The History of the Highland Clearances 10

The History of the Highland Clearances 10

The pasturage had been destroyed before

the legal term, and while in even the eye of the law it was still the

property of the poor Highlanders; but ere disturbing them in their

dwellings, term-day was suffered to pass. The work of demolition then

began. A numerous party of men, with a factor at their head, entered

the district, and commenced pulling down the houses over the heads of

the inhabitants. In an extensive tract of country not a human dwelling

was left standing, and then, the more effectually to prevent their

temporary re-erection, the destroyers set fire to the wreck. In one day

were the people deprived of home and shelter, and left exposed to the

elements. Many deaths are said to have ensued from alarm, fatigue, and

cold.

 

Our author then corroborates in detail the atrocities, cruelties, and

personal hardships described by Donald MacLeod and proceeds:--But to

employ the language of Southey,

 

“Things such as these, we know, must be

At every famous victory.”

 

And in this instance the victory of the lord of the soil over the

children of the soil was signal and complete. In little more than

nine years a population of fifteen thousand individuals were removed

from the interior of Sutherland to its sea-coasts or had emigrated to

America. The inland districts were converted into deserts through which

the traveller may take a long day’s journey, amid ruins that still bear

the scathe of fire, and grassy patches betraying, when the evening

sun casts aslant its long deep shadows, the half-effaced lines of the

plough.

 

After pointing out how at the Disruption sites for churches were

refused, Hugh Miller proceeds:--We have exhibited to our readers,

in the _clearing_ of Sutherland a process of ruin so thoroughly

disastrous, that it might be deemed scarcely possible to render it

more complete. And yet with all its apparent completeness, it admitted

of a supplementary process. To employ one of the striking figures

of scripture, it was possible to grind into powder what had been

previously broken into fragments,--to degrade the poor inhabitants

to a still lower level than that on which they had been so cruelly

precipitated,--though persons of a not very original cast of mind

might have found it difficult to say how the Duke of Sutherland has

been ingenious enough to fall on exactly the one proper expedient

for supplementing their ruin. All in mere circumstance and situation

that could lower and deteriorate had been present as ingredients in

the first process; but there still remained for the people, however

reduced to poverty or broken in spirit, all in religion that consoles

and ennobles. Sabbath-days came round with their humanising influences;

and, under the teachings of the gospel, the poor and the oppressed

looked longingly forward to a future scene of being, in which there

is no poverty or oppression. They still possessed, amid their misery,

something positively good, of which it was impossible to deprive

them; and hence the ability derived to the present lord of Sutherland

of deepening and rendering more signal the ruin accomplished by his

predecessor.

 

These harmonise but too well with the mode in which the interior of

Sutherland was cleared, and the improved cottages of its sea-coasts

erected. The plan has its two items. No sites are to be granted in

the district for Free Churches, and no dwelling-houses for Free

Church ministers. The climate is severe,--the winters prolonged and

stormy,--the roads which connect the chief seats of population with the

neighbouring counties, dreary and long. May not ministers and people

be eventually worn out in this way? Such is the portion of the plan

which his Grace and his Grace’s creatures can afford to present to the

light. But there are supplementary items of a somewhat darker kind.

The poor cotters are, in the great majority of cases, tenants-at-will;

and there has been much pains taken to inform them that, to the crime

of entertaining and sheltering a Protesting minister, the penalty

of ejection from their holdings must inevitably attach. The laws of

Charles have again returned in this unhappy district, and free and

tolerating Scotland has got, in the nineteenth century, as in the

seventeenth, its intercommuned ministers. We shall not say that the

intimation has emanated from the Duke. It is the misfortune of such

men that there creep around them creatures whose business it is to

anticipate their wishes; but who, at times, doubtless, instead of

anticipating misinterpret them; and who, even when not very much

mistaken, impart to whatever they do the impress of their own low and

menial natures, and thus exaggerate in the act the intention of their

masters. We do not say, therefore, that the intimation has emanated

from the Duke; but this we say, that an exemplary Sutherlandshire

minister of the Protesting Church, who resigned his worldly all for the

sake of his principles, had lately to travel, that he might preach to

his attached people, a long journey of forty-four miles outwards, and

as much in return, and all this without taking shelter under cover of a

roof, or without partaking of any other refreshment than that furnished

by the slender store of provisions which he had carried with him from

his new home. Willingly would the poor Highlanders have received him at

any risk; but knowing from experience what a Sutherlandshire removal

means he preferred enduring any amount of hardship rather than that the

hospitality of his people should be made the occasion of their ruin.

We have already adverted to the case of a lady of Sutherland threatened

with ejection from her home because she had extended the shelter of her

roof to one of the Protesting clergy,--an aged and venerable man, who

had quitted the neighbouring manse, his home for many years, because

he could no longer enjoy it in consistency with his principles; and we

have shown that that aged and venerable man was the lady’s own father.

What amount of oppression of a smaller and more petty character may not

be expected in the circumstances, when cases such as these are found to

stand but a very little over the ordinary level?

 

The meannesses to which ducal hostility can stoop in this hapless

district, impress with a feeling of surprise. In the parish of Dornoch

for instance, where his Grace is fortunately not the sole landowner,

there has been a site procured on the most generous terms from Sir

George Gunn Munro of Poyntzfield; and this gentleman, believing himself

possessed of a hereditary right to a quarry, which, though on the

Duke’s ground, had been long resorted to by the proprietors of the

district generally, instructed the builder to take from it the stones

which he needed. Never had the quarry been prohibited before, but on

this occasion a stringent interdict arrested its use. If his Grace

could not prevent a hated Free Church from arising in the district, he

could at least add to the expense of its erection. We have even heard

that the portion of the building previously erected had to be pulled

down and the stones returned.

 

How are we to account for a hostility so determined, and that can stoop

so low? In two different ways, we are of opinion, and in both have

the people of Scotland a direct interest. Did his Grace entertain a

very intense regard for Established Presbytery, it is probably that he

himself would be a Presbyterian of the Establishment. But such is not

the case. The church into which he would so fain force the people has

been long since deserted by himself. The secret of the course which

he pursues can have no connection therefore with religious motive or

belief. It can be no proselytising spirit that misleads his Grace. Let

us remark, in the first place, rather however in the way of embodying

a fact than imputing a motive, that with his present views, and in

his present circumstances, it may not seem particularly his Grace’s

interest to make the county of Sutherland a happy or desirable home

to the people of Scotland. It may not be his Grace’s interest that

the population of the district should increase. The clearing of the

sea-coast may seem as little prejudicial to his Grace’s welfare now

as the clearing of the interior seemed adverse to the interests of

his predecessor thirty years ago; nay, it is quite possible that his

Grace may be led to regard the clearing of the coast as the better

and more important clearing of the two. Let it not be forgotten that

a poor-law hangs over Scotland,--that the shores of Sutherland are

covered with what seems one vast straggling village, inhabited by an

impoverished and ruined people,--and that the coming assessment may

yet fall so weighty that the extra profits accruing to his Grace from

his large sheep-farms may go but a small way in supporting his extra

paupers. It is not in the least improbable that he may live to find the

revolution effected by his predecessor taking to itself the form, not

of a crime,--for that would be nothing,--but of a disastrous and very

terrible blunder.

 

There is another remark which may prove not unworthy the consideration

of the reader. Ever since the completion of the fatal experiment which

ruined Sutherland, the noble family through which it was originated

and carried on have betrayed the utmost jealousy of having its real

results made public. Volumes of special pleading have been written

on the subject,--pamphlets have been published, laboured articles

have been inserted in widely-spread reviews,--statistical accounts

have been watched over with the most careful surveillance. If the

misrepresentations of the press could have altered the matter of fact,

famine would not be gnawing the vitals of Sutherland in a year a

little less abundant than its predecessors, nor would the dejected and

oppressed people be feeding their discontent, amid present misery, with

the recollections of a happier past. If a singularly well-conditioned

and wholesome district of country has been converted into one wide

ulcer of wretchedness and woe, it must be confessed that the sore has

been carefully bandaged up from the public eye,--that if there has been

little done for its cure, there has at least been much done for its

concealment. Now, be it remembered that a Free Church threatened to

insert a _tent_ into this wound and so keep it open. It has been said

that the Gaelic language removes a district more effectually from the

influence of English opinion than an ocean of three thousand miles,

and that the British public know better what is doing in New York

than what is doing in Lewis or Skye. And hence one cause, at least,

of the thick obscurity that has so long enveloped the miseries which

the poor Highlander has had to endure, and the oppressions to which he

has been subjected. The Free Church threatens to translate her wrongs

into English, and to give them currency in the general mart of opinion.

She might possibly enough be no silent spectator of conflagrations

such as those which characterised the first general improvement of

Sutherland,--nor yet of such Egyptian schemes of house-building as

that which formed part of the improvements of a later plan. She might

be somewhat apt to betray the real state of the district and thus

render laborious misrepresentation of little avail. She might effect

a diversion in the cause of the people, and shake the foundations of

the hitherto despotic power which has so long weighed them down. She

might do for Sutherland what Cobbett promised to do, but what Cobbett

had not character enough to accomplish, and what did he not live even

to attempt. A combination of circumstances have conspired to vest in a

Scottish proprietor, in this northern district, a more despotic power

than even the most absolute monarchs of the Continent possess; and it

is, perhaps, no great wonder that that proprietor should be jealous of

the introduction of an element which threatens, it may seem, materially

to lessen it. And so he struggled hard to exclude the Free Church, and, though no member of the Establishment himself, declares warmly in its behalf. Certain it is that from the Establishment as now constituted he can have nothing to fear and the people nothing to hope.