CLEARANCES***


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THE HISTORY OF THE HIGHLAND CLEARANCES

by

ALEXANDER MACKENZIE, F.S.A., Scot.

With a New Introduction by Ian Macpherson, M.P.


   “Truth is stranger than fiction.”







P. J. O’Callaghan,
132-134 West Nile Street, Glasgow.

First Edition                             1883.

Second Edition, altered and revised       1914.




CONTENTS.


  EDITOR’S PREFACE,                                                    7

  INTRODUCTION,                                                        9

  SUTHERLAND--

  Alexander Mackenzie on the Clearances,                              19
  The Rev. Donald Sage on the Sutherland Clearances,                  32
  General Stewart of Garth on the Sutherland Clearances,              41
  Hugh Miller on the Sutherland Clearances,                           52
  Mr. James Loch on Sutherland Improvements,                          69
  Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe on the Sutherland Clearances,            78
  Reply to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe by Donald Macleod,              88

  TRIAL OF PATRICK SELLAR,                                           115

  ROSS-SHIRE--

  Glencalvie,                                                        128
  The Eviction of the Rosses,                                        134
  Kintail,                                                           143
  Coigeach,                                                          144
  Strathconon,                                                       144
  The Black Isle,                                                    146
  The Island of Lewis,                                               147
  Mr. Alexander Mackenzie on the Leckmelm Evictions,                 149
  Lochcarron,                                                        161
  The 78th Highlanders,                                              167
  The Rev. Dr. John Kennedy on the Ross-shire Clearances,            169

  INVERNESS-SHIRE--

  Glengarry,                                                         170
  Strathglass,                                                       187
  Guisachan,                                                         193
  Glenelg,                                                           194
  Glendesseray and Locharkaig,                                       196

  THE HEBRIDES--

  North Uist,                                                        198
  Boreraig and Suisinish, Isle of Skye,                              202
  A Contrast,                                                        212
  South Uist and Barra,                                              213
  The Island of Rum,                                                 222

  ARGYLLSHIRE--

  The Island of Mull,                                                228
  Ardnamurchan,                                                      232
  Morven,                                                            235
  Glenorchy,                                                         237

  BUTESHIRE--

  Arran,                                                             240

  PERTHSHIRE--

  Rannoch,                                                           242
  Breadalbane,                                                       245

  NOTABLE DICTA--

  The Rev. Dr. Maclachlan,                                           247
  A Highland Sheriff,                                                253
  The Wizard of the North,                                           254
  A Continental Historian,                                           254
  Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace,                                         255
  A French Economist,                                                259
  Mr. Joseph Chamberlain,                                            263
  Hardships Endured by First Emigrants,                              264
  An Evicting Agent,                                                 271
  An Octogenarian Gael,                                              274

  STATISTICAL STATEMENT--

  Showing the Population in 1831, 1841, 1851, 1881, and
  1911, of all Parishes in whole or in part in the Counties
  of Perth, Argyll, Inverness, Ross and
  Cromarty, Caithness, and Sutherland,                           278-282

  APPENDICES,                                                        283




EDITOR’S PREFACE

TO SECOND EDITION.


Mackenzie’s _History of the Highland Clearances_, with its thrilling
and almost incredible narratives of oppression and eviction, has
been for a long time out of print. In view of the current movement,
described by Mr. Asquith as an “organised campaign against the present
system of land tenure,” it has occurred to the holder of the copyright,
Mr. Eneas Mackay, publisher, Stirling, that, at the present juncture,
a re-issue might be expediently prepared. He recognised that the story
of the great upheaval which, early in the nineteenth century, took
place among the Highland crofters would be of undoubted interest and
utility to those who follow the efforts now put forth to settle the
land question in Scotland. At his request I readily undertook the task
of re-editing.

The circumstances, or points of view, having changed in no slight
measure since the first appearance of the work, I decided to subject
it to a pretty thorough revision--to excise a large mass of irrelevant
matter and to introduce several fresh articles. Donald Macleod’s
“Gloomy Memories” are omitted out of considerations for space,
and because it is proposed to reprint them shortly in a separate
form. There is included, for the first time, a vindication of the
Sutherland Clearances by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of “Uncle
Tom’s Cabin,” and another by Mr. James Loch, principal factor on the
Sutherland Estates during the time the removals were carried out.
There are also given graphic and realistic word pictures of these
evictions by the Rev. Donald Sage. The general arrangement of the
book has been altered to the extent of grouping together the accounts
relating to each particular county, and descriptions are added of a
number of Clearances which were not dealt with in the first edition.

I have pleasure in acknowledging my indebtedness to Mr. Ian Macpherson,
M.P., and Dr. J. H. Fullarton, London, for kindly looking over the
proofs.

Special and very sincere thanks are due to Mr. John Henderson,
secretary of the National Library Club, London, who manifested the
kindest and liveliest interest in the undertaking. Not only did he read
the proofs with scrupulous care, but he was ever ready to give advice
and offer suggestions when cases of doubt arose. To me, one of the most
pleasant memories connected with the labour of editing is the valuable
assistance always so promptly and cheerfully given by Mr. Henderson.

I greatly appreciate the courtesy shown by Messrs. Daniel Ross & Co.,
Ltd., publishers, Wick, in permitting extracts to be taken from Mr.
Sage’s _Memorabilia Domestica_.

Regarding the Publisher, I may be permitted to mention that he rendered
my task very easy by providing, sometimes at considerable trouble and
expense, all works of reference which I considered would be of service
in endeavouring to make this History thoroughly accurate and reliable.




_INTRODUCTION._


It is with great pleasure that I accede to the request that I should
write a short introduction to welcome this reprint of so interesting
and valuable a book as Mackenzie’s _Highland Clearances_. It has long
been out of print, which anyone who recalls its first appearance will
easily understand. It was written by a Highlander who commanded in
a great measure the esteem of Highlanders, and it collected for the
first time the sane and authenticated accounts of the experience of the
Highlanders in the great agrarian crisis of their history. It appealed
to the race as no book within recent years has done. The Highlander
loves his past and his native land with a passionate attachment, and
the story of the great wrongs of the days of the clearances is still
deeply embedded in his mind. Within the last year or two many accounts,
more or less imaginary, have appeared purporting to be true stories
of those terrible days in the north, and it is peculiarly appropriate
that, when once again men’s minds are centred on the great problem of
the land in this country as a whole, and specific attention has been
directed towards the Highlands, this reprint should now appear. We
are all, therefore, under deep obligations to the public spirit and
enterprize of the publishers and others who have been good enough to
secure in an accessible form a reliable account of the conditions and
events which at once intensified the acuteness of the land-hunger in
the Highlands and constituted the blackest page in Highland history.

Many evil deeds have been associated with the abuse of the monopoly
power of land ownership in this and other countries, but it is safe
to say that nowhere within the limits of those islands, or, indeed,
anywhere else at any time have blacker or more foul deeds been
committed in the sacred name of property than in the Highlands of
Scotland in those days. It has always been a matter of astonishment
that a brave race should ever have submitted to them. This becomes all
the more remarkable, too, when one remembers that during those very
years regiments raised in these very districts of the finest soldiers
who ever marched to the stirring strains of the bagpipes, were gaining
for the empire and for British arms the most noted achievements ever
won in the Napoleonic wars and in the colonies. It is true, of course,
and it is an eternal discredit, that many of these brave fellows came
back wounded and war-scarred to find, not that a grateful country had
taken care that the homes and the helpless ones they had left behind
were kept sacred and immune from the greed and ruthless savagery of
the landlord or his hirelings, but that their hearths and homes were
desecrated and destroyed, and every moral law of patriotism and honour
had been violated. “Their humble dwellings,” says Hugh Miller, “were
of their own rearing; it was they themselves who had broken in their
little fields from the waste; from time immemorial, far beyond the
reach of history, they had possessed their mountain holdings, they had
defended them so well of old that the soil was still virgin ground,
in which the invader had found only a grave; and their young men were
now in foreign lands fighting at the command of their chieftainess the
battles of their country, not in the character of hired soldiers, but
of men who regarded these very holdings as their stake in the quarrel.”
Well has my friend Mackenzie MacBride expressed it:--

  “Ye remnant of the brave!
  Who charge when the pipes are heard;
  Don’t think, my lads, that you fight for your own,
  ’Tis but for the good of the land.

  And when the fight is done
  And you come back over the foam,
  ‘Well done,’ they say, ‘you are good and true,
  But we cannot give you a home.

  ‘For the hill we want for the deer,
  And the glen the birds enjoy,
  And bad for the game is the smoke of the cot,
  And the song of the crofter’s boy.’”

The silence with which men of that calibre met these hardships and
cruelty might well remain an enigma to one who does not know the
Highlands. They knew that for centuries their ancestors