The History of the Highland Clearances

The History of the Highland Clearances - Second Edition, Altered and Revised

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 Mackenzies 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 mens 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[10] 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: 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 had tilled those lands and lived free and untrammelled. By every moral law, if not by the law of the land, they had a right to the soil which had been defended with their own right arm and that of their ancestors. These were the days when they were useful to the chief, who assumed some indefinable right to the land. But the day came after the Forty-Five when men were no longer assets to the chief. His territorial jurisdiction was broken. He wanted money, not men, and the lonely silences of the hills instead of merry laughter and prattle of children singing graces by the wayside. And these men bore the change which meant so much to them with patience. Why? The Highlands were permeated then as now with a deep religious sense. They lent a willing ear to the teachings of the ministers of the Gospel, who wielded the power of the iron hand which left its deep impress on the social life and even the literature of the Highlands. They regarded the minister as the stern oracle of truth, and the strict interpreter of the meaning of the ways of God to man. What happened was right. And a perusal of the pages that are to follow will show what a mean use many of these ministers made of the power which their faithful flock believed was vested in them. These men werewith a noble exception or twoin reality the servile tools of the estate whose powers they feared, and whose support they received. In their own interests and in those of their earthly lord and master, they assured the people that all their troubles were but part of the punishment inflicted on them by Providence in the course of working out their redemption! This attitude of the ministers had another significance. In many parishes they[12] were the only persons who were educated enough to write, and so able to express the wrongs which their people were called upon to endure. But their voices were silent and their pens were idle, except, indeed, when they were used to ennoble the character, the prestige, and the benevolence of the evicting tyrant! ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 51271
Author: Mackenzie, Alexander
Release Date: Feb 21, 2016
Format: eBook
Language: English