“A Colony to Themselves”: Scottish Highland Settler Colonialism in British North America, 1770–1804

Abstract

This article explores the links between anti-Catholicism in the United Kingdom and the acceleration of settler colonialism in British North America, and it does so by considering two group migrations from Catholic districts in the North West Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Occurring over 30 years apart, the Glenaladale settlement (1772) in Prince Edward Island and the Glengarry settlement (1803) in Upper Canada offer instructive insight into how anti-Catholicism activated Highland Catholic colonial agency. Not only did significant numbers of Highland Catholics choose to quit Scotland forever, but their settlement in places like Prince Edward Island and Upper Canada accelerated the process of settler colonialism and the establishment of the Catholic Church. The colonies at Glengarry and Glenaladale were peopled by settlers who were doubly motivated to settle in the empire. They stood to prosper economically—certainly—and they also stood to gain the freedom to practice their faith free of obvious interference. To the Indigenous peoples whose ancestral lands they settled, the consequences were not softened by this pretext for settler colonization, and too often the history of anti-Catholic discrimination in the four nations elide the fact that Catholics were enthusiastic colonizers elsewhere, and that the two processes were often related.

The Reformation of 1560 set in motion a program of socio-religious exclusion that almost succeeded in wiping Catholicism off the faith map of Scotland. While most people transferred their allegiance to an emerging Presbyterian faith, there were some who clung to the “old faith,” existing in pockets in the Southwest and Northeast as well as in the Northwest Highlands and Islands. In the latter district, Catholics were in fact the majority in much of Knoydart, Arisaig, Morar, and Moidart on the mainland and on the islands of South Uist, Barra, Benbecula, Canna, and Eigg—areas that would emerge, in the early eighteenth century, as Catholic Jacobite strongholds.¹ While the regal union of 1603 introduced a new era of consolidated power, it was the parliamentary union of 1707 that gave Scotland and its people formal and official access to a growing empire that propelled social, economic, and cultural change at home while also advancing an aggressive process of colonization abroad.² No one and no region were unaffected, and Highland Catholics went on to play major roles in Britain's imperial program as settler colonists despite enduring systemic and widespread discrimination over the course of the eighteenth century. Religious persecution was not unusual in early modern Europe, nor was the conflation of disloyalty with religious preference. Catholics at all levels of Highland society were perceived as disloyal subjects and so struggled in an environment that was deeply hostile to their existence. The colonies, particularly those in what became British North America following the American Revolution, offered a critical respite to this minority as well as access to large plots of land made available by the systematic dispossession of Indigenous peoples. The colonies were attractive to these settlers precisely because they offered something unavailable to them in the domestic context from which they emerged: land they could exploit for their own gain and with no compromise to the retention of their faith.³

This article argues that there were strong links between anti-Catholicism in the United Kingdom and the acceleration of settler colonialism in British North America, and presents two group migrations from Catholic districts in the Northwest Highlands and Islands as examples.⁴ Occurring over 30 years apart, the 1772 Glenaladale settlement in Prince Edward Island and the 1804 Glengarry migration to Upper Canada shed light on how anti-Catholicism activated Highland Catholic colonial agency. The Glenaladale settlement, named after John MacDonald, eighth of Glenaladale, a disillusioned tacksman and chief architect of the emigration scheme, was undertaken in 1772 with 214 people from the Arisaig area on the mainland and South Uist, one of the Outer Hebrides, after a landlord on the latter, Colin MacDonald of Boisdale, attempted to force his Catholic tenants to convert to Presbyterianism. Tacksmen were figures of high social standing who held large tracts of land on behalf of a chief and then leased portions out to various tenants. The group MacDonald brought together represented the first organized migration cluster of Scottish Catholics to what would soon become British North America. The 1804 Glengarry migrants, conversely, joined a pre-existing settlement in Upper Canada that had been established by earlier waves of migrants from the Glengarry estate in Knoydart. These later migrants were mostly Highland Catholic soldiers from the disbanded Glengarry Light Infantry Fencibles and were led by their chaplain, Alexander Macdonell. The reason they went to Upper Canada and not the newly acquired Caribbean territory of Trinidad was because their initial invitation to settle in the latter had come to nothing. Perceptions of Highland Catholics as possessing pro-French sympathies probably played a role in this, given the intense anxiety that had been generated by the Franco-American Alliance of 1778 and the dominance of French Catholics on Trinidad by the turn of the nineteenth century.⁵ The deep opposition of Britain's leading abolitionists, such as William Wilberforce, to Trinidad's settlement for fear that it would lead to an expansion of enslavement was another influential factor. Added to this was Wilberforce's well-known anti-Catholic prejudice—a position that shaped his perceptions of the island and how much influence the Catholic Church should have there for decades.⁶

The eighteenth-century British state that all Highlanders navigated was inherently complex, deeply hostile, and filled with countless stereotypes. Loathed in government circles, their ways of life and living were characterized as inimical to its progress.⁷ A case in point was General George Wade's report on the Highlands and its people in 1724 wherein he highlighted their “extensive adherence to one another as Highlanders in opposition to the People who Inhabit the Low Countries whom they hold in the utmost contempt” as deeply problematic.⁸ Yet, it was the Catholics among them who, belonging as they did to a proscribed faith, bore the brunt of the discrimination. Penal legislation, which outlawed activities such as mass attendance and the sacraments, the inheritance of property, the guardianship of children, and Catholic education, was coupled with aggressive Protestant conversion efforts undertaken by organizations such as the Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge.⁹ It was made clear that while they might be subjects, they were not equals.

As the pioneering work of James Hunter, J. M. Bumsted, Marianne McLean, and Eric Richards has shown, an established pattern of outward migration emerged across the Highlands and Islands as the impact of the legislative attacks on various aspects of their culture became clear. The sweeping changes that were introduced by landlords in the second half of the eighteenth century dramatically altered the structure of the Highlands and Islands economy, and ushered in a protracted era of clearance. The observations that Glengarry's “estate levying disrupted the traditional tenurial hierarchies” rang true across the region.¹⁰ We argue that despondency was coupled with displacement—people were priced out by high rents and replaced by livestock or dispersed to new locations to service emerging yet precarious industries such as kelp.¹¹ For the region's Catholics, these changes sat alongside legal exclusions and deep-rooted societal bigotry. The prospect of religious freedom, the ability to identify openly as Catholic, and opportunities for land acquisition encouraged their departure. Whether by proxy or design, these circumstances accelerated the process of Catholic migration to and settler colonialism in British North America, the primary destination of Highlanders before 1815. The fact that many would deliberately and aggressively displace local Indigenous peoples, such as the Mi'kmaq, Wulstukwiuk, Mohawk, and Algonquin, and disrupt other settling groups, namely the Acadians and Québécois, mattered little to them.¹² Across Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Upper Canada, Catholic Highlanders established themselves in significant numbers because as Britons, an identity they could claim in the colonial world, they were able to acquire and exercise significant privilege. This was an advantage that only came after they were abroad and the need for “loyal” settler subjects was desperate enough to facilitate their inclusion.

Intense anti-Catholicism was a fact of eighteenth-century Scottish life, and although it influenced each group's decision to leave Scotland and settle in British North America, it was experienced in different ways and with varying degrees of visibility. The Glenaladale emigration of 1772 was the result of several factors, including the decline of the tacksman class, but principal among them was the overt antagonism expressed by a Presbyterian landlord toward his Catholic tenants and his efforts to force them to convert. The 1804 Glengarry migrants, conversely, had redirected their attention from Trinidad to Upper Canada after the Colonial Office's initial enthusiasm dissipated in response to the concerns of the anti-slavery lobby and the anxieties associated with the governance of a newly acquired, Catholic-majority territory. What these groups had in common was the fact that their “home” districts had been deeply affected by the process of “improvement” that had introduced a more commercial culture of landownership. Despite being reorganized to focus on having different economies—Clanranald, wherein Glenaladale sat, became heavily dependent upon kelp whereas Glengarry's concentration was on black-faced sheep—the tenants of these districts faced poor long-term prospects.¹³ Additionally, these districts were problematized as being both Catholic and Jacobite strongholds—the phenomenon Murray Pittock calls the “propagandistic identification of Jacobitism with Catholicism.”¹⁴ Although attacks on Highlandism had been underway since the early seventeenth century, the legislative interventions and proscriptions that were introduced in the eighteenth century systematically dismantled the communal structures of the Scottish Gàidhealtachd.¹⁵ The period between 1715, when the first Jacobite rising occurred, and 1784, when the forfeited estates were “restored” to the “original possessors upon reasonable conditions,” was particularly difficult, but the effects were long-term and irreversible.¹⁶ Both groups of settlers experienced deep loss as their sense of place and communities fell apart.

Placing Highland Catholics within the context of settler colonialism has been complicated by the oppression they experienced before their departure. Catholic migrants from the Scottish Highlands and Islands, but also from Ireland, are sometimes compared with other diasporas similarly affected by trauma, such as the Armenian, greater African, and even Palestinian expatriate communities. The justification for this is often that they were propelled in vast numbers from their homeland by a single cataclysmic event—the Famine for the Irish and the Clearances for the Highlanders (despite the fact that the Clearances occurred over decades from the 1770s through the 1850s).¹⁷ Both the Irish and Highland Protestants had established migratory patterns before these events, but since the Highland Catholics had struggled to access the empire in large groups before the early 1770s on account of the need to keep their heads down, their contribution to the settler colonial project came later and was concentrated in the colonies that were less desirable. Thus, while it is possible to frame those Highland Catholics affected by the Clearances in this way, their subsequent behavior as colonists complicates such narratives. Furthermore, when it comes to Highland–Indigenous interactions in British North America, it is essential to see the Highlands and Islands as a deeply complex place and attempts to draw comparisons between the experiences of Highlanders and Indigenous peoples as inappropriate.¹⁸

Anti-Catholicism and settler colonialism both have considerable literature, but few connect these phenomena and on the rare occasion where they do intersect, the focus has been on the twentieth century.¹⁹ While work on the Scottish Highland context has not been integrative, there have been some important contributions that explore either anti-Catholicism as a factor motivating emigration or highlight aspects of Catholic settlement. The work of Clotilde Prunier and Kathleen Toomey, for example, has added significant depth to understandings of how anti-Catholicism affected Catholic prospects, with Toomey in particular making links with emigration.²⁰ Similarly, the works of J. M. Bumsted and Marianne MacLean have offered invaluable and pioneering insight into how settlements took shape in Prince Edward Island and Upper Canada.²¹ These works, coming as they did before serious consideration was given to Scots as pragmatic participants in the British colonizing process, did not link anti-Catholicism and settler colonialism. This is now changing. Kehoe's work on Highland Catholic complicity with the displacement of Indigenous peoples and land theft in the Maritime colonies is shedding new light on how Highlanders accessed and exercised colonial privilege.²² Similarly, in his work on Highland soldiering Matthew Dziennik has also made an effort to consider Catholic Highlanders as part of the whole and, as a result, is illuminating this group's pragmatic approach to imperial engagement.²³ In this article, we follow the example of John Wolffe in considering Highland Catholics within a four-nations perspective, but extend his analysis of nineteenth-century patterns much further back into the previous century in order to think about the motivations of earlier Catholic settlers in Prince Edward Island and Upper Canada.²⁴ We likewise draw on insights from an impressive literature on anti-Catholicism “at home” in the United Kingdom, and religious intolerance in early modern America.²⁵

Catholic settler colonialism has a long history in the Americas, arguably beginning with the papal bull issued by Pope Nicholas V in 1452. This bull, taken together with Pope Alexander VI's 1493 bull directed at the Portuguese and the Spanish, is often referred to as the Doctrine of Discovery and provided the mechanisms through which land and property could be expropriated in the name of God. This Doctrine of Discovery was soon embedded in English common law and can thus be said to have influenced the very foundations of the British Empire; the royal charter of 1621 for Nova Scotia is one example.²⁶ Settler colonialism is distinct from other forms of domination in that it does not necessarily depend on the subjugation of an Indigenous majority, or their exploitation as a labor force. Rather, it requires their absence to facilitate the ultimate colonial fantasy: empty or “virgin land” yet to be exploited by “free labor,” and justifiable because of an intense belief in European and Christian supremacy.²⁷ It was a version of this “promise” that motivated the Scottish Highland settlers to select Prince Edward Island and Upper Canada. The colonies held out the promise of what the Highlanders could not have in their ancestral home: the possibility to practice their religion without prejudice, and the (incorrect) idea of “empty,” “uncontested” land that could be enhanced and exploited.²⁸ In their case the fantasy was premised on British ideas of supremacy derived from the Doctrine of Discovery, itself arguably a “Catholic” creation, and fueled by the rejection of their Catholicism at “home.”

There are a couple of important connections between the leaders of the two groups of settlers considered here. First, both John MacDonald and Alexander Macdonell came from Jacobite families and they, like so many other descendants of those who had participated in the risings, entered the military service of the British Crown to support the extension of Britain's imperial interests. The consolidation of landed authority required this allegiance as well as the pragmatic inclusion of some Jacobites.²⁹ The tradition of Highland military service ran deep in the lands of Clanranald and Glengarry and, while this informed both emigrations, the links were more obvious with the disbanded Glengarry Fencibles. While throwing into sharp relief the complexities inherent in Catholic loyalism's entanglement, first with British colonization and then with settler colonialism, the decision taken by each group of people to quit Scotland altogether illuminates Highland Catholic agency and a determined rejection of anti-Catholicism. That both groups of people made the decision to emigrate testifies to the authority they claimed over their own destinies. While there is an argument to be made that imperial engagement enabled forms of “regional particularism,”³⁰ there is also one to be made about the added value it offered those who had been dispossessed of the ability to worship freely and to be regarded as citizens of equal worth. That Catholic agency could be expressed at all was thanks, in no small part, to landscape, which was, in places, like the “Rough bounds” (Garbh-chriochan), so rugged that it defied the Reformation.³¹ According to one local priest, “No roads with any pretence to the name existed… … and whatever General Wade may be elsewhere, he is of no account here.”³² Much of Clanranald's lands were in the Rough Bounds and while Glengarry's were slightly beyond this, they were also largely mountainous and beyond the abilities of practically all but those born and raised there. Such a landscape maintained secret networks, much to the chagrin of the Presbyterian authorities who feared Catholicism's transference to the young people who were “tainted in their principles with the Popish Books, Rebellious Pamphlets, declarations, Manifestoes, and song put into their hands by the priests.”³³ In both districts, Protestant lairds, a predominantly Protestant gentry and, in the case of Glengarry, a “nominally” Presbyterian clan chief—Alexander Ranaldson MacDonell—had jurisdiction over a local Catholic majority. Secondly, once settled, they played prominent roles, either indirectly (Macdonald provided support for religious personnel) or directly (Macdonell was a priest then became the first Bishop of Kingston), in shaping Catholicism in what would become English-speaking Canada, which is ironic given the fact that all these people were Gaelic speakers. As will be shown below, the colonial world represented—for each group—a space where they could re-establish themselves, their prosperity, and their faith.³⁴ In the case of these two migrations, the anti-Catholicism each group had experienced in the Scottish Highlands and in the realm of British abolitionist politics was foundational to the establishment and advancement of Catholicism and the Catholic Church in British North America.

Anti-Catholicism in Britain and Ireland

Anti-Catholicism was a powerful social and political force across all regions in the United Kingdom, but its effect was not felt evenly as Scottish, Welsh, English, and Irish Catholics all experienced variations of the same discrimination and hostility. This matters when attempting to understand the peculiarities of the Highland Catholic experience. Some of the differences between the United Kingdom's Catholic communities were embodied in the Continental colleges that were established after the Reformation to educate the sons of Catholic elites and to train some of them as priests for the English, Scottish, and Irish missions. While Catholicism was divided along national lines, which ultimately reduced its power as a unified bloc, in Scotland, it was also divided along Highland–Lowland lines since language, culture, and customs were very different. In the colonial world, the four national groups, despite having relationships that were more “competitive than harmonious,” could, and did, join forces to push against external intervention, usually that of Rome.³⁵ Collectively, though, all confronted an entrenched culture of anti-Catholicism that worked to exclude them from positions of power and influence.³⁶ How this was manifest across the United Kingdom differed. English Catholics, for example, had much in common with their Anglican brethren and many “papists” remained deeply embedded within elite circles and, in many cases, retained their lands and wealth.³⁷ In Ireland, the defeat of James VII and II was confirmation of the process of Catholic suppression that had long been underway. In 1703, Catholics only held about 14 per cent of the land there and the most influential Catholic elites had been either killed or were in exile across Europe. This coincided with the passing of various statutes or “Popery laws” between 1695 and 1709, many of which were enforced up until about 1750. While legal measures were not a coherent penal code, when taken together, they imposed a formidable array of restrictions on the public and private lives of Catholics of all backgrounds.³⁸ The Irish experience differed from other Catholic groups because they constituted a majority population, and thus retained some power to subvert and resist en masse, as well as constituting an actual security threat—a perceived threat that became a sharp reality when the Irish rebelled in numbers in 1798.³⁹ That Catholic involvement in settler colonialism needs to be considered within the context of this “national” rendering of loyalties is foundational for building better understandings of how and why Scottish Catholics engaged with empire.

In Scotland, the culture of intense anti-Catholicism that followed the Reformation gave Catholics reasons to be fearful. Priests were a primary target and faced imprisonment, banishment, or worse. Gilbert Blakhal's description of his near drowning with his horse as they tried to cross a freezing river undetected is an early example.⁴⁰ Originally from northeast Scotland, he attended Scots College Rome between 1626 and 1630 before returning to the Highlands as a missionary priest. Having managed to get himself (and his horse) out of the water, Blakhal was forced to go back in up to his neck to retrieve the vestments he had accidentally dropped to prevent local Protestants from “persuading themselves, finding these vestments, that some priest had been drowned in that river and rejoice thereat.”⁴¹ Visible expressions of the faith were outlawed, and people had to worship in secret. Mass stones (clach na h-aifrinn), such as Lochaber's Meall Doire, and place names, such as Mass Burn (Allt na h-aifrinn) or Priest's Rock (Creag an t-sagairt), are stark reminders.⁴² As Clotilde Prunier's work on perceptions of the Scottish Catholic mission during the 1720s and 1730s reveals, the eighteenth century offered little respite. One of the main reasons for this was that “Popery” was believed to pose a serious risk to established Presbyterianism because of its ability to win over Episcopalians on account of the “common Cause of Jacobitism.”⁴³

The districts from which the two focus migrations come were in the thick of it. In his 1724 report, General Wade declared the Glengarry and Clanranald territories troublesome because their large Catholic populations were “disaffected” to the government.⁴⁴ State rhetoric associated with the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745–46 amplified suspicions of Catholic disloyalty, even though the majority of Jacobites were Episcopalian.⁴⁵ The officers of the Clanranald and Glengarry regiments, for example, were entirely Catholic and so were targeted by state authorities.⁴⁶ In the immediate aftermath of Culloden in 1746, it was proposed that government troops be stationed in these districts for extra security since gathering information on “treasonable practices” was extremely difficult with “Knoidart, Moidart, Arisaig and Glenfinnan [being] almost void of cover or provisions, which makes it impracticable at present for any but Highlanders to subsist there.”⁴⁷

While Irish Catholics, as noted above, could at least derive political power from the fact of their numerical majority on the island, and English Catholics were typically wealthier and benefited from localized patronage and protection, Scottish Catholics—especially those in the Highlands—enjoyed none of these advantages and were arguably the most disadvantaged of the three major groups.⁴⁸ The estate forfeitures, land confiscations, and difficulties they experienced in acquiring leases, coupled with their exclusion from military service until 1793, were devastating in their long-term effects. In both Scotland and Ireland, those Catholics who managed to cling on to their landholding did so through tactical conversions into ever more complex confessional contortions.⁴⁹ The penal laws reflected “Protestant anxiety” and affected the life experiences of all Catholics, but they were also designed deliberately to undermine the Gaelic worlds of Ireland and Scotland. The stigma of belonging to a district declared hostile and of being a people perceived as “uncivilized” and disloyal was difficult to overcome.⁵⁰ The Scottish Enlightenment's commitment to stadial theory, which pitted the “primitive” and “savage” ways of life and living in the Highlands against the “modern” and “industrious” ways of the Lowlands, was especially destructive and weakened the integrity of the entire Highlands and Islands region.⁵¹ Its Catholics were perceived by most in Presbyterian Scotland as regressive and anti-modern. The re-education of Catholic children remained a preoccupation of Church of Scotland ministers, landowners, and parish schoolteachers until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and priests remained nervous about communicating with each other well into the 1780s—often using pseudonyms and omitting certain details “lest they were used against the whole Catholic community if the letter were intercepted by malevolent persons.”⁵²

While these examples show the longevity of anti-Catholicism in Scotland, the violence of the Gordon Riots and the fact that Catholic Relief legislation was only introduced for Scotland in 1793, some fifteen years after Ireland and England, reveals the influence of the Covenanting mentality of Presbyterianism.⁵³ This was entangled with widespread socio-economic change that severed people's ties with their ancestral lands. Consequently, by the turn of the nineteenth century, the pendulum had swung decisively toward emigration—so much so that the proportion of Catholics leaving had become a cause for concern in landowning, political, and religious circles.⁵⁴ Catholic leaders were rightly worried about Catholicism's survival in the Highlands and Scotland more widely because, apart from the persistent anti-Catholicism faced by adherents, the numbers of people choosing to leave continued to rise. The prospect of greater religious toleration and the “flattering accounts” of life in North America were very influential.⁵⁵ After a conversation with “several gentlemen from Glengary,” the Catholic bishop of Scotland's lowland district, George Hay, explained that the people “want nothing but a proper opportunity to go to America” to avoid “rapacious Masters”:

…it naturally occurred that if they could get a colony to themselves in one place where they could have all the freedom in Religion it would be infinitely preferable, & the persecution in Uist arising at the same time, has made many of the leading people among them enter more ardently into the Schemes.⁵⁶

Hay observed a pivotal moment for Scottish Catholic Highlanders. The colonial world became, from this point onward, a place of respite where they could not only imagine greater religious toleration but activate it in their transplanted communities.

The Glenaladale Settlement of Prince Edward Island

South Uist is an island in the Outer Hebrides measuring roughly “twenty-four miles long and five miles broad.” Although it was part of Clanranald's lands, the South Uist estate was owned by Colin Macdonald of Boisdale, a Presbyterian laird. Records from the early 1790s put its majority Catholic population at around 2,950 and its Presbyterians at 500.⁵⁷ In the late 1760s, a serious fracture emerged between Boisdale and his Catholic tenants that culminated in a group exodus. These people made up a significant part of the Glenaladale settlers who went to Prince Edward Island in 1772. Writing to John Geddes, a fellow Scottish priest and his future co-adjutor, Bishop George Hay provided an overview of what was happening:

The persecution of Ouist goes on apace, Boysdale after having got his poor people fixed for another year, has used every means in this power to harass them because they will not allow their children to be brought up as he pleases, so that there is no remedy left but to see & get a settlement for them in America and I have been employed for some time in getting proper intelligence how that could be done.⁵⁸

More details on what some of the children were subjected to was provided by Hay's Highland counterpart, Bishop John MacDonald:

…he kept a schoolmaster in his house, a profligat[e] man both as to his principals and morals, the greatest nu[m]ber of his schollars being Cath he did all he cou'd to bring them to his owne way of thinking and as he did not succeede in that, he caused flesh meat to be brought in to the school in Lent and force it in their mouth, and whoever did not take it was severely scourged.⁵⁹

Signed off by “Mr. Tiberiop,” the alias of Bishop John MacDonald, these lines testified to the violence that the Catholics of South Uist endured when they refused to follow their landlord's order to convert to Presbyterianism. Boisdale, who was known locally as “Big Colin,” came down particularly hard on his Catholic tenants because he lacked the experience, support, and authority required to manage an estate effectively.⁶⁰ The situation worsened before it got better, and people did what they could to avoid him and his insults. According to Hay, “the best appellative he addresses them with is ‘you devil & c:21’. The blasphemous forms in which he mentioned every article of our holy religion to them are intolerable to Christian ears and makes death more eligible than any connection with him.”⁶¹ As the Gaelic scholar Dòmhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart explains, the observance of holy days had also become a “flash point” in districts with large Catholic populations. Landlords saw them as threatening to their incomes, and tenants saw attempts to cancel or reduce them as undermining established “reciprocal rights and obligations.”⁶² Tired of the “heightening rents,” the “unrelenting oppressions,” and “every kind of barbarous treatment,” many Catholics on South Uist saw emigration as their way out.⁶³ At the same time, John MacDonald, eighth of Glenaladale, had grown frustrated with his limited options and was working on an emigration scheme that would see him establish a new settlement across the Atlantic on Prince Edward Island. So intent was he on leaving and making a fresh start abroad that he was prepared to borrow money by “mortgaging his own estate” to make it happen.⁶⁴ Boisdale's anti-Catholicism and bullying handed Glenaladale the opportunity to recruit settlers.

Britain took Prince Edward Island, also known as Isle Saint-Jean and Epekwitk by the French and Mi'kmaq people respectively, from France with the 1763 Treaty of Paris and in 1772, the Glenaladale settlement began. Much has been written about it, including land tenure, class makeup, its connection with the broader development of the Catholic Church, and secondary migration to Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island.⁶⁵ Although intended as a haven for Protestant elites, it attracted little interest from industrious and affluent English, Irish, and Scottish landowners, despite its first Lieutenant-Governor, William Patterson, who arrived in 1770, being Donegal-born.⁶⁶ The lack of interest meant that the commissioners, who had carved up the island into 67 townships, were compelled to grant tracts to people beyond the desired categories such as affluent Catholics—and MacDonald was the first one.⁶⁷ In late 1770, MacDonald had travelled to Edinburgh with the intention of securing land from Scotland's then Lord Advocate, Sir James Montgomery, so that he could set up an emigration scheme for other disillusioned Highlanders who might be persuaded to leave. Montgomery, the official responsible for sharing out the land on the island, was sympathetic. Bishop Hay explained that “tho’ a man so much of the Government [Montgomery] is most willing to give them all encouragement, & their [sic] being R. Cath. is far from being an objection with him.”⁶⁸ As someone poised to become a majority landholder on the island, it was in Montgomery's interest to advance its settlement and, given the preference that Scots had for working within Scottish networks, the incorporation of Scottish Catholics was not surprising.⁶⁹ While it took a few years to secure land and enough buy-in from prospective emigrants to make the journey viable, once the land was secured, Glenaladale and Hay, despite initial reservations about the prospective emigration of Catholics, started fundraising. MacDonald raised cash by selling what he could, including his two estates, Glenaladale and Glenfinnan, to his first cousin, Alexander (or “Golden” Sandy, Alasdair an Oir) MacDonald, who had made a fortune in Jamaica.⁷⁰

Understandings of the extent to which colonial exploitation in the Caribbean enabled settler colonialism in British North America is expanding as work on Scotland's involvement in the Atlantic trade of enslaved African people evolves. There can be no doubt that money earned in that part of the empire was used to acquire land and establish settlements in northern colonies. The transaction between John MacDonald and his cousin “Golden” Sandy shows one of the forms it could take. Rather than a direct investment from Jamaica to Prince Edward Island, money was routed through Scotland. The Highlands was, like other regions in the United Kingdom, deeply invested in the enslavement of Black people and many Highlanders welcomed the profits that their connections with the plantation economy yielded. In this respect, they were no different to countless other Britons. Their society, like others, normalized it.⁷¹ It is not known if enslaved people worked on the MacDonald lands, but they were a visible proportion of the labor force in the early years of the colony at Prince Edward Island and were often present in the households of the wealthiest settlers.⁷² Patterson, Montgomery, and other prominent island figures of Scottish or Irish origin, such as Chief Justice Peter Stewart, Attorney General Phillip Callbeck, and Speaker of the House Walter Berry, were known enslavers. The colony's introduction of a statute in 1781, which tightened up hereditary bondage by preventing any change to the status of enslaved people upon their baptism, empowered the enslavers and other settlers.⁷³ Upon arriving on Prince Edward Island, the Catholic Highlanders entered a colonial structure where, for the first time, they were considered a class higher than another group of people.

The first group travelled on the Alexander and left Greenock on 23 April 1772, stopping at Arisaig, the Isle of Eigg, and South Uist to pick up a total of 214 passengers and supplies before setting off across the Atlantic in mid-May. Its passenger list was almost entirely Catholic and represented a cross section of Highland society.⁷⁴ This was the first organized mass Scottish Catholic settlement in British North America, but John MacDonald's desire to establish himself as a paternalistic landowner alienated many of those who had joined his scheme.⁷⁵ While the settlement was not a failure, it did lose a number of the original migrants and their children to neighboring Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island where land and independence from landlords were more easily acquired.⁷⁶ This put in place an extensive Highland Catholic settler colonial program that included widespread Indigenous Mi'kmaq displacement,⁷⁷ rapid population growth, church building, and, later, a system of Catholic education, including the establishment of a seminary in 1853 that evolved into St Francis Xavier University—an institution built by and for the Highland Catholics in Nova Scotia.⁷⁸ Taking their Catholicism with them, they, along with subsequent waves of Catholic migrants from the Scottish Highlands, enabled the faith to spread much further and at a more rapid rate than would have been likely otherwise.

The Glengarry Settlement of Upper Canada

The circumstances surrounding the emigration of Alexander Macdonell and the disbanded soldiers from the Glengarry Fencibles in 1804 were not the same as those of the Glenaladale migrants but anti-Catholicism was an important factor in where they ended up. In the 1790s, there were an estimated 1,400 Catholics in Glengarry and Fr. Alexander Macdonell, who would later go on to become the first Bishop of Kingston, Upper Canada, came from one of its families.⁷⁹ Born in 1762, somewhere in Glengarry, Macdonell left Scotland for his religious training in the mid-1780s and was ordained at the Scots College in Valladolid, Spain, in 1787. A condition of his Continental education, and that of all other young men whose fees were paid by the cash-strapped Scottish mission, was that he return to Scotland to serve as a missionary priest once his studies were finished. His first assignment was the central Highland district of Badenoch, described as of “enormous extent and extremely challenging terrain.”⁸⁰ He stayed there until around 1792, when, after seeing the constant stream of Highlanders migrating south to Glasgow in search of work in the cotton mills, he requested a transfer, arguing that these people needed a Gaelic-speaking priest and someone whom they could trust to deal with the mill owners.⁸¹ The outbreak of war with France in 1793 caused major disruptions and mass unemployment in the textile sector and so in 1794, the year after Catholic Relief was extended to Scotland, Macdonell and Alastair Ranaldson Macdonell, the chief of Glengarry, formed the Glengarry Fencibles to ease the pressure of unemployment. The offer of military service benefited both sides—the government accessed home-grown troops and Catholics acquired a greater sense of inclusion, employment, and opportunity. In this respect, and in the context of the United Kingdom as a whole, they acted in a similar manner to other religious minorities, including Presbyterians.⁸² Glengarry was a major Highland landowner and a young chief with a “violent disposition” who was desperate for recognition.⁸³ The regiment's soldiers were drawn mostly from his Glengarry estate and those who were reluctant to enlist were threatened with eviction. Alexander Macdonell served as chaplain to the roughly 620 men when the Fencibles were in Guernsey and Ireland.⁸⁴

When war ceased and the regiment was disbanded, the volatility of the Highland economy and the vulnerability of the men and their families were laid bare. Life was precarious for the landless since there was “no mechanism for absorbing the shocks when things went wrong”—including poor decisions by “incompetent landlords” such as Glengarry whose own debt by this time was “staggering.”⁸⁵ Any hope the soldiers had of retiring back to the Highlands was shattered when Glengarry raised the rents as part of the estate's economic restructuring. The people's sense of betrayal, coupled with “favorable” accounts of life in the colonial world and a desire to be with friends and family members, tipped the balance in favor of emigration.⁸⁶ Macdonell was convinced that his community's future lay abroad. His involvement in the campaign to enable Catholic military service had won him recognition and several high-level political contacts, including Henry Addington, the Prime Minister from 1801 to 1804.⁸⁷ Like Prince Edward Island had been in the early 1770s, Trinidad was, in the early 1800s, an important territorial acquisition. Having been secured by Britain with the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, Trinidad's management was hotly contested for several reasons—including the fact that its resident population was predominantly Catholic and comprised largely enslaved, French, and Spanish peoples. British colonial authorities considered the island to be underpopulated and so saw settlement and turning a profit as essential to building it up as a strategic defense position in the Caribbean, just like the other ceded islands of Dominica and Grenada.⁸⁸

Many British abolitionists disagreed. William Wilberforce, for example, whilst being deeply anti-Catholic, was opposed to any kind of settlement for fear that it would lead to more slavery. Conversely, George Canning, a disciple of William Pitt the Younger, abolitionist and advocate of Catholic Emancipation, argued that settlers from the Caribbean who were “capable to serving in the militia” were acceptable so that “a new system of colonisation for future military purposes” might be introduced. It was a mixed response in government circles too. There were many like Addington, who were opposed to immediate abolition and wanted to recruit “whites or creoles” to settle the island.⁸⁹ Thus, when Charles Yorke, a tentative Addington ally and Secretary at War from February 1801 until May 1804, approached Alexander Macdonell in late 1802 with a proposal to lead 500 of the disbanded Glengarry soldiers to Trinidad and establish them as a militia there, it was part of Addington's agenda.⁹⁰ Macdonell's correspondence from early 1803 testifies to this and in one letter, he wrote that upon “mature” consideration, he agreed that having disbanded soldiers settled there “might prove a sufficient security upon any emergency from its internal resources.” It could only work, he added, “provided Government be disposed to give them liberal encouragement.”⁹¹ Liberal encouragement included free passage, land, housing, agricultural implements, loans for laborers, a Gaelic-speaking Catholic chaplain, a chapel, and a schoolhouse.⁹² Although not spelled out, it is likely that “internal resources” referred to the island's enslaved population.

Had Macdonell been able to get a straight answer from his government contacts, he would have been ready and willing to go Trinidad. This point is usually sidelined in writings on his life and career given the major role he went on to play in the development of Anglo-Catholicism in what would become Canada. If it is mentioned, it is usually with the caveat that he declined the offer to go to Trinidad because it would have exposed the men and their families to “an unhealthy tropical climate” and that he “preferred leading them to Canada where so many of their friends were already settled.”⁹³ The high risk of death was a concern, but Macdonell's attention shifted to Upper Canada because the government got cold feet after coming under pressure from anti-Catholic abolitionists who wanted to prevent settlement. Popular literature, such as Pierre F. McCallum's Travels to Trinidad (1805), showcases this prejudice. Scattered throughout this work, which was described as a form of “political and literary surveillance” by the Anti-Jacobin Review, was an anti-Catholic diatribe designed to highlight the superiority of Protestantism.⁹⁴ McCallum argued that in Trinidad, “as in other Roman Catholic countries, the priests endeavour to defeat human reason, and throw a dark veil over truth.”⁹⁵ This kind of bombast, coupled with the contempt that high-profile abolitionists like Wilberforce had for Catholicism and the Catholic Church would hardly have helped Macdonell's efforts to move Catholic Highlanders there.⁹⁶ Macdonell also faced obstacles closer to home, including stiff opposition from his immediate superior, Bishop Aeneus (John) Chisholm, who feared the loss of such a large group of Catholics, and from his one-time ally, Alastair Ranaldson Macdonell of Glengarry, who, like many Highland landowners, lobbied hard against Highland emigration to avoid labor shortages.⁹⁷

All of this took its toll and many of the Highlanders whom Macdonell had planned to bring with him got tired of waiting and began making their own arrangements to emigrate to North America. In a letter to Yorke in mid-January 1803, the priest explained that they “despaired of the success of my mission… I find that several of them have already entered into obligations with the leaders of emigrations.”⁹⁸ Indeed, many saw Upper Canada as a viable option because of their friends and relatives who had already gone there.⁹⁹ Yet, efforts to secure some kind of arrangement for Trinidad were still underway in the latter part of February and a detailed proposal for settlement was sent to several people, including William Fullarton, first Commissioner of Trinidad and MP for the Scottish weaving district of Ayrshire, where a large number of Highlanders went to find work as weavers and day laborers.¹⁰⁰ Fullarton's appointment to Trinidad was a response to major concerns about the brutal governance of General Thomas Picton, a Welsh army officer and the territory's first British Governor.¹⁰¹ Preoccupied with Picton's “ungovernable violence” and aware of the heightened tensions among colonial officials, the British Army, and the planters over the employment of Black soldiers and whether or not the slave laws applied to them, Fullarton avoided commenting on the possibility of using Highlanders as a militia corps for the island.¹⁰² These challenges, coupled with a lack of clarity from the government officials who had first proposed the idea to him, forced Macdonell to abandon Trinidad as an option. Broader concerns about the loyalty of Highland Catholics were also likely given that tensions with both France and America were again on the rise.¹⁰³ Settling disbanded Highland Catholic soldiers along the northern border with the United States to thwart a possible invasion was more palatable.¹⁰⁴ According to Macdonell, the Prime Minister was “perfectly convinced of their principles of loyalty to their sovereign and attachment to the Constitution of their country” and regretted that so many were “reduced to quitting their country for ever.”¹⁰⁵

In this case, Macdonell's emphasis on Catholic loyalty makes sense for someone who had only ever known life in post-Culloden Scotland and who was fully aware of the innate hostility and prejudice that both Catholics and Highlanders faced. Highlanders, but especially those from Jacobite families and districts, were problematized as subversives, even though by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, sympathy with the Stuart cause had practically disappeared.¹⁰⁶ None of this, however, eroded the intense anti-Catholicism that permeated mainstream British society. Anxieties about France and Rome were entangled with genuine fears, realistic or not, about the risk that Catholic populations posed both to the British constitution and to Britain's imperial program—after all, it would be another 25 years after the 1804 settlers arrived in Upper Canada before Catholic emancipation was passed for the United Kingdom.

What do we learn from the Scottish settlements at Glenaladale and Glengarry? The legacy of being Highland Catholic, Jacobite, or both had serious consequences for many of those at home or abroad in the Britain's colonial territories. Not only did significant numbers of Highland Catholics choose to quit Scotland forever, but their settlement in places like Prince Edward Island and Upper Canada accelerated the process of settler colonialism and extended the reach of the Catholic Church. Both emigration schemes included either members of the leading Highland Catholic families, who would contribute the religious personnel necessary for expanding Catholicism in English-speaking British North America, or who would themselves serve as its pioneers.¹⁰⁷ Alexander Macdonell himself is perhaps the most prominent example since he went on to become the first Catholic bishop in British North America outside of Quebec, but there was also Angus MacEachern, who became the most well-known Catholic missionary across all the Maritime colonies. His parents and other relatives had been part of the Glenaladale settlement. That the leads of both emigration schemes—John MacDonald and Alexander Macdonell—had a shared sense of dissatisfaction with what had been on offer to them and their co-religionists as Catholics and Highlanders in Scotland is what pushed them to maneuver behind the scenes to expand opportunities for themselves and for their fellow Highland Catholics. They wanted—and would receive—religious freedom because, despite being part of a persecuted minority, both were extremely effective at taking advantage of the opportunities that the empire offered.

The two settlements highlighted here, notwithstanding the different circumstances that shaped them, were peopled by Catholic colonists who rejected the restrictions that had been imposed upon them at home by a prejudiced state. The prevailing “push” factor in both cases was a culture of systemic anti-Catholicism—Scottish Highland Catholics were arguably the most marginalized of all the United Kingdom's Catholic groups due to geographic isolation, and low economic and political capital. Yet, we have argued, the pull factor was equally significant. Scottish Catholics were enthusiastic settler colonists, and their motivation was both economic and faith based. They stood to prosper economically, through the acquisition of significant land resources. They also stood to gain a freedom to practice their faith free of obvious interference. The toleration of Catholicism and its expansion was a considerable improvement for the Highland Catholics who answered the call of the colonies in significant numbers. For the Indigenous peoples, whose ancestral lands they took and settled, the consequences were not softened by this pretext for settler colonization. Too often the history of anti-Catholicism in the four nations overlooks the fact that Catholics were enthusiastic colonizers whose thirst for land caused mass displacement among Indigenous peoples like the Mi'kmaq and Wulstukwiuk. It is to this that the attention of researchers must now turn.