This is based on an email I wrote to an Episcopal priest in 2009. I have cleaned up the links and converted it to HTML
I first learned of the Highland Clearances many years ago when I read John Prebble’s book on the subject. It is heart breaking reading.
Following the Battle of Culloden in 1746 the traditional order of Gaelic Society was destroyed. The Highland Chiefs found they could obtain higher revenues by renting their lands out for large scale sheep farming than from the rents paid by their tenants, who in former centuries were their clansfolk and kin. Tens of thousands of Highland men, women, and children were brutally evicted from the lands where their ancestors had lived for centuries. The most intense period of clearing was from roughly 1785 through the 1850’s.
Some of the Highland Lords showed some compassion for their tenants and tried to help them. Other did not. The most brutal and notorious of the latter were the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland, and their agent, Patrick Sellar. Prebble on the Duke:
“He was coal and wool joined by a stately hyphen, and ennobled by five coronets. The glens emptied by his commissioners, law agents, and ground officers (with the prompt assistance of police and soldiers when necessary), were let or leased to Lowlanders who grazed 200,000 true mountain sheep upon them, and sheared 415,000 lbs of wool every year.”
Uncle Tom’s Cabin brought Harriet Beecher Stowe fame all over the world. One Highlander drew the obvious parallel and wrote “Auntie Kate’s Cabin.”
Stowe visited Scotland. She was famous, and many prominent Britons were interested in and sympathetic towards the plight of African-Americans on the other side of the Atlantic. She was invited to be the guest of one such couple: The Duke and Duchess of Sutherland, whose sympathy for the oppressed stopped when it interfered with their income. She was completely taken in. She would not believe any of the stories about the clearances and defended the Duke and Duchess for their “improvements” to the land (See Sutherland – Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe on the Sutherland Clearances) and wrote Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands. The Highlander Donald MacLeod wrote a reply, which is taken from his book Gloomy Memories.
By this time there was some public outcry against the clearances. Stowe’s defense of the Sutherland family, backed by her considerable prestige, allowed them to continue for several more years. She bears some responsibility for the displacement of an indigenous people from its ancient homeland. In this she is no different from the White Americans who cheated the Natives over here out of their lands.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 