While Moodie felt he had been cheated, the success of many of his recruits helped to persuade the British government to launch the short-lived 1820 Settlers’ Scheme. Funded by a £50,000 parliamentary grant, it attracted 9,000 applicants, 4,000 of whom were chosen to colonize the district of Albany in the Eastern Cape under leaders who were required to pay a deposit on each recruit. Free passages were provided and 100-acre grants allotted to each male adult, title deeds being granted after three years to those who had remained on their land. Scots, who comprised about 10 per cent of the colonists, included a contingent of Highlanders and a party of twenty-four from Berwickshire who settled near Cradock under Thomas Pringle, a journalist, poet and the colony’s first librarian.
Financial constraints, combined with problems in securing enough colonists with practical skills, soon snuffed out the flickering candle of official and public interest in settlement at the Cape. By the time the Albany scheme was under way, the concepts of both emigration society and land company had re-emerged in Canada, where in the 1820s and 1830s they were to have a particularly Scottish focus. Although the weavers’ emigration societies examined in the previous chapter were composed of largely urban artisans, it was in order to take up land that they emigrated. The tone of their correspondence suggests that the transition was generally successful and may well have induced chain migration:
I have got my land and money, and everything as was said. I am just going off on Monday to build my house … I am very sorry, father, that I did not take you out with me, and if you had come you would have got the same as I, for if you do not get into some society, as I got, the expense will be great to take you from Quebec as they impose upon strangers so much, but, coming under government grant, we were well assisted.
Let my brother Robert, James and Andrew know, that I wish they would come here, if they can, as I think this is the country to live in. I will write you as soon as I can, to tell you what to do… I never thought such a country was here, and I wish that I had been some years sooner. You may tell all my friends that they need not come here but for farming; no tradesman is wanted hardly at all…9
So wrote William Miller, a member of the Anderston and Rutherglen Society, to his father. His encouragement was echoed by Andrew Boag, of the same emigration society, in a letter to his sister in Scotland. Even though the land where Boag had settled with his wife and father was subsequently described as ‘worthless’ in an inspection in 1834, he declared, ‘I was never so happy in my life. We have no desire to return to Glasgow, for we would have to pay a heavy rent and here we have none. I had to labour 16 or 18 hours a day and could only earn about 16 or 18 shillings a week; here, I can, by labouring about half that time, earn more than I need.’ 10 Further endorsement of farming opportunities, as well as of openings in domestic service, was provided by William Gourlay of Greenock, a member of the Muslin Street Emigration Society, who, like Boag, came to Canada aboard the Brock in 1820, accompanied by his wife and two chil-dren:
We are getting over the winter easier than we expected; we have not that fretful anxiety of mind how to get through, as we had in the old country. We have no landlords nor tax-gatherers here. I am very uneasy to know how all the poor people with you have got through the winter. I wish that many of them were here, for they would be able to make themselves comfortable in a short time. Come out yourselves, also, if it be possible, bring Janet and Mary, for they could get service quite fast; servants are very much wanted and get from three to five dollars a month. 11
William Davie was equally emphatic in recommending Canada to his children and insisting that no inducement would lure him back to Glasgow:
Were I to get a gift of a free house and shop in Parkhead, and one hundred pounds beside, I would not exchange. I value my present situation more than that. I can see men here, who have not been more than two or three years on their land, who have now three head of cattle, and forty fowls about their doors, and living in the greatest plenty. Now only compare this scene with that of the weavers at home, and you will be able to judge for yourselves. We would all be pleased exceedingly, were every one of you to come to this place; should you do so, I will do every thing in my power to make you comfortable.
Andrew Angus, writing to his parents two months later, also liked the country ‘very well’, thought anyone willing to work hard for two years ‘may look forward to something like independence’ and observed that large families were a particular asset. ‘If trade is no better in Glasgow, you could not do better than come out,’ he concluded. By 1826 James Dobbie and his family were ‘still taking well with this country’; the difficulties they had encountered ‘are nothing in comparison to your wants in Glasgow; we have always had plenty to eat and drink, and have always had a little to spare ’. Urging other relatives to join him, he reported in a subsequent letter, ‘All this settlement is striving to do well; were you here, and seeing the improvements that are going on amongst us, you would not believe that we were once Glasgow weavers.’ 12
At the same time as these letters were stimulating continuing Scottish interest in the Ottawa Valley, the Canada Company and the British American Land Company were making strenuous efforts to attract Scots and others to their lands in, respectively, Upper Canada’s Huron Tract and Quebec’s Eastern Townships. The Canada Company, founded in 1824 by the Scottish novelist John Galt and chartered in 1826, secured a bargain of over 1 million acres of government land, on condition that it improved and populated its huge grant in the area bordering Lakes Huron and Ontario. Within ten years it succeeded in selling half these territories, before the flow of settlers dried up in the wake of the Canadian Rebellion of 1837. Particular inducements were offered to the settler with capital, who was told that he could ‘look forward to the enjoyment of comfort and independence as a proprietor of land’. 13 Scots, according to a Company pamphlet, made the most successful settlers, and the Company’s wares were heavily touted by shipping agents and newspaper editors.
The Canada Company’s efforts in Upper Canada were matched in the Lower Province by the British American Land Company, formed in 1833—4 by a group of Montreal and London businessmen and modelled on the Canada Company. Having purchased nearly 1 million acres of Crown land in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, south of the St Lawrence River, bordering the American states of Vermont and New Hampshire, it attracted large numbers of Outer Hebrideans, initially to the townships of Bury and Lingwick. The first Scots arrived in 1838, when the Earl of Seaforth, proprietor of Lewis, negotiated with the Company to send sixteen families from the island to Bury and Lingwick, as part of a larger Company-sponsored emigration of sixty Highland families. Three years later these pioneers were joined by a further contingent of 223 Lewis crofters and, in subsequent years, by small groups and individual families from the Hebrides and other parts of the Highlands who spread out into the adjacent townships of Winslow, Whitton, Hampden and Marston. ‘Oh! young men of Ness, I want you to come here, and be not afraid,’ wrote Donald Campbell of Lingwick in 1851, while Donald McLean, writing from the same township, assured his correspondent that ‘labourers in this country get bed and board as good as the common gentleman in your country’. 14 By 1881 there were around 4,000 Scots in Compton County, 15 and although many had undoubtedly emigrated unwillingly from a background of poverty, famine and eviction, some were attracted to the expanding Gaelic-speaking community which, according to one Gaelic guidebook, offered abundant water, timber and grazing, as well as a fertile soil, proximity to American markets and a range of social amenities. 16 With the promise of landownership ringing in their ears, it was not surprising that impoverished Highlanders saw emigration to the Eastern Townships as a means to ‘better their chance for their families’ in a familiar social environment. 17
‘Comfort and independence’: attracting the farming emigrant
Canada-bound emigrants did not have to acquire their land from large colonization companies. Crown land could be obtained by free grant before 1827 and by purchase a
t auction thereafter. A land act in 1841, at the time of the Union of the Canadas, set prices which were meant to be low enough to attract genuine farmers but high enough to deter speculators, who were to be further discouraged by stricter supervision of settlement duties. Free fifty-acre grants, increased in 1853 to 100 acres, were also offered to able-bodied settlers on certain colonization roads, while after Confederation the Dominion Lands Act of 1872 regulated the allocation of land in the new prairie territories. Free quarter-sections (160 acres) were offered to heads of families, or to anyone over twenty-one, on payment of a $10 (approximately £1.80) registration fee. Full legal title was given after three years’ actual occupancy and on proof of a certain amount of cultivation; and adjoining quarter-sections could be pre-empted at a price fixed by the government. Homestead grants of 100 or 200 acres of bush land were available in the older provinces, and ‘improved’ farms could be purchased at prices of £4—£10 per acre. Land could also be acquired from private vendors, many of whom were moving on to new frontiers after clearing and cultivating wild land, from speculators such as Adam Fergusson and James Webster, who sought to establish ‘a thriving community of Scottish emigrants’ on the 7,367-acre tract they purchased in Southern Ontario, 18 and, by the end of the century, from the Canadian Pacific Railway which desperately needed to generate freight income by populating its vast grant of prairie land.
By no means all the petitions submitted to the Colonial Department in the 1810s came from impoverished weavers and tenant farmers. A significant proportion came from would-be investors, as well as retired army and navy officers on half-pay. They included thirty-five-year-old bachelor Robert Weir of New Kilpatrick, Stirlingshire, who took £300 sterling to Canada when he emigrated in 1817 in response to a newspaper advertisement for government land grants, and Francis Hall from Clackmannan, a married man with a family, who had capital of £500. ‘If it be necessary for me to state my reasons for leaving the country,’ he wrote, ‘they are as follows — being bread [sic] to agricultural pursuits in my younger days I afterwards learned the trade of weaving, but I still prefer agricultural pursuits as most congenial to my health, and think there is no place where I could follow that pursuit with so much advantage as in British America.’ The government’s Scottish agent, John Campbell, specifically recommended that encouragement be given to Robert Scott, a saddler, ‘in hopes of diverting his mind from the United States. For having lived so much abroad he is more indifferent where he settles provided he gets an opportunity of promoting the advantage of his family and improving the capital of which he is possessed.’ Another petitioner, James Whyte from Fife, had previously lived in both the United States and the West Indies, but by 1818 wished to devote his energies — and his considerable but unspecified capital — to Upper Canada, where he hoped to farm in partnership with his brother. ‘With ample means of carrying his intentions into effect, and being a man ardently devoted to the interests of his king and country [and] already well acquainted with the affairs of America’, he petitioned the Colonial Department for a 1,000-acre grant. When John Haldane of Edinburgh promised to invest £2,000 sterling, possibly more, in clearing and cultivating land in Upper Canada, he too requested a large tract of unappropriated Crown territory for himself and his sons, a pledge which the government refused to give in advance of his emigration. 19
The benefits of Canadian landownership were ceaselessly touted in the Scottish press. The contrast with Scottish farming prospects was a favourite topic of the Quarterly Journal of Agriculture, which was the initial forum for the dissemination of Adam Fergusson’s Practical Notes, but it also frequently reproduced letters from satisfied emigrants to illustrate its case.
I have not the slightest hesitation in declaring, that it appears to me as plain as the sun at noonday, that a farmer in Scotland, occupying a farm that does not pay him, distressed as he must be, perplexed and degraded, toiling from morning to night, with a degree of mental anxiety and anguish pressing upon his mind … and yet, after all, quite unable to support his family or better their circumstances in any degree; I say, that a farmer in such circumstances, and continuing so, while so much land lies in Canada to occupy, acts the part of an insane person. 20
So wrote James Somerville, an emigrant from Edinburgh to the Whitby area, to a friend at home. The 1830s was a time of rapidly rising land prices in Canada, and Somerville ’s advice to emigrants not to delay was reiterated by a number of other contemporary commentators. ‘In a short time, there will be no cheap land to be procured about these parts,’ wrote a clergyman, settled near Guelph, to his brother in Scotland in 1832, in a letter quoted in John Mathison’s popular pamphlet Counsel for Emigrants.21 Also quoted in this compilation was a letter written in 1833 by a recent emigrant who had just bought 200 acres in Clarence Township, on the banks of the Ottawa River, in which he urged his mother and brothers to join him as soon as possible: ‘You can have no idea of the comfort and independence which characterise the circumstances of Upper Canada squires … The best way for my brothers to lay out their money here is in buying land, which is every year rising in value.’ 22 The importance of acting quickly was further emphasized a year later by a correspondent of the cheap and widely read Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, who predicted that ‘a year or two will make a serious difference in the purchase money’. 23
Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal consistently sang the praises of Canadian farming. Shortly after it first appeared in 1832, it published a glowing review of Martin Doyle ’s guidebook, Hints on Emigration to Upper Canada:
Just fancy yourselves possessed of real property, on such terms — no yearly ten-antcy [sic] — no terminable leases to breed interminable jealousies at the change of occupants, but pure fee simple — no rent to pay — after labouring here for a shilling, or tenpence, or eightpence, or sixpence, a day. What a happy change would this be, and how irresistible the temptation to make the experiment! And only think of the advantage of working a rich, maiden soil, that will yield abundantly, instead of ploughing or digging a worn-out one at home, without manure to mend it, and which, without abundance of it, will not yield a crop sufficient to pay its labour. 24
Forty years later, it was still promoting Canadian land settlement, when it reminded readers that ‘the inducements to immigrate to Canada are not simply good wages and good living among kindred people, under the same flag, in a naturally rich country, possessing a pleasant and healthy climate, but the confident prospect that the poorest may have of becoming a possessor of the soil, earning competence for himself, and comfortably settling his children’. 25 The promise of independence and modest prosperity through landownership was also regularly aired in the editorial, correspondence and advertising columns of Scottish newspapers, and in the 1880s in the Napier Commission Report’s publication of the formulaic and somewhat disingenuous promotional letters of Benbecula crofters who in 1883 had been sent by Lady Emily Cathcart to establish a prairie colony near Wapella. One Hebridean wrote home:
Dear brother, I am very sorry indeed that you have not all come out with me. If you, and Donald, and Morag had come, we would have got three homesteads, and by taking one pre-emption we would have a whole section to ourselves; we would be settled together, and would be as happy as the day is long … Dear brother, it makes my heart sore to think of the way you two are working at home, and having so little thanks or comfort for it, when we might have been here very well and happy if you had come. 26
So wrote William McPherson in June 1883. His sentiments were echoed by Lachlan McPherson, who claimed that ‘everything bad that we were hearing before we left was all lies’. After observing that ‘the moskittes was pretty bad last month, but not much worse than the mitches when they are bad at home ’, he went on to predict that the settlement would be full within a year and hoped that his brothers would join him, since ‘they would do better here in one year than three at home ’. 27
While Canada clearly led the field in the volume and diversity of encouragement offered to
agricultural emigrants from Scotland, it did not have a monopoly on such inducements. The attractions of farming in the United States, which absorbed more Scots than any other destination in the nineteenth century, were advertised in many guidebooks and newspapers, and in 1837 a correspondent of Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal reminded readers that American land, particularly in Michigan, was now cheaper and more easily obtainable than that in Canada. 28 As the frontier moved steadily westwards, emigrants in the years before the Civil War were encouraged to penetrate further into the country, beyond Pennsylvania and Ohio, to Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa, as well as Michigan, often to specific tracts of land which were offered for sale. After 1862, when the Homestead Act allowed any family head who had taken out American citizenship to claim 160 acres of surveyed public land free on condition that he paid a registration fee and lived on his grant continuously for five years, the spotlight of encouragement fell increasingly on the Midwestern prairie states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas, along with Texas and the Pacific North-West. Editors engaged the attention of Scottish readers not only by publishing straightforward advertisements but also by drawing attention to the correspondence of successful emigrant farmers. Counsel for Emigrants, for instance, which gave impartial coverage to both Canada and the United States, quoted from the letter of a settler in Illinois who declared in 1834 that a family man would be delighted at the prospects for his children in a country where they could easily become owners of the soil they cultivated, and where they could enjoy the ‘certain prospect of wealth and respectability, if they were industrious and economical’. 29
Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus Page 11