Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  An overenthusiastic agent also caused problems in South Africa in 1881, when the Shetland-based recruiter, John Walker, was hauled over the coals by his employers at the Cape for misleadingly assuring emigrants that they would be settled in ‘the fairest land to be found in any country’. 38 Throughout the century South Africa was only occasionally recommended as a destination, and encouragement was often qualified by reservations about limited openings and the high cost of living. Andrew Murray, who served as minister in the Dutch Church at Graaff-Reinet for forty-five years, advised his sons in 1842 that while there might be openings at the Cape in theology, medicine or commerce, ‘I should never wish you to think of the law, as our Bench and Bar and Notories are of such principles and morals that I should tremble for any contact with them.’ He was equally scathing about farming opportunities, claiming that ‘to study the improved modes of agriculture practised in Scotland and come to South Africa where in all the inland districts nothing will grow without irrigation, and on an extensive and expensive farm there is often only water for a garden or sowing two or three buckets of wheat would be perfectly ridiculous’. 39 Ten years later a rather different picture was painted by James Arbuth-not, who, having emigrated from Peterhead to Ilovo in Natal, claimed in an open letter to his former local newspaper that a working farmer with £300 capital could, in the course of only a few weeks, become ‘more comfortable, and more independent of the world, than ever he can expect to be by farming in Buchan’. 40

  Mixed messages about opportunities for emigrants were not confined to literature on new destinations in the southern hemisphere. The United States had a long history of settlement but an equally long tradition of disputed claims about its desirability. The competing claims often reflected different political viewpoints and although most of the reservations were voiced in respect of the high cost of living, the lack of employment or the unsuitability of the land or climate, at the root of all these warnings was a basic distrust of American society. Hostility waxed and waned in tandem with the strength of political antagonism. It was strongest in the early nineteenth century, when several Tory commentators, fearing that the United States intended to indulge in a policy of territorial aggrandizement at the expense of British America, advocated emigration to Canada for purely strategic reasons rather than for its own sake. Others preferred to steer emigrants in the direction of Australia, fearing that ‘the half of those who reach it [Canada] may find their way to more genial climes’ to the south. Even after the military threat had abated, some editors continued to criticize the United States for poaching British emigrants who had originally settled in Canada, and warned those who favoured the Republic that they were likely to be cold-shouldered and treated as aliens. 41

  Whether emigrants regarded the prospect of a republican, egalitarian society as a threat or an opportunity depended on their position in society and their attitude to their circumstances at home. Letters quoted in Counsel for Emigrants reflected a range of viewpoints. ‘If you do come to this country I will answer for your happiness, or I am much deceived,’ wrote a settler in Michigan to his friends in Aberdeenshire in 1834. Others, however, emphasized deficiencies in the American lifestyle, warning that the ‘religious morals’ of many people were ‘far from what we would wish to expose our young families to imitate ’. Children were allegedly encouraged to resist parental control and English and Scottish settlers often had to endure criticism of their homeland and ignorance of their customs. As one Scottish settler in Buffalo declared:

  I like this country very much but am by no means particular to some of the Yankie habits. Mechanics are here nearly as busy on Sunday as any other day, and many of those who are not employed go to the woods with the rifle. Few of them have any religion whatever, and many of them are never baptized. If a man contrive to cheat his neighbour, he is said to be ‘quite a smart man,’ and instead of being despised, is by many more respected for so doing. 42

  The guidance given to farmers thinking of emigrating to the United States was also more equivocal and less convincing than the almost universal recommendation of British North America. Encouragement was frequently tempered by warnings to exercise caution when buying American land, and in particular to ensure that the bargain was concluded in writing. The Homestead Act of 1862 did not usher in equitable land distribution, partly because the system remained open to abuse by speculators, and emigrants were repeatedly warned about fraudulent land schemes, particularly in Texas. Even the advice to tradesmen, which was generally more extensive and sympathetic, was not unambiguously positive. Earnings might be lucrative and employment opportunities more varied than in Canada or the Antipodes, but the United States did not enjoy unbroken economic health. Heavy taxes and living costs eroded wages, emigrants were warned that employment was by no means assured in a labour market that was periodically glutted and occasionally characterized by ‘panic, ruin and bankruptcy’, and press evidence suggests that there may have been a higher rate of disillusioned return from the United States than from other emigrant destinations. 43

  Although settlement in the United States rather than in Canada was sometimes advised, most commentators favoured the opposite course of action, and Canada was more consistently recommended than any other destination by emigrants and editors, at least to those who intended to farm. Even so, there were still warnings, not least about the exaggerated claims made by land companies. The Reverend Patrick Bell, who emigrated from Scotland to Upper Canada in 1833, was particularly critical of the Canada Company:

  They held out great prospects to Emigrants at home and coaxed and flattered every one that thought of coming to this Country through their hired Agents the Editors and Proprietors of several British Newspapers until their ranks were filled to overflowing — when their troops arrived in this Country they too often found that they had swallowed the bait and it was not such an easy matter to get out of the Canada Companies fetters. They had their money and what could they do? After taking possession of their lots they found that the promised well made roads were nothing better than ill formed tracts through the woods — the promised mills and bridges were in many cases never finished … the price of produce dwindled to one half of what was held out while the necessaries of life that they required to purchase were double what they expected. The settlers on the large Huron tract were last winter literally starving and in a state of open rebellion against their cruel seducers. 44

  Four decades later, similar warnings came from the pen of Shetlander Michael Tait, who had emigrated to Illinois in 1838, but subsequently spent three years in Canada before returning to his farm at Joliet. In his opinion, too many Scots trod the well-worn trail to Canada unthinkingly, simply on the urging of relatives, and invested capital unwisely, only to find that ‘when it is gone they resemble a prisoner on a small island; there they are, and there they must remain’. 45

  Conclusion

  As global wanderers the Scots have a long and impressive pedigree. The destinations may have changed, but the twin driving forces of adventure and exile have remained consistent, in their varied manifestations, as have the recurring concerns of sponsors and opponents about the ethics of an extremely complex movement. The story of the Scots overseas can be told chronologically, geographically, biographically or thematically. The thematic option has been chosen here in order to demonstrate continuities and changes in an era when the long-standing and well-attested restlessness of her people became a relentless tide that swept Scotland almost to the forefront of Europe’s emigrant exporters.

  2

  EXPELLING THE UNWANTED

  ‘… their miseries are increasing, and their only hope is emigration …’ 1

  Emigration could be either an escape route for the poor and persecuted or an avenue of advancement for the ambitious and adventurous. Often it was both. Push and pull influences were rarely mutually exclusive, and in all but a few cases emigrants evaluated the discouragements of their existing circumstances against the attractions of life overs
eas. This complex fusion of pros and cons varied according to time, location, occupation and individual, but it was a complexity that was often ignored by emigrants themselves, as well as by observers and sending agencies, who tended to depict the exodus either as exile or adventure. The Scottish debate, as we have seen, was characterized by this simplistic, polarized approach, particularly in the nineteenth century, when the trauma of Highland clearance and Lowland recession could be set against alluring agricultural and investment opportunities in a range of overseas locations. While a detached analysis of Scottish emigration would probably highlight overseas incentives over domestic ills, the public perception of the nineteenth-century exodus frequently emphasized the expulsion of the unwanted. This negative image was fostered by a variety of commentators, including those who enthusiastically advocated emigration as a safety valve, emigrants and policymakers who reluctantly accepted overseas relocation as a last resort, and polemicists who deplored any attempt to ‘shovel out the paupers’. Emigration as expulsion in a Scottish context has traditionally focused heavily on cleared and destitute Highlanders, but it also incorporates unemployed weavers from the central belt, Lowland agriculturists whose status and prospects had been eroded by modernization and commercial fishermen who could not weather the financial storms of the 1880s. But economic imperative was not the only catalyst for exporting the unwanted; in addition, judicial decree and financial or moral scandal also played a part in ensuring that a small proportion of emigrants did not leave voluntarily.

  Crime, punishment and self-exile

  A minority of emigrants had no choice whatsoever in the decision to send them overseas. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the sentence of banishment was imposed on men and women alike for misdemeanours ranging from theft and housebreaking to adultery, incest and murder. In addition to 1,200 exiled Jacobites, David Dobson has estimated that approximately 400 Scottish criminals were banished to the colonies between 1707 and 1763, their precise destinations depending on the whim of ships’ captains, while the Aberdeen Journal in the fifty-three years from 1748 to 1800 reported on at least 135 verdicts of overseas banishment handed down by circuit courts at Inverness, Perth and Stonehaven, as well as Aberdeen itself. 2 At the other end of Scotland, the jail books of Dumfries, which exist from 1714 to 1839, include several references to convicts of both sexes who were sentenced to transportation or whose death sentences were commuted to transportation. 3

  If convicted felons were unwilling exiles, so too were those unfortunate individuals who fell victim to the kidnapping trade, in which Aberdeen gained a particular notoriety in the mid-eighteenth century. Whether or not it was provoked by the city magistrates’ concern at an influx of vagrants from the rural hinterland during the famine years of 1739—42, it was deemed sufficiently significant by William Kennedy to merit a two-page discussion in his Annals of Aberdeen, the only reference to transatlantic links in that two-volume survey. In 1742 and 1743, according to Kennedy, there

  appears to have been carried on, by certain persons in Aberdeen, a very nefarious traffic with Virginia, being a species of the slave trade … It would seem, that young boys of the country, who had occasion to repair to the town, and were without the protection of their friends, were enticed to enter into engagements with the traders to go to the plantations in America. Many of these unwary youths were, in this manner, decoyed, and transported to Virginia, where they were disposed of to the best account; and, being kept in a condition which never enabled them to redeem their freedom, they continued in bondage as long as their masters thought proper to detain them. 4

  The kidnapping trade, Kennedy continued, did not at the time ‘seem to have much attracted the attention of the people, or to have occasioned much alarm in the town’, perhaps because the citizens were unaware of the fate of the victims. That ignorance was to change as a result of the well-documented action of Peter Williamson, who in 1742, as a twelve-year-old boy sent from Aboyne to stay with an aunt in Aberdeen, had been apprehended at the docks, detained below decks for a month, and then shipped to Philadelphia. There, for the sum of £16, the captain sold him into seven years’ indentured service with a Scottish farmer from the Forks of Delaware who had himself suffered the same fate in his youth, and who treated him well, sent him to school and left him a substantial legacy. Sixteen years later, after acquiring and losing both a farm and a wife to Indians, and suffering periods of captivity, ill-treatment and injury at Indian and French hands before and during the Seven Years War, Williamson was repatriated. Returning to Aberdeen in June 1758, he proceeded to sell copies of an autobiographical pamphlet describing his adventures since the time he had been kidnapped. His allegations were highly embarrassing to the city merchants and magistrates named and shamed, and at their behest an initially successful libel action was raised against Williamson, who was fined, imprisoned until he apologized and banished from the town, after seeing the controversial parts of his book torn out and burned at the market cross. But he was not silenced. Moving to Edinburgh, he sued the Aberdeen magistrates through the Court of Session, leading, in February 1762, to a unanimous judgement in his favour, and a substantial award of compensation and costs against the Provost, Dean of Guild and four baillies of the City of Aberdeen. 5

  After the loss of the American colonies put an end to transatlantic transportation, overcrowding in British jails forced the government to seek an alternative outlet for prisoners, and in May 1787 the first fleet of convict ships left England for Australia. Although 160,000 convicts were transported over the next eighty years, only 5 per cent (approximately 7,600 individuals) were tried in Scotland, perhaps reflecting a general trend away from banishment in the second half of the eighteenth century before transportation was stepped up after 1820. Best known, though numerically insignificant, were the political prisoners transported in the 1790s and 1820s. Thomas Muir and Thomas Palmer, campaigning for parliamentary reform in the wake of the French Revolution, were convicted of sedition and sentenced to fourteen and seven years’ transportation respectively in 1793. Almost thirty years later, during the depression that followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars, similar agitation among the ‘Bonnymuir weavers’ led to twenty-one men being charged with treason for taking up arms against the government. Two were hanged and nineteen transported to Australia, while in the 1840s transportation was also employed as a weapon against striking miners, Chartists and food rioters.

  Recent scholarship has questioned the traditional perception of Scottish convicts as the most degenerate. Most were single males in their teens and twenties who came from the Lowlands and belonged to the labouring classes. Up to three-quarters had previous convictions, usually for theft, and those from central and southern Scotland were held in Edinburgh’s Calton jail before being sent to hulks in the Thames and then on to New South Wales or — more commonly — Van Diemen’s Land. Female convicts tended to be slightly older, were more likely to be married and had generally been convicted of persistent petty crime and prostitution. Sentences were normally seven years, fourteen years or life, although well-behaved convicts, or skilled tradesmen, might be given some freedom through the grant of a ‘ticket-of-leave ’. Conditions in the penal settlements varied considerably. A few prisoners — notably the political prisoners — were allowed to acquire their own land, but most were employed at land-breaking for the government or individual masters, sometimes in chain gangs. Some returned to Scotland when their sentences expired, but others were joined by their families. One Colonial Office register of 1,323 applications for passage made by convicts’ families between 1848 and 1871 includes sixty-seven Scottish applicants, most of whom were from the Glasgow area, although almost every part of Scotland was represented, including the islands of Shetland, Skye and Lewis. 6

  While convicts were exiled at the behest of the authorities, some emigrants chose self-exile rather than face the consequences of financial or moral indiscretions. In 1832 Thomas Milne had his goods impounded for the recovery of de
bts after he had allegedly ‘absconded’ to America without fully paying the rent of his shoemaker’s shop in Fraserburgh. 7 In 1833 a committee was appointed in Aberdeen to tackle the problem of debtors resorting to emigration in order to escape their creditors, and in 1834 both leading Aberdeen newspapers reported on the persistence of this ‘cowardly and worse than thievish practice ’. Later that year a petition signed by the city’s ‘Merchants, Manufacturers and Inhabitants’ was sent to the local MP, Alexander Bannerman, for presentation to Parliament, ‘complaining of the practice of Clandestine Emigration to the United States of America, and praying for an enactment to protect the public against the same ’. 8 Similar practices were castigated by the minister of the Dumfries-shire parish of Hutton and Corrie in his entry in the New Statistical Account.

  Much loss and mischief are occasioned by dishonest emigrants to America. It is well-known, that the United States and the North American British Colonies are the quarters to which the eyes of thousands, who find they cannot thrive in their own country, are anxiously directed. And of these a considerable proportion are guilty of dishonest practices. During the ministry of the present incumbent, not much short of a score have left this parish under charges of various kinds; some to avoid supporting illegitimate children, — some, after swindling practices and committing forgery, — and some after committing frauds of all sorts, with a view to emigrate with their ill-gotten gains. The state of our North American colonies is such, that it may be said to hold out a premium to the practice of villany in the mother country. 9