March 2nd 1775

Pre-Clearance emigration

It was as a response to a number of factors but mainly to the improvements in agricultural practices which were making themselves felt in the Highlands by the second half of the 18th Century. Longer leases were offered to tenants which encouraged better farming practices, rents were increasingly paid in cash rather than in kind, rents in many cases increased substantially as lairds assumed that improved farming methods would result in increased yields and when leases expired new leases were often put up to auction.

These changes certainly increased the income of the lairds but for the tenants the results were less happy. The tacksmen (the middlemen between the laird and tenant) also felt threatened by the new developments. In many ways this was the key factor. The tacksmen were the immediate superiors of the small tenants and it was the tacksmen who organised much of the emigration. Also, it must be emphasised, it was not the poorest section of the community who set out for a new life but the relatively prosperous. A description of a gathering at Killin illustrates the point.

“The word was given, as it was phrased, at the beginning of March 1775; and a rendezvous was appointed at Killin on the first of the ensuing May. Here convened about thirty families making in all about three hundred people. Early the next morning the whole company was called together by the sound of bagpipes and the order of their march was settled. Men, women and children had all their proper stations assigned. They were all dressed in their best attire; and the men armed in the Highland fashion…Many of them were possessed of two or three hundred pounds and few of less than thirty or forty; which at least showed that they had not starved upon their farms. They were a jocund crew and set out, not like people flying from the face of poverty but like men who were about to carry their wealth, their strength and a little property to a better market,” 

These were families who were able to pay for their passage. In many ways they were not so much people searching for a new way of life as people disillusioned with the changes at home, hoping to retain the old ways in new settlements in Canada or America.

The emigration was popular neither with the Government nor the lairds. The Government relied upon the Highlands to a quite disproportionate extent to provide recruits for the British army, and for the lairds there was the fear that the spiralling increase in rents would not be maintained with even a modest reduction in the numbers living in the Highlands.

The propaganda employed to dissuade emigration relied heavily on scare stories of conditions in the Americas. There is no doubt that many immigrants did find the initial conditions very difficult - clearing of forest land was not a problem faced before by many Highlanders. However, once these difficulties had been overcome, families did prosper and the letters sent home belied the stories carefully put out by the authorities.

There was another strand developed by the landlords, that those who emigrated were idle and indolent. Some writers even suggested that all Highlanders were “pictures of indolence and filth,”  going on to argue, somewhat ingenuously, that landlords had to raise rents “to excite the industry of their people.”  Just to what lengths these comforting arguments were pushed comes from the pages of the Edinburgh Advertiser addressed “To the Emigrants from the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.” 

Question. Why do you leave the place where your ancestors lived these thousand years?
Answer. Because I want food.
Question. Are there any fish on your coasts?
Answer. Amazing plenty.
Question. Can you catch fish?
Answer. Yes.
Question. Then why don’t you catch them?
Answer. Because I am lazy.
Conclusion. It is well known that you are lazy and ‘tis honest of you to acknowledge it.

It is difficult to believe such nonsense could sway the minds of any intending emigrants. In any case as Gaelic speakers, very few indeed would ever read the Edinburgh Advertiser.

It is surprising how little sympathy was shown to the problems of the Highlands. Alexander Irvine, Church of Scotland Missionary at Rannoch. “Can we harbour the thought that men (the landlords) who are capable of such patriotic exertions should act so inconsistently, as the charge of oppression would lead us to believe? Would they drive from their country those very people whose interests they study to promote? But “to keep pace with the improvements in the south, many sacrifices must be made, and many schemes must be devised, which require all the invention of ingenuity and all the economy of prudence.”  Hence it became “necessary to deprive some persons of their possessions, to make room for others more industrious or more fortunate.”  However, the landlords “only remove the lazy and the indolent to encourage the active and the industrious.” 

This was written in 1803 when both the Government and the landlords were arguing that emigration should be discouraged by all legal means possible.