Highland Clearances: Timeline of events

[Mayacaman]

HIGHLAND CLEARANCES : TIMELINE OF EVENTS

1688: James VII of Scotland (James II of England), a Roman Catholic, is exiled and protestant William III, married to Mary, James’ daughter, are crowned King and Queen. For many, James remained the true king, leading to the Jacobite Rebellions (from “Jacobus” latin for James).

1707: Scotland and England united by Treaty of Union that leads to the creation of Great Britain. All Scots now have commercial and political access to the former English colonies.

1736: Highlanders settle Darien, Georgia.

1739: First recorded evictions on Skye by Macdonald of Sleat. First migrations from Scotland to Cape Fear, North Carolina.

1745: Last Jacobite Rebellion. Jacobites are finally defeated at Battle of Culloden April 1746. Gaelic and tartan are banned.

1762: Sheep-farming is introduced into the North of Scotland by Sir John LockhartRoss.

1772: Emigrations from South Uist in the Outer Hebrides.

1773: Voyage of the Hector to Pictou, Nova Scotia, Canada.

1776: American War of Independence. Britain loses the American colonies.

1784: Estates forfeited after the Jacobite Rebellion are restored to their owners.

1785: First large clearances on Glengarry’s estate. Tenants emigrate to Glengarry County, Ontario. Countess of Sutherland marries the wealthy English landowner & industrialist, the Marquess of Stafford – later the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland.

1785: James Boswell publishes “The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, L.,LL.D.”

1786: Large-scale emigrations to Canada from Knoydart to Glengarry County, Ontario. Copyright 2015, Voices Over the Water, LLC

1790: A new breed of sheep, The Great Cheviot, is brought to Ross and Caithness. It is able to withstand harsh winters in the Highlands of Scotland and still provide plenty of meat and wool.

1792: Year of the Sheep (Bliadhna nan Caorach) - Landlords begin moving tenants from hills onto coastal margins providing them with land insufficient to support their families. Tenants are now expected to develop fishing, kelp-farming etc. There is insurrection in Ross and sheep are “stolen.”

1800: First clearances in Sutherland. Clearances in the western Highlands and Islands.

1801: Clearances in Inverness-shire and Morvern in Argyll.

1802: Glengarry people emigrate to Upper Canada (modern- day Ontario). Over 8,000 Highlanders emigrate to Canada and United States.

1803: The Passenger Act raises the cost of emigration in an attempt to restrict the number of people emigrating.

1807: Patrick Sellar is hired to run the estate of the Duchess of Sutherland. Sutherland clearances of Dornoch, Rogart, Loth, Clyne, and Golspie. Strathglass is cleared.

1811: Earl of Selkirk acquires land in North America – the Red River Colony, with plans to settle Highlanders there.

1812: Sellar clears districts in Assynt.

1813: Sellar clears Kildonan. Tenants leave for the Red River Settlement in what is now Winniepeg, Canada.

1814: The Year of the Burnings – Sellar clears Strathnaver. Sir Walter Scott publishes “Waverley” – the novel that made him the first best-selling author and that romanticized the Highlands.

1815: Napoleonic Wars end and many fighting men come home. James Loch publishes an account of improvements completed on the Sutherland Estate. Alistair Ranaldson Macdonell of Glengarry forms the “Society of True Highlanders.”

1816: Patrick Sellar is tried for murder in Inverness, but is acquitted.

1820: Riots in Culrain, further evictions.

1821: Clearances on Mull. Copyright 2015, Voices Over the Water, LLC

1821: Mary MacPherson (Màiri Mhór nan Oran/Big Mary of the Songs), the great poetagitator of the Clearances era, is born in Skeabost, Skye.

1825: Kelp industry is decimated by the abolition of excise duty on salt after the Napoleonic Wars ended. Some landlords begin to sell off their estates.

1826: Islands of Rum and Muck are cleared.

1828: North Uist and Ardnamurchan in Argyll are cleared.

1830: Newspaper reports a “fever of emigration is raging in Sutherland.” Macleod evicts tenants on Skye.

1832: Cholera outbreak in the Highlands.

1836: Famine in the Highlands. Increase in famine amongst tenants requires landlords to provide relief. Some landlords charter ships to take tenants away, absolving themselves from further responsibility for their people.

1845: Glencalvie is cleared. The Times newspaper sends a reporter to cover the events.

1846: Potato Blight in the Highlands of Scotland leads to failure of the potato crop.

1847: Food riots.

1849: Glenelg, Tiree, and Sollas are cleared.

1851: South Uist and Barra evictions. The Skye Emigration Society is formed to help people to leave.

1852: Highland and Island Emigration Society is formed. The Land and Emigration Commissioners offer ships and assistance.

1853: Lord Macdonald clears Boreraig and Suishnish townships on Skye. Josephine Macdonell of Glengarry clears Knoydart in Argyll. Harriet Beecher Stowe visits Britain and meets the second Duchess of Sutherland.

1854: Strathcarron in Ross is cleared leading to the Greenyards resistance and the “Massacre of the Rosses.” Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes “Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands” in Boston, Massachusetts.

1856: Harriet Beecher Stowe visits Britain again and stays at Inveraray Castle and Dunrobin Castle. Copyright 2015, Voices Over the Water, LLC

1857: Donald MaclLeod publishes his “Gloomy Memories” in Toronto, Ontario.

1880s: Crofters’ War—sustained and popular protests to Highland landowners.

1882: Battle of the Braes—rent strikes and land raids in the Highlands and Islands. Crofters agitate for security of tenure.

1883-84: The Napier Commission hears testimony from crofters and tenants about their conditions. The Commission includes two people who can speak Gaelic.

1886: The Crofter Act is passed in Parliament, which grants security of tenure to tenants and terminates the landlords’ right to evict.

1911: Sorley Maclean is born in Raasay. Considered the greatest Gaelic poet of the twentieth century, Maclean wrote many poems on the Clearances, including, most famously, Hallaig.

1968: Iain Crichton Smith publishes "Consider the Lilies", a novel about an elderly woman who is evicted during the Clearances.

1973: John McGrath’s "The Cheviot, the Stag & the Black Black Oil", an iconic play on the cultural history of the Highlands, presents its first performance in Edinburgh.

1998: The Scotland Act is passed, leading to the first elected Scottish Parliament legislating for its own affairs.

2014: The Scottish referendum on independence is held. Scotland votes to remain in the United Kingdom by 55.3%.

*******

This is not an exhaustive list but a general overview of many of the events commonly interpreted by historians, ethnographers and literary figures.

[ Source ]

[Mayacaman]

The Tragic Highland Clearances

by Robert M Gunn
Chapter 4: Strathnaver

This falls under the larger heading of the Sutherland Clearances due to the fact that the land was owned by the Duke of Sutherland. The Sutherland Lords (who were not even Sutherlands), also cleared Assynt, areas near Caithness, Dornoch, Rogort, Loth, Clyne, Golspie and lower Kildonan leading to the 'rebellion' of the Gunns in the previous chapter.

In 1814 they began in Strathnaver. Their method was reminiscent of the 'Butcher' Cumberland. They ordered the tenants out of their homes and set them ablaze. If anyone was slow getting out or went back for possessions, the fire was started with them inside. All possessions, including furniture were burnt. Women, children, old men and animals stood in huddled, fightened groups whilst the savage work went on. To make the land more suitable for the Sheep, the burned homes were levelled so the Cheviots could browse with ease. This also made it impossible for the tenant to rebuild or take refuge in the remains of their homes. The land was to be devoid of all human habitation as not to intrude upon the grazing sheep.

The evicted lost all their possessions, their clothes and cooking utensils, not to mention their dignity and sometimes their lives. Now they had no place to go, and nobody thought (or cared) to provide them with one. They were, as was said at the time, "driven out like dogs."

In one incident, a woman of perhaps more than ninety years old, was to old and weak to be moved from her home. The neighbours pleaded for Patrick Sellar, the agent, to show mercy for the old woman. Sellar responded,

"Damn her, the old witch. She has lived too long. Let her burn."

Her house was put to the torch, even the sheets on her bed were set ablaze. Local clansmen and clanswomen tried to rescue her by taking her burned body to a nearby barn, but she died five days later in agony, as surely murdered as anybody could be.

Some of the following eyewitness stories of the horrors of the Sutherland and Strathnaver Clearances come from writings of a clergyman named Donald MacLeod. He had a congregation in Strathnaver and stayed awake days on end during the "Burning Times" to record what he saw. His work initially was disbelieved in Scotland. Finally, 70 years later, it was published by his son, but to late to serve justice upon the guilty. Here are just a few from his book, "Memorbilia".

Said MacLeod,

" I saw the townships set on fire. Grummore with 16 houses and Archmilidh with four. All the houses were burnt with the exception of one. A barn. Few if any of the families knew where to turn their heads or from whom to get their next meal. It was sad, the driving away of these people. The terrible rememberance of the "Burnings" of Strathnaver will live as long as a root of the people remains in this country."

One of those burned out of Grummore was ninety year old William MacKay. He remembered the Jacobite days and had already been evicted once. His wife, Janet, died as a result. When he was evicted again from Grummore he went to the churchyard and stood over her grave and said "Well, Janet, the Countess will never filt (evict) you again." He turned and walked, alone, to Wick where he died alone and unmourned.

MacLeod documents more:

A man named Robert MacKay, whose family was sick with fever, carried his daughters on his back for 25 miles, "first by carrying one and laying her down in the open air, and, returning did the same with the other till he reached the seashore."

Also of Clan MacKay, another elderly man crawled away from the Burnings, and into a ruin of a mill unseen. His dog kept rats away from him and he survived for a few days by licking the dust of meal from the floor. MacLeod added, "To the best of my recollection he died there."

An elderly woman, who was partially paralyzed and in absolute pain if moved or if she tried to walk, was ordered out of her home by Lord Stafford's agent (Sellar). She could only sit in a motionless chair. Sellar told the neighbours she must immediately be removed by her friends or the constables (Lowland sheperds) would be ordered to do it. Her family lifted her from the chair, and four boys of the township cried as they carried her out in a blanket. As she was taken towards the coast,

"...her cries never ceased till within a few miles of her destination, when she fell silent."

The eyewitness stories told of these evictions are blood-curdling. One man tried to save some bits of wood and was caught in the act. The wood was burned so that he would have nothing to cook or keep warm by. Many starved and froze to death where their homes had been. Some died of exposure, disease and fatigue. Starvation was rampant. A callous remark was made by the Countess of Sutherland upon seeing some of the thin Highlanders. She wrote in a letter to a friend in England,

"Scotch people are of happier constitution and do not fatten like the larger breed of animals."

One Mrs. John M'Kay, trying to dismantle her home before the arsonists could get to it, fell through the roof and had premature labour.

Donald McBeath had his roof ripped off and he died of exposure.

The factors and constables seemed to take a perverse pleasure in maltreating the old and the frail -- they were so easy to deal with. One common recurrent theme is the mistreatment of pregnant women -- there were many premature labours as a result, and there was death.

One tenant, Hugh MacBeth, sought an interview with Sellar, and told him that he had to leave for his godmothers funeral. He asked that his house and sick father might be left alone until he came back. Sellar sent him packing. MacBeth partially demolished the cottage before leaving, hoping that this would satisfy the factor. When he came back he found the house destroyed and his sick father lying in the open, to die very soon.

Another incident tells of a house occupied by a young woman named Christy MacKay, described in the "Northern Ensign" as a "harmless, inoffensive but sensible girl." The constables and a factor accused her of giving shelter to an aged evicted pauper. After finding the person in her home, the officers dug a hole in the cold earth and put the old woman in it - still alive --then nailed up Christy's house, leaving her weeping against a dry-stone wall.

Not even animals were spared the barbarity. One account tells how a terrified cat, which tried to escape the flames of a burning croft, was thrown back again and again until it finally perished.

Homeless people were left destitute in wind and rain, to survive as best they could without food or shelter. The crying of terrified children & the groans of the elderly made an edifying accompaniment to the important work of 'improving' the Duke's estates. Crowds of people, initially, slept on brae hillsides, watching the embers of their homes and hopes extinguish.

Some evicted from Strathnaver were told if they wanted shelter they should take a ship north. There was only one small ship available. One old man, mortified of the sea, turned the oppostie direction and walked to Kildonan, away from the sea he feared. He was not heard of again. The others took to the sloop which was filled with quicklime. It was partially emptied and her master agreed to take some of the evicted to Caithness. Twenty families went aboard. According to Donald MacLeod again,

"They filled the deck, hold and every part of the vessel, many of these persons had not been on the sea before, and when they began to sicken a scene indescribable ensued. To add to their miseries, a storm and contrary winds prevailed so that instead of a day or two, the usual time of passage, it was nine days before they reached Caithness. All this time the poor creatures, almost without necessaries, most of them dying with sickness were either wallowing among the lime and various excrements in the hold, or lying on the deck exposed to the raging elements."

Another account tells of a man, who was recently evicted and homeless. His wife and children had just died of exposure and starvation and he was in the process of burying his family in cheap boxes when the factor's men came in and evicted him in the middle of the funeral service. They drug him away crying.

There are literally hundreds more eyewitness accounts of the atrocities of the first period of the Highland clearances. Many of these recorded, primarily, by minister Donald MacLeod of Strathnaver. He wrote another book in response to a book written about the graciousness of Countess Sutherland several years later. We will be looking at those books in chapter five.

[ Source ]

[Mayacaman]

Highland Clearances

Highland Clearances, the forced eviction of inhabitants of the Highlands and western islands of Scotland, beginning in the mid-to-late 18th century and continuing intermittently into the mid-19th century. The removals cleared the land of people primarily to allow for the introduction of sheep pastoralism. The Highland Clearances resulted in the destruction of the traditional clan society and began a pattern of rural depopulation and emigration from Scotland.

Clans, Collectives, And The Jacobite Rebellion: The Highlands Before The Clearances

By the early 18th century the people in the Lowlands of Scotland—which lie southeast of a line drawn from Dumbarton, near the head of the Firth of Clyde on the western coast, to Stonehaven—were primarily urbanized. They were also more aligned with England in terms of culture, language, and politics than with their fellow Scots of the Highlands. The people in the Highlands—which encompass the northern half of Scotland as well as, according to many categorizations, the western offshore islands of the Inner and Outer Hebrides and Arran and Bute—were mostly rural and trying to survive in a largely infertile land. Their culture and language were predominantly Scots Gaelic.

The Highlanders still followed the clan system, which had been in place for hundreds of years. The clan was ruled by one family, from which its chief was drawn. The kinsfolk and others who made up the clan lived together in agricultural townships that functioned like collectives or joint-tenancy farms. The land was controlled by the chief but leased from him by “tacksmen” who rented it to tenant farmers, who in turn employed cottars to help cultivate it. Tinged with feudal influences, the clan was also very much a martial system grounded on the obligation of its fighting men to provide military service for the chief to whom they owed personal allegiance. Those fighting men were partly dependent on plunder gained from raiding neighbouring clans to maintain their standard of living.

In 1745 Charles Edward, the Young Pretender (called “Bonnie Prince Charlie”), led the fifth Jacobite rebellion that the house of Stuart had undertaken in an attempt to reclaim the British throne. (Charles’s grandfather James II had been deposed as king in the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89.) Charles won support among the Scottish Highlanders to battle the English and many Scottish Lowlanders for the British crown. After some initial success, Charles and his troops were eventually defeated at the Battle of Culloden (April 16, 1746), during which thousands of Highlanders were killed. In the subsequent weeks and months, some 1,000 Highlanders were hunted and killed. In the process, whole Highland clans were destroyed or were forced to flee.

Even before the catastrophe at Culloden, the clan system had begun slowly deteriorating during the reign of James I, who distrusted the Highlanders so much that he ordered the chiefs away from their clans to attend prolonged court visits so that he could keep them from plotting against him. That deterioration accelerated, however, in the years following the Battle of Culloden, as the British government imposed restrictive laws that compromised the power of the clan chiefs and the Gaelic culture that underpinned it, including the banning of clan tartans (plaid textile designs) and bagpipe music. The government also cleared the way for outsiders to acquire much of the land in the Highlands. The new landlords were set on replicating capitalist agriculture models employed in the Lowlands,

Clearances, Crofting, And Consequences

The subsequent disruption of traditional life and dispossession of land that occurred over roughly the next century became known as the Highland Clearances. The Clearances are generally regarded as having come in a series of waves, whose nature and circumstances varied according to when they happened, where they happened, and who was involved. George Granville Leveson-Gower, later duke of Sutherland, for instance, was the catalyst for notorious evictions that took place from about 1810 to 1820. Advised that his interior lands were best suited for sheep raising and were little fit for human habitation, he evicted thousands of families, burning their cottages and establishing large sheep farms. The evicted tenants were resettled in coastal crofts (small tenant farms), frequently on only marginally cultivable land. They were forced to subsist by collecting and smelting kelp (a source of potash and iodine), something of a boom industry at the beginning of the 19th century, or by fishing, an occupation that was foreign to them. Other landowners in the Highlands followed that eviction model, though some focused on rearing cattle rather than sheep, whereas still others resettled the evicted farmers on crofts where highly labour-intensive cropping was the objective.

The decline of the kelp industry, falling cattle prices, and, later, the potato famine in the Highlands that began in the mid-1840s were major blows to the subsistence economy of the crofters (who had no legal claim to the land on which they lived). When the potato blight hit, about 1846, the crofters were financially devastated. Disease and starvation spread. Mass migrations occurred, mainly to the Scottish Lowlands (where factory work could be found), Canada, the United States, or Australia. Often, Highlanders departed as indentured servants, hoping one day to own their own land. Some left on their own, The way of many others was paid for by landowners who preferred to finance their tenants’ emigration rather than provide prolonged monetary support to help them through the economically difficult years. In 1883, in response to growing sympathy for the plight of the crofters, the Napier Commission was established to investigate their condition. In the meantime the Highland Land Law Reform Association (better known as the Land League) was established. Finally, in 1886, the possibility of future evictions was legally eliminated with Parliament’s passage of the Crofters Holdings Act, which was grounded on the so-called three Fs: fair rent, free sale (the right to become an owner-occupier), and fixity of tenure.

[ Source: Britannica ]

[Mayacaman]

Highland Clearances in "Das Kapital"

The Highland Celts were organised in clans, each of which was the owner of the land on which it was settled. The representative of the clan, its chief or “great man,” was only the titular owner of this property, just as the Queen of England is the titular owner of all the national soil. When the English government succeeded in suppressing the intestine wars of these “great men,” and their constant incursions into the Lowland plains, the chiefs of the clans by no means gave up their time-honored trade as robbers; they only changed its form. On their own authority they transformed their nominal right into a right of private property, and as this brought them into collision with their clansmen, resolved to drive them out by open force. “A king of England might as well claim to drive his subjects into the sea,” says Professor Newman.

This revolution, which began in Scotland after the last rising of the followers of the Pretender, can be followed through its first phases in the writings of Sir James Steuart and James Anderson. In the 18th century the hunted-out Gaels were forbidden to emigrate from the country, with a view to driving them by force to Glasgow and other manufacturing towns. As an example of the method obtaining in the 19th century, the “clearing” made by the Duchess of Sutherland will suffice here.

This person, well instructed in economy, resolved, on entering upon her government, to effect a radical cure, and to turn the whole country, whose population had already been, by earlier processes of the like kind, reduced to 15,000, into a sheep-walk. From 1814 to 1820 these 15,000 inhabitants, about 3,000 families, were systematically hunted and rooted out. All their villages were destroyed and burnt, all their fields turned into pasturage. British soldiers enforced this eviction, and came to blows with the inhabitants. One old woman was burnt to death in the flames of the hut, which she refused to leave. Thus this fine lady appropriated 794,000 acres of land that had from time immemorial belonged to the clan. She assigned to the expelled inhabitants about 6,000 acres on the sea-shore —2 acres per family. The 6,000 acres had until this time lain waste, and brought in no income to their owners.

The Duchess, in the nobility of her heart, actually went so far as to let these at an average rent of 2s. 6d. per acre to the clansmen, who for centuries had shed their blood for her family. The whole of the stolen clanland she divided into 29 great sheep farms, each inhabited by a single family, for the most part imported English farm-servants. In the year 1835 the 15,000 Gaels were already replaced by 131,000 sheep. The remnant of the aborigines flung on the sea-shore tried to live by catching fish. They became amphibious and lived, as an English author says, half on land and half on water, and withal only half on both.

— Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Chapter 27.

[Mayacaman]

The Highland Clearances: a capitalist tragedy

by Chris Bambery
April 8, 2017

The history of the Highlands is steeped in the suffering of capitalism's victims, writes Chris Bambery

A friend of mine recently returned from a week’s holiday in Wester Ross, in the Scottish Highlands, to tell me “we saw more seals than people.” Where they were staying is well known to me from family holidays as child. The beauty of the area is etched in my mind.

But as you walk or drive through what seems a wilderness it’s important to know that it wasn’t always so and that the wonderful landscape is not natural, it is manmade. More accurately it is a product of capitalism’s development in 19th century.

In 1750 a third of Scotland’s population still lived north of the Highland Line; today it is just five percent. In 1811 there were 250,000 sheep there; by the 1840s there were almost a million. Within that period sheep replaced people driven from their homes by direct eviction or through hunger and destitution. After the sheep and over-grazing came deer and the creation of hunting grounds for the elite. By 1884 a tenth of Scotland’s land was given over to deer forests, greater than the size of Wales, and taking up the great majority of the land in the crofting counties (crofts were the small plots of land available to the remaining population).

In England the clearing of the rural population from the land took place over three centuries – from Tudor times until the Napoleonic Wars. In Lowland Scotland it took place at a more rapid pace in the 18th century but largely escaped history because the cotters celebrated by Robert Burns tended to simply drift away to find work in the new industries and mines of the West of Scotland, or to immigrate to the Americas.

The Highland Clearances saw all the brutality which had occurred in England over decades and decades concentrated into a short space of time. Britain was a fully capitalist state, and capitalism abhors the existence of older economic forms, these must be suppressed and destroyed, as they were in its colonies. Society must be re-forged in its own image.

In this case the Gaelic speaking Highlands were essentially an off-shoot of Gaelic Ireland. By the early 18th century townships existed across the Highlands and Islands, even in what are now remote glens. Their ruins can still be found among the bracken and the heather. These were made up of clachans, a collection of stone and turf houses, and their outbuildings. Close to them lay the best land on which the people grew crops. Outside the settlements was a mix of arable, grazing and fallow land, and beyond that common grazing land. Cattle were sold or traded, alongside, to a lesser extent, horses and butter.

This was a feudal society and hunger was never far away. The land was allocated by the tacksman, who was the main leaseholder from the landowner, and rent was paid to him. The inhabitants nominally belonged to a Clan whose chief could call on them for military service. To complicate the picture the Clan chief was not necessarily the feudal lord. MacDonald’s could live on land owned by the Dukes of Argyll, head of Clan Campbell.

This Gaelic society and its language had long been in retreat but in the 18th century two things accelerated that process. Firstly a minority of the Clans who inhabited the region had joined the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion aimed at restoring the exiled Stuart kings to their throne. Booted out by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 the Stuarts were tied to the Crown of France and the Vatican and looked to turn the clock back in Britain to the long lost days of autocratic royal rule.

The 1745 rebellion ended with a crushing military defeat at Culloden less than a year after it begun. Previously the British state had let sleeping dogs lie after such rebellions but this time, scared by the fact the Jacobites had reached Derbyshire, it decided to break the military power of the Clans of the West Highlands, and to end feudalism throughout Scotland. In the Highlands vicious repression was deployed and laws put in place against carrying weapons and banning the feudal powers enjoyed by the nobles.

This destroyed the link between clan chiefs and their followers. They had allowed a myth to gather that they held the communal land in trust. In fact they owned the land. After Culloden Highland nobles drifted south to Edinburgh or London and required cash not fighting men. They were quick to move towards renting land out at commercial rates.

Many Highlanders chose to migrate but most remained eking out a living by raising cattle for sale down south and existing on potatoes and, often, money earned doing seasonal work in the factories of Central Scotland.

The second factor in destroying the Gaelic communities of the Highlands were the missionaries deployed by the Church of Scotland and its various breakaways. They used Gaelic to convert people to their dour Presbyterian faith, but once that was achieved the new flocks were told the language was barbaric and all sermons, preaching and education had to be solely in English. This reflected the residual racism of Lowland Scots against the Highlanders.

Meanwhile, hard pressed in its endless wars with France, the British army began raising regiments in the Highlands. Tough mountain men proved hardy shocktroops in countless wars, both against France and to carve out new colonial lands. Tartan and the bagpipes had been banned post-Culloden but were permitted in the British army. In time these would become the very symbols of all Scotland. By then the Highlanders were no longer seen as a threat and had long gone in most cases.

What did for so much of the population was the breeding of new stocks of sheep, the Cheviot and the Blackface, which could thrive in the hardy conditions of the Highlands, producing a good fleece of wool for the woollen mills of the Lowlands and Northern England. Rents were driven up, and when the Highlanders could not pay they were served with eviction orders. In the final decades of the 18th century some 200,000 were cleared to make way for sheep.

There had already been opposition to this. More than two decades before Waterloo, in 1792, Biadna nan Caorach (The Year of the Sheep), there was a virtual uprising in Ross against the new sheep walks, it being reported: “… a Mob of about four hundred strong are now actually employed in collecting the sheep over all this and the neighbouring county of Sutherland.” By early August some 6000 sheep were being driven south. When troops intervened the men simply melted away. A few were captured, some being banished from Scotland and one being transported to Botany Bay. The commander of the troops wrote to London, however, that:

“… no disloyalty or spirit of rebellion, or dislike to His Majesty’s Person or His Majesty’s Government is in the least degree concerned in these tumults.”

The collapse of the Highland economy after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, with the end of the demand for beef and for sea weed, meant landlords now looked to turning over all their lands to sheep grazing, removing the crofters altogether. The most infamous Clearances were on the huge estate of the Countess of Sutherland. Her husband, Lord Stafford, removed between 6000 and 10,000 tenants between 1807 and 1821. The Strath of Kildonan was cleared of its people between 1813 and 1819, with such savagery that it provoked a reaction.

In December 1812 an agent for Lowland sheepfarmers visited the Strath, asking questions of the tenants, who proceeded to run him off their land. He immediately claimed he had been threatened with his life and the Marquess of Stafford grabbed at his claims to mobilise his male estate workers as special constables, and to summon a detachment of soldiers. Faced with this resistance the locals melted away and the Upper Strath was cleared within three months. They were offered emigration or resettlement in the town of Helmsdale. Many of the young chose to leave for Canada.

However, Stafford’s Agent, a Lowland Scot, Patrick Sellar, believed this response had been too soft. Worse was to follow in the parishes of Farr and Kildonan, where the land was in the hands of Sellar. Later in the century the Highland historian Alexander Mackenzie wrote a History of the Highland Clearances, published in 1883, which described Sellar’s illtreatment:

"As the lands were now in the hands of the factor himself, and were to be occupied as sheep farms, and as the people made no resistance, they expected, at least, some indulgence in the way of permission to occupy their houses and other buildings till they could gradually remove, and meanwhile look after their growing crops.

Their consternation was therefore greater, when immediately after the May term day, a commencement was made to pull down and set fire to the houses over their heads. The old people, women and others, then began to preserve the timber which was their own but the devastators proceeded with the greatest celerity, demolishing all before them, and when they had overthrown all the houses in a large tract of country they set fire to the wreck. Timber, furniture, and every other article that could not be instantly removed was consumed by fire or otherwise utterly destroyed. The proceedings were carried on with the greatest rapidity and the most reckless cruelty. The cries of the victims, the confusion, the despair and horror painted on the countenances of the one party, and the exulting ferocity of the other, beggar all description.

At these scenes Mr. Sellar was present, and apparently, as sworn by several witnesses at his subsequent trial, ordering and directing the whole. Many deaths ensued from alarm, from fatigue, and cold, the people having been instantly deprived of shelter, and left to the mercies of the elements. Some old men took to the woods and to the rocks, wandering about in a state approaching to, or of absolute, insanity and several of them in this situation lived only a few days. Pregnant women were taken in premature labour, and several children did not long survive their sufferings."

In total two thousand people were removed from Kildonan. When Sellar was charged with murder for burning down an old woman's house, a hand-picked jury of landowners found him not-guilty, but he had brought bad publicity to the Sutherland Estate and lost his job. James Loch was an Edinburgh lawyer who for 40 years, from 1812, was commissioner for the Marquis of Stafford. He would write an apology for his employers but his racism towards their tenants was never far from the surface, with him complaining:

“… [their] habits and ideas, quite incompatible with the customs of regular society, and civilised life, adding greatly to those defects which characterise persons living in a loose and unformed state of society.” His concern was to provide wool for the “staple manufactory of England” and to convert the people to “the habits of regular and continued industry.

A young journalist sent by the “Scotsman” to the Highlands exhibited the same racism, writing in 1847 that the Highlanders were “an inferior race to the Lowland Saxon.” Robert Knox, the Edinburgh surgeon who bought the bodies the gravesnatchers Burke and Hare stole, believed in the superiority of the “Anglo-Saxon race” and wrote that the Highlanders “must be forced from the soil.” Sellar would have concurred with this because he regarded the Highlanders as racial degenerates. In his racist view they were, "the aborigines of Britain shut out from any general stream of knowledge... "

In the preface to his History of the Highland Clearances, Mackenzie raised this question, and answered it: “Some people ask 'Why rake up all this inquiry just now?' We answer that the same laws which permitted the cruelties, the inhuman atrocities described in this book, are still the laws of this land.” Of the Duchess of Sutherland, Karl Marx wrote this in Capital:

“This person, well instructed in economy, resolved, on entering upon her government, to effect a radical cure, and to turn the whole country, whose population had already been, by earlier processes of the like kind, reduced to 15,000, into a sheep-walk. From 1814 to 1820 these 15,000 inhabitants, about 3,000 families, were systematically hunted and rooted out. All their villages were destroyed and burnt, all their fields turned into pasturage. British soldiers enforced this eviction, and came to blows with the inhabitants. One old woman was burnt to death in the flames of the hut, which she refused to leave.

Thus this fine lady appropriated 794,000 acres of land that had from time immemorial belonged to the clan. She assigned to the expelled inhabitants about 6,000 acres on the sea-shore, 2 acres per family. The 6,000 acres had until this time lain waste, and brought in no income to their owners. The Duchess, in the nobility of her heart, actually went so far as to let these at an average rent of 2s. 6d. per acre to the clansmen, who for centuries had shed their blood for her family. The whole of the stolen clanland she divided into 29 great sheep farms, each inhabited by a single family, for the most part imported English farm-servants. In the year 1835 the 15,000 Gaels were already replaced by 131,000 sheep.”

It might be argued the Clearances on the Sutherland Estate were the most excessive, and most people were removed with less savagery and on a smaller scale, but they were coerced off their land.

At the height of the clearances there was resistance, but it was never organised or effective. Obedience to the Clan Chief still counted, even when he was the one ordering you onto the emigrant boat, while ministers stressed obedience to the law, even when they sympathised with their flock.

In 1846 matters became desperate as the potato blight brought the likelihood of famine to the Highlands. In response Charles Trevelyan, Under Secretary at the Treasury, wrote: "The people cannot, under any circumstances, be allowed to starve." Two years later he did the opposite in Ireland, letting hundreds of thousands die. Arguing the famine there was "a mechanism for reducing surplus population."

Yet, as starvation became apparent the British government did intervene to feed the population: just two deaths from starvation are recorded, both on the hard hit population of the Isle of Barra (whose people were largely cleared in 1853 and sent to Quebec). This contrasts with Ireland, where the Great Famine killed thousands. While Ireland was nominally part of the UK it was in reality a colony and seen as separate. The Highlands were regarded by the British government as part of the UK, and starvation could not be permitted there (although emigration was encouraged).

The evictions went on despite the famine. In 1853 attempts were made to clear the people of Coigach in Wester Ross and Greenyards, near Ardgay, in Strathcarron. The summonses carried by the sheriff’s officer were seized and destroyed by a crowd of women and he was stripped naked and put in a boat to be sent back.

At Greenyards, however, matters took a more violent turn. The sheriff’s officer, accompanied by 35 police, were confronted by a crowd of 300, two thirds women. They stood at the front armed with stones, while the men, carrying sticks, were at the rear. The police used their batons and 15 or 16 women were seriously injured. They were taken to the jail in Tain before being released.

As the 19th century developed the growing popular resistance to evictions in Ireland helped spark resistance in the Highlands and Ireland which had a radical edge. That continued into the 20th century, especially in the immediate aftermath of the two World Wars. But emigration continued too.

One result of all this is that the land issue remains a real issue in Scotland, in a way that is not the case in England. Because so many Highlanders ended up in the Glasgow and the West of Scotland, the searing memory of the Clearances and of resistance fed into the developing left and working class movement. It remains today.

The Highland Clearances are a glaring example of injustice and deserve to be remembered. But they cannot compare, as previously noted, to the deaths imposed on the people of Ireland and Bengal by a series of manmade famines created by British colonialism (the last being in Bengal in 1943). But they all speak volumes about how capitalism came into being, dripping with blood and at the expense of common people. It ever was and ever will be while we allow it to remain.