and flashed along the port cities of Europe, up the watercourses, and into the columns of newspapers and journals already crammed with alluring information on emigration. In the tiny North Sea fishing village of Dunbar, Scotland, even the dour master of the grammar school showed some excitement and allowed his pupils to exhibit some of their own. To ten-year-old Johnnie Muir this latest American news seemed almost too exciting to bear. In their reading book he and his classmates had already been awed by accounts of the vast American forests that contained such marvels as the sugar maple and by descriptions of the wonderful wildlife these forests harbored. Johnnie Muir had been especially taken with the descriptions of the fish hawk and the bald eagle by the Scots naturalist Alexander Wilson, who like so many of his countrymen had gone to the New World after the American Revolutionary War. The boy read Wilson’s words over and over again until he knew them by heart. And now to be told there was also gold in this fabulous country! Visions of hawks, eagles, red Indians, huge trees oozing sweets, and gold glittering in the mighty gloom of the wilderness filled Johnnie Muir’s head.
Such dreams may be the special and perishable blessings of childhood, yet there is good evidence that in varying degrees of vividness they were shared in these years by the adults of Dunbar and a thousand other towns and villages of the Old World and for reasons that had as much to do with European realities as American promises. At midcentury, the Old World seemed faded and chaotic, the New World bright with limitless prospect. The latest news merely made the contrast the more obvious and the impulse for emigration the more compelling.
The three decades since the Congress of Vienna had redrawn the map of Europe had seen an accelerating pace of social and economic disruption amounting to a cultural revolution. Every aspect of life from family relations to international trade was profoundly affected. What is now called the First Industrial Revolution was then a bewildering phenomenon of so many facets that not even the most farsighted social philosopher or statesman could begin to comprehend it all or predict the direction and consequences of the changes taking place. Only the great poets of the Old World could then correctly intuit some of the consequences of all this on the hearts and minds of humankind, and few were listening to them.
Well into the nineteenth century the old certainties of the medieval world, apparently long vanished in the smoke and blood of war and the political rearrangements of the intervening centuries, had survived as emotional preferences and habits of living for millions in the rural areas. Now even these were being utterly obliterated in ways more final than could have been accomplished by the blasts of cannons and the changes of flags. The very landscape that had nurtured the old ways of thought and life was fast vanishing into the pits of industry, swallowed up by the expanding industrial centers. And the old assumptions of a fixed abode, of place, of hierarchical obligations, and of home-centered labor were being roughly uprooted without effective alternatives in prospect. Village life was being deliberately sabotaged by those who owned the lands surrounding the villages and who now saw new ways to make those lands yield greater profit.
Agriculture, once the basic mode of life, was becoming increasingly consolidated and at the same time was becoming distinctly subordinate to the cities with their factories, ports, commerce. Even in the years when harvests were good, agriculturalists suffered because of lowered selling prices. And when crops were poor—as they often were in what were known in Scotland as the “Hungry Forties”—there was hunger and indeed famine, and not just in the newly spawned cities. Such had been the case in 1845, so it was again in Ireland in 1847 and 1848, and in the latter year the condition spread from Ireland to infect much of the Old World and to leave a scar on the European consciousness: such sights, such scenes of unparalleled, irremediable suffering could not easily be forgotten or understood as the bottom curve of some huge cycle. They must instead portend the end of something.
The year 1848 confirmed the general fear of crisis, for not only was there the agricultural failure and famine; there was also the attendant economic crisis. Eighteen forty-five and 1846 had seen wild speculation in wheat and railroads; then the huge wheat purchases had been followed by a bad harvest. In England business houses failed in droves, thirty-three of them in London alone in 1848.
Above all this hovered the specter of revolution on the Continent. In Paris the king had been forced to abdicate, leaving the Tuileries to the vengeance of a mob. There had been upheavals in the German and Italian states and in Hungary. In Vienna, even the grand political puppeteer Metternich had been forced to flee to England before the threat of mob violence.
Assessing the situation, the Edinburgh Review in its July-October 1848 number took a very Burkean view, admitting the real possibility of political collapse everywhere, a contagion emanating from France’s “huge chronic ulcer,” the “foul and purulent” contents of which were now disgorged upon all nations. Plainly, in order to deal with the mobs of unemployed and dispossessed, extraordinary remedies might be temporarily required, “among the rest, greater facilities to Emigration—a subject which has lately, and justly, claimed so large a share of public attention.”
With the exception of the Irish, the Scots were perhaps the most susceptible to encouragements to emigration, and a man like Daniel Muir, Johnnie’s father, had grown up hearing talk of American opportunities while all about him he was discovering evidence of his homeland’s historic poverty and overpopulation. Daniel Muir was born in 1804, precisely the period in which a more general recognition had come to the Scots people of just how far their country lagged behind the community of modernizing nations and of how far it was likely to stay behind. Scotland’s problems, exaggerated by the convulsions of the Industrial Revolution, were in fact endemic.
As early as the eighteenth century the Scots financial adventurer John Law (he of the Mississippi Company Bubble) succinctly identified the country’s major problem: numbers of people, he observed, “the greatest riches of other nations, are a burden to us.” The country was simply too poor to support a large population. Law’s personal solution was to try his fortunes abroad as did ever-increasing numbers of his countrymen as the century wore on and conditions darkened. The years 1763–75 saw almost 25,000 Scots leave for Nova Scotia, Canada, and America, a figure that would later look paltry but in that time was of sufficient magnitude to become a major public issue.
From the Highlands, where barren gray rocks dropped precipitously into the waters of lochs and range behind range of mountains and hills bore only the tough furze and heather, the people came down to try their luck in the Lowlands, and then, finding the prospects there equally grim, went to America, about which the news was so unfailingly good. There were stories of the American soil’s great, almost magical fecundity, of the inexhaustible resources, of space for a free life. And those who had seen the Glasgow tobacco dealers grow fabulously wealthy on a product of the American earth, sporting their scarlet cloaks and gold-knobbed canes, could not doubt the factual basis of these rumors. Journals like the Scots Magazine, which featured a special section on “British North America,” and the Chambers’s Information for the People and Edinburgh Journal catered to the rising interest in emigration to America. Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer enjoyed a sustained popularity after its first publication in 1782. In it Crèvecoeur had written extensively of the Scots immigrants descending from the “high, sterile, bleak lands of Scotland, where everything is barren and cold,” lands that “appear to be calculated only for great sheep pastures.” He retailed the representative history of one Andrew, an honest Hebridean, who arrived in America pale, emaciated, and virtually without resources yet who in the course of four years became “independent and easy.”
They were still coming down from the high country and out from the Lowlands forty years after Crèvecoeur wrote, for the conditions that sent the emigrants to the New World were only intensifying. The Highland clearances that had begun in the 1780s had by the 1820s increased in scope and ruthlessness as thousands of Highlanders were thrown off the land to make room for sheep. So too with the agriculturalists of the Lowlands, where consolidation and modernization were squeezing out the small farmer. Even the once-prosperous weavers of Glasgow, Paisley, Renfrew, and Lanarkshire now felt the pinch as thousands willing
