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IT is a curious coincidence
that among the many experiences of her journey, Miss Schaw should have
come into contact with a phase of that highland emigration which is a
conspicuous feature of Scottish- American history just before the
Revolutionary War. Between 1763 and 1776 there left Scotland many
thousands of her people—the total number is not known—who had lived in
towns, valleys, and islands of North Britain, from the southwest to the
uttermost north, including the Hebrides, the Orknevs, and the Shetland
Islands. They represented nearly all grades of the population—tacksrnen,
farmers and other tenants, and laborers, and covered mans' gradations of
wealth, from the substantial and prosperous chief tenants to the very
poor, unable to maintain themselves and their families. These people,
migrating at different times and under different conditions, seem all to
have been attracted by the fertile and cheap lands of the New World and
by the opportunities these lands offered of making a living. They went
to nearly all the colonies, but chiefly to Nova Scotia, New York, and
the Carolinas.
The causes of this
movement have never been adequately explained, although there is a great
mass of evidence, printed and in manuscript, upon which a thorough study
might be based. In general it was due to the breaking up of the clan
organization and the transition from tribal to civil power and
authority, constituting a veritable revolution in Scottish highland life
in the eighteenth century. Three results followed: an increase of
anarchy and crime; a substitution of money payments for payments in kind
in rents and other transactions; and an increasing pressure of
population upon the food supply. The landed proprietors or their chief
tenants, the tacksmen, began to absorb small farms into large ones,
evict tenants or raise rents, and harry the lesser folk with exactions
and heavy oppressions, whereas the latter, bred to a farming and
stock-raising life, were unable to find new forms of livelihood. The old
linen manufacture was in decay, while the redundancy of population
rendered stock and cattle raising and the time-honored methods of
agriculture a precarious and insufilcient means of subsistence. By
witness of all whose testimony has been recorded, the chief cause of the
movement was the rise of rents, and the difficulties of subsistence due
to the enhanced cost of provisions and other necessaries of life. The
situation was in many ways not unlike that which accompanied the
enclosure movement in England in the sixteenth, eighteenth, and
nineteenth centuries.
The emigrants complained
of all of these conditions as making it impossible for them to remain in
Scotland. "It is a grief to our spirits," said one, "to leave our native
land and venture upon such a dangerous voyage; but there is no help for
it. We are not able to stand the high rents and must do something for
bread or see our families reduced to beggary." But just who were
responsible for the situation is not so easy to determine. A recent
writer has called attention to the fact that one cause of the emigration
was the "tacksman system." The tacksmen were chief tenants, often men of
wealth and social standing, who held their lands of the proprietors or
lords of the soil on long leases and were accustomed to "subset" these
lands to undertenants. Both classes suffered, for while some of the
tacks- men were among the oppressors, others, confronted with the
prospect of heightened rents and lowered social position, themselves
joined the movement and came to America, bringing with them not only
much wealth, but also many of their lesser tenants, who followed them
partly from motives of clan loyalty and partly in the hope of bettering
their condition (Miss Adam, in The Scottish Historical Review, July,
1919).
Among those who were
driven from Scotland because of the increase of lawlessness and crime
was James Hogg, who came to North Carolina in 1774. He agreed that
"others complain, with too much justice, of arbitrary and oppressive
services, of racked rents and cruel taskmasters," but declared that in
his case he and his family were compelled to leave because of "the
barbarity of the country," meaning thereby the theft and pilfering of
his crops and stock by the people of the neighborhood, the burning of
his house and other buildings, and the threats which were made against
his own life. "A list of the murders, robberies, and thefts," he wrote,
"committed with impunity there during my residence in Caithness, would
surprise a Mohawk or a Cherokee. The loss of so many people and the
numbers they may in time draw after them will probably be missed by the
landholders, but let them learn to treat their fellow creatures with
more humanity. Instead of looking on myself as an enemy to my country in
being accessory to the carrying off so many people, I rejoice in being
an instrument in the hand of Providence to punish oppression which is by
far too general, and I am glad to understand that already some of those
haughty landlords now find it necessary to Court and caress those same
poor people, whom they lately despised and treated as slaves or beasts
of burden" (Scots Magazine, 36, pp. 345-346).
Miss Schaw's fear that
the emigration of so many able-bodied men would have a bad effect on
recruiting was realized during the American War, when the obtaining of
soldiers from Scotland, always a fertile field for the recruiting
sergeant, became exceedingly and increasingly difficult. |
