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The second Duchess of Sutherland was a key figure in organising, An Affectionate and Christian Address of Many Thousands of Women in Great Britain and Ireland to their Sisters in the United States, an 1853 petition against slavery signed by over half a million British women. Who better to receive this petition and, present it in the United States, than the author of the book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which had drawn the country’s attention to the problem. ‘A sentimental, melodramatic and tendentious account of slavery written by a woman whose personal knowledge of the subject had been gained during a weekend in Kentucky .... dumpy little Harriet Beecher Stowe’, is John Prebble’s description in his account of the Clearances. What could she have done to forge an unlikely alliance between Prebble and the Ku Klux Klan?
When Mrs Stowe visited Britain in 1856 she was gathering material for a travel book. Her friendship with the Duchess was well-known and some Americans were less than keen to listen to lessons in morality from a family, who, they had heard, burned tenants out of their homes. Similarly, Donald Ross, a Glasgow lawyer and some-time journalist had written scathingly and effectively of the Knoydart clearances, and specifically the case of Catherine MacKinnon at Inverie, under the title, “Aunty Kate’s Cabin”. No doubt with posterity in mind, the second duchess mounted a charm offensive.
Donald Ross saw it clearly enough and wrote to her at Dunrobin,
‘At Dunrobin castle you are in a manner tied to the Duchess of Sutherland’s apron strings. You are shown all the glory and grandeur of the Ducal residence. You are brought to see extensive gardens, aviaries, pleasure-groves, waterfalls and all that is beautiful and attractive, and you are occasionally treated to a drive along the coast for some miles, through rich farms and beautiful corn-fields .... But you have not visited Strathnaver, you have not penetrated into Kildonan, you have not been up Strathbrora, you have not seen the ruins of hundreds and hundreds of houses of the burnt-out tenants’
It made little impression on Harriet Beecher Stowe. To cement the impr, the Duchess presented her with a copy of James Loch’s book on ‘the Improvements’. Stowe acknowledged, in the book she published on her return, SunnyMemories from Foreign Lands, that people had criticised the actions of the Sutherland estate but
‘To my view it is an almost sublime instance of the benevolent employment of superior wealth and power in shortening the struggles of a civilisation and elevating in a few years a whole community to a point of education and material prosperity, which, unassisted they might never have obtained.’
She rallied to the defence of her friend, the Duchess, also,
‘As to those ridiculous stories about the Duchess of Sutherland, one only has to be here, moving in society, to see how excessively absurd they are. I was associating, from day to day, with people of every religious denomination and every rank of life. I have been with dissenters and with churchmen; with the national Presbyterian church and the free Presbyterian; with Quakers and Baptists. In all these circles I have heard the great and noble of the land freely spoken of and canvassed, and if there has been the least shadow of a foundation for any such accusations, I certainly should have heard it.’
It was not even that the Clearances were over by this time. Nine months before Mrs Stowe’s first visit, the Marquis of Stafford, the son of the Duchess, was attempting his first evictions at Coigach, one of the few where local resistance, and the fear of extreme violence, at least stalled the process by persuading the sub-tenants to keep the lease for another year.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was not the first, nor the last, reporter to be taken in by carefully orchestrated tours and presentations. To criticise her for not being an investigative journalist is more than harsh and even John Prebble calms down by the end of his chapter on her, seeing a ‘thrush among ospreys’, ‘a simple impressionable woman’.
Donald MacLeod, the Strathnaver stonemason who documented many of the Clearances was not so sanguine. By now living in Canada, he accused Mrs Stowe of being paid by the Duchess to write her account and edited some of his earlier letters to the Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle into a pamphlet publishes as Gloomy memories of the Highlands.
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