After 1815 the weavers became the most prominent occupational group in the emigration movement, and in Lanarkshire alone they had organized thirty-two emigration societies.
Growing up in that Lanarkshire district, Daniel Muir would surely have noticed all this, would have heard the talk of the New World and of the plans of the emigration societies. Daniel Muir’s flight from the backcountry to Glasgow around 1825 was part of the larger pattern and was the first step in his own eventual emigration.
Muir had been born in Manchester, England, where his soldier father was then stationed in the British army. Shortly after birth Daniel had been orphaned by the deaths of both parents, and the baby with his eleven-year-old sister Mary was taken back to the father’s home region of Lanarkshire and raised there by relatives.
In nearby Glasgow, despite some feeble child-labor statutes, small children regularly worked thirteen-hour days, and in the cotton mills of Lanarkshire similar brutalizing routines were in force. So it is not difficult to imagine that life for the orphan Muir children on the farm near Crawfordjohn was anything but idyllic. There on the high moors, surrounded by steep mountains that suffered but a few bleak villages and some lead mines, Daniel Muir “lived the life of a farm servant,” as his son John was later to write in an obituary notice. He continued in this when he moved to the neighboring sheep farm of Hamilton Blakley after his sister Mary had become Blakley’s wife.
Given the numbing routine of such a life and the absence of parental affection, it is a little surprising that Daniel Muir should ever have displayed much joy in life or any interest in its non-utilitarian dimensions. Yet at some point in his calcified maturity he confessed to his son John that on the Crawfordjohn sheep farm he had taken pleasure in carving little images out of whatever materials were at hand. He had also made himself a fiddle and had learned to scrape across its catgut strings the tunes of hymns and ballads. The native Lowlander is said to be an outwardly dour type who conceals the warm romanticism that bubbled out in Burns and Sir Walter Scott, and if circumstances deny him any effective outlet for the romanticism and demonstrativeness within, the result can be a grim, crabbed character. So it proved with Daniel Muir, and whatever his talents for life, for art and music, they were crushed out of him in the monotonous grind of agricultural servitude. He gave up the carving, though the fiddling and singing lingered on for a few years as a pathetic, vestigial remnant of the suppressed side to his character.
The most significant event in Daniel Muir’s Lanarkshire apprenticeship to life was his conversion to a brand of evangelical Presbyterianism. Indeed, this was to prove the most significant event of his entire life and, it might be argued, of the lives of those who were to be his family and who would be forced to bear the burdens of his spiritual convictions. At some point in adolescence the Word in the dress of flaming, hellfired rhetoric was brought to the lonely farmhand, and he found in the love of Jesus something of what his earthly circumstances had denied him.
The specifics of the conversion experience are unknown, whether it came as the culmination of broodings while carrying buckets in muddy boots; or while in moments in his metic’s cot before exhausted sleep; or whether some bellows-lunged marathon evangelizer reached the boy on a single, indelible Sunday. Nor is it known which brand of evangelical preaching among the many was decisive. The Scots have always been a divided people with a historical predilection for disputation and “hiving off” into a welter of small and smaller camps of opinion. This is particularly obvious in religious matters, where there exists a long, reddened record of religious warfare. The years of armed strife in Jesus’ name were over by Daniel Muir’s time, but the schisms and splinterings continued, and in the period 1806–20 there existed seven different Presbyterian churches plus other smaller evangelical sects like the Glassites or Sandemanians.
What probably attracted Daniel Muir most in the message he heard was the addition of emotionalism to the ascetic piety of Calvinism and the displacement therein of the elitist doctrines of election and predestination. The most obvious source for this development was the influence of John Wesley, who in the course of his career made twenty-two proselytizing trips to Scotland; he gained few actual converts to Methodism through these, but his influence on the tenor of Scots religious practice was enormous. In a larger sense, this evangelical element was another of the myriad consequences of the Industrial Revolution, which had created new conditions for which the old modes and doctrines of worship now seemed inadequate. The poor, the dispossessed, the laboring masses, those like young Daniel Muir, needed some sort of fire in their lives, and evangelical religion with its odor of brimstone and its passionate promises of true equality in the hereafter gave it to them. As John Nelson, the English stonemason, told Wesley of Christ’s poor, “No other preaching will do … but the fine old sort that comes like a thunderclap upon the conscience.” Daniel Muir’s conscience was struck in that way, and it remained so throughout his life. In his subsequent position as tyrant-head of his household and in his later career as a backwoods Wisconsin preacher and wandering evangelist, he would strive with a grim earnestness to direct God’s thunderclap upon the consciences of his listeners.
In the meantime, he discovered that as one of Christ’s poor this was a hard world to live in, and that some places might be harder than others. So in his early twenties he became part of that shifting, often confused mass of his countrymen seeking more hopeful prospects. But leaving the farm was one thing, a gamble Daniel Muir and thousands of rural people willingly took; accommodating oneself to city life was another. What Daniel Muir encountered in the Glasgow of the 1820s was enough to disabuse him forever of the idea that the city offered anything more than another version of the miseries of the backcountry. At the same time, having experienced the limitations of Scots life in, both places, he may have recognized in the Glasgow episode the potential virtues of that even bigger gamble, emigration.
For Glasgow as Muir encountered it was fearfully overcrowded, having grown without plan more than 100 percent since the turn of the century. Sanitary conditions were hopelessly inadequate, and the old dread diseases like smallpox, typhus, and cholera had reappeared. Gangs of unemployed laborers, displaced rural folk—like Muir fleeing the farms or else thrown off them—aimlessly roamed the streets. Beggars clogged every corner. Hundreds of public houses ministered in their way to the despairing, and to get drunk was said to be “the short way out of Glasgow.”
Another way out and one more congenial to Daniel Muir was to accept military service, as had his father before him. He took it, though it can have done little to ameliorate his view of life’s harsh, regimented necessities. In the course of this tour he found himself on a mission as a recruiting officer to the fishing village of Dunbar.
How long Sergeant Muir stayed on this particular mission is now unknown, but it was long enough to meet, court, and marry a Dunbar woman and to persuade her to buy his release from service with some of her inheritance money. Muir took over the grain and feed store that was another portion of her legacy, and he was apparently in the process of turning it into a going concern when his wife died, leaving him in sole possession.
Given the conditions of the time and Daniel Muir’s own situation, it would seem that this would have been the right, natural time for him to emigrate: he was alone and childless, a comparative stranger in Dunbar, and for the first time he possessed enough capital to make a good start in the New World. He must have seriously considered it, but Daniel Muir stayed on, and it may be that he did so because he had become involved with another woman. Early in 1833 he married Anne Gilrye.
Anne was a tall, serious-faced young woman who lived with her parents diagonally across the high street from where Muir had reestablished his business in a narrow three-story building faced with the Upper Old Red Sandstone so pervasive in the East Lothian region. The parents, David and Margaret Gilrye, both came from old and proud Highlander families and had done well in Dunbar, where David had sold meat until his retirement. They considered their daughter somewhat above the obscure young widower across the way who each Sunday could be seen turning to the right out of his store and marching with military resolution down the sloping street to the kirk on the hill. In that same kirkyard lay
