Economic conditions in Ulster, 1714-1718
To understand the conditions in Ulster in 1718 it will be necessary to know the Irish Society, or as it was called legally The Society of the Governor and Assistants of London, of the New Plantation in Ulster, in the Kingdom of Ireland. This Society held sway over the present county of Londonderry, between the rivers Foyle and Bann, leasing or subletting its valuable rights and privileges to local officials. The territory about Coleraine thus came by lease into the hands of the Jackson family. Ambitious to acquire both property and power, they were often at odds with the authorities in London, and were driven by these conditions to hold their territory at excessive rates imposed by the none too friendly London directors. In the year 1713 complaint was made that Mr. William Jackson had three uncles who with himself and two tenants were aldermen, so that six out of the twelve aldermen of Coleraine obeyed his orders. Five of the twenty-four burgesses, or members of the lower house, were his tenants, and Mr. Jackson desired to fill a vacancy with another tenant of his, living ten miles away at Kilrea ; this tenant was moreover brother of a burgess, and both were sons of Alderman Adams. Thirteen members of the Common Council (which included Aldermen and Burgesses) called upon the mayor for a judicial investigation of the matter, but the mayor, who was a relative of Jackson s," refused to accede to their request although it was made according to the law. This was but the beginning of discord in the Bann valley. In 1728 the Society expressed dissatisfaction with the Jackson family, which had opposed the political interest of the Society, and had through control of the Corporation of Coleraine usurped the power to grant lands.
The long arm which reached out from London had no sooner quieted Coleraine, than Derry (the early name for Londonderry) was in trouble for disregarding its by-laws. These controversies probably had little influence upon the lot of the humbler tenant except along the Bann where the Jackson sway was felt. It was " commonly reported " that the Hon. Richard Jackson was forced to raise the rents of his tenants in order to meet his obligations ; and that these tenants, who lived upon lands within the jurisdiction of the Clothworkers Company near Coleraine, began agitation for the first great Scotch- Irish emigration to America.
The larger part of the lands in Ulster had escheated to the crown early in the reign of James I, as confiscated property of Irish noblemen in rebellion. In order to plant a Protestant colony in Ulster the Lords of Council placed these lands in the hands of wealthy adventurers. That part now known as County Londonderry came under the jurisdiction of the Corporation of London, and by its officers it was divided between twelve of the chief London companies or guilds who came forward as "undertakers" or promoters of the project. The Irish Society was incorporated to have a general control of Derry and Coleraine, and of lands not granted to the twelve companies. It aided churches and schools, protected the settlers, and defended the rights of those who had invested in the enterprise. The twelve chief companies and their lands were noticed in the report of a journey of inspection made by Eobert Slade in 1802. They were :
Ironmongers, about Garvagh. Including more or less of the parishes of Aghadowey, Agivey, Macosquin, Desertoghill, Errigal.
Clothworkers, about Coleraine. From the Atlantic S. E. along the Bann to Killowen ; included Down Hill.
Drapers, about Moneymore.
Grocers, about Muff. Bounded N. by Lough Foyle ; S. by Burntollet river.
Goldsmiths, near Londonderry. Bounded N. and W. by lough and river Foyle; S. by Tyrone.
Vintners, Ballaghy, west of Lough Beg.
Merchant Tailors, about Somerset, near Salmon Leap. Included most of Macosquin.
Mercers, near Kilrea.
Fishmongers, about Walworth, near Lough Foyle. "Alias Ballykelly."
Skinners, " Alias Dungiven."
Haberdashers, about Newtown Limavady, and Ballycastle.
Salters, about Magherafelt.
The charter granted by King James in 1615 was in the reign of Charles I annulled in the Court of Star Chamber, so that the Society and the twelve companies and their subordinate companies, all lost their powers. This decree was rescinded under Cromwell; and a new charter was granted by Charles II in 1662, whereby Derry became known legally as Londonderry. It was at this time that the control of Londonderry and Coleraine, with the fisheries, woods, ferryage, and the right of patron age of the churches, was vested in the Governor and Assistants of the Irish Society and not in the several companies.
This system went far toward established Protestant power in Ulster. Indeed if the Presbyterians in Ulster had been treated with consideration and wisdom by the leaders of the Irish Established Church, and with tact by the government in London, they would have had less inclination to brave the ocean to inhabit the frontiers of the colonies in America. It is evident that the economic changes in Mr. Jackson's territory along the Bann cannot alone explain the emigration fever which prevailed on the banks of the Foyle. The controlling influences were more wide spread and more vital in the lives of the people. They were to some extent economic, but they were still more political and religious. A Scot might starve in Ireland as peaceably as he was likely to do in a strange land beyond the sea, but to be thwarted in his views of right and of heaven stirred him to action.
The six years between 1714 and 1719 were notable in Ireland for their insufficient rainfall. So long a period of injury to crops proved more and more discouraging, not only to those settlers who depended upon agriculture, but also to the weavers of flax who found the cost of food very high. In 1716 the sheep were stricken with a destructive disease known as rot, and severe frosts over Europe further crippled The supply of food. During the spring and summer of 1718 "a slow confluent small-pox" raged over Ulster in a malignant form; while the next three years brought fevers in the winter months. These misfortunes affected the Scotch farmer in Ulster just as they did the native Irish in Leinster or in Munster. The following note on Ireland in 1716 is from Archbishop King's papers, and it has the ring of Dean Swift. It shows, moreover, that in Ireland the farmer had to contend with difficulties that were less marked in England and Scotland.
"The common Irish are laborious people, and if we set aside the holydays their religion injoins, they work as hard and as long as any in England. I confess not with the same success, for they have neither the assistance to labour nor the encouragement workmen have in England, their poverty will not furnish them with convenient tools, and so the same quantitie of work costs them perhaps twice the labour with which it is performed in England; there are many accidental differences that increase their labour on them, as, for example, England is already enclosed, and if a farmer have a mind to keep a field for medow, grazing, or plowing, it costs him no more but the shutting his gate, but the Irishman must fence his whole field every year or leave it in common, and the like saving of labour happens in the plow utensils in building houses and providing fireing. Neither hath the Irishman that encouragement to labour as there is in England, lie has no markett for his manufactories, if he build a good house or inclose his grounds, to be sure he must raise his rent or turn out at the end of a short lease. These and many other considerations make the Irishman's case very pitifull, and ought, as seems to me, to move compassion rather than anger or a severe condemnation. Upon the whole I do not see how Ireland can on the present foot pay greater taxes than it does without starving the inhabitants and leaving them entirely without meat or clothes. They have already given their bread, their flesh, their butter, their shoes, their stockings, their beds, their house furniture and houses to pay their landlords and taxes. I cannot see how any more can be got from them, except we take away their potatoes and butter milk, or flay them and sell their skins."
The people suffered also from the devotion of the great landlords to grazing, due to the profit to be obtained from contraband trade in wool, and from the sale of salted meat. Farm buildings gradually disappeared or fell into decay and the herder with his dog wandered over the desolate fields. Leases forbade the use of the plow, and grain had to be imported because Ireland did not supply enough to satisfy the demand even at high prices. Archbishop Boulter who, with King, and that other brilliant churchman, Dean Swift, strove incessantly for legislation to make Ireland prosper, wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1727 that more tillage must be demanded of the landowner. The Irish House of Commons had tried in 1716 and again in 1719 to interest the England Parliament in a bill of this nature. Boulter writes to the Archbishop of Canterbury in February, 1727
"There is part of another bill which will go over, that is of great consequence to this kingdom; the title of the act is, I think, an act to prevent frauds, &c. in buying corn, &c. and to encourage tillage.
"It is the latter part of this bill about tillage that is of great moment here. The bill does not encourage tillage by allowing any premium to the exporters of corn, but barely obliges every person occupying 100 acres or more (meadows, parks, bogs, &c. excepted) to till five acres out of every 100 ; and so in proportion for every greater quantity of land they occupy. And to make the law have some force, it sets the tenant at liberty to do this, notwithstanding any clause in his lease to the contrary. We have taken care to provide in the bill, that the tenant shall not be able to burnbeat any ground in virtue of this act; and since he is tyed up from that, and from ploughing meadows, &c. the people skilled in hus bandry say, he cannot hurt the land though he should go round the 100 acres in 20 years.
"I find my Lord Trevor objected to a bill we sent from council that this was a breaking of private contracts, and invading property : but I think that nothing, since the lessor receives no damage by it, and the publick is very much benefitted; and this is no more than what is done every session in Eng land, where rivers are made navigable or commons inclosed; and in many road bills.
"I shall now acquaint your Grace with the great want we are in of this bill : our present tillage falls very short of answering the demands of this nation, which occasions our importing corn from England and other places ; and whilst our poor have bread to eat, we do not complain of this; but by tilling so little, if our crop fails, or yields indifferently, our poor have not money to buy bread. This was the case in 1725 and last year, and without a prodigious crop, will be more so this year. When I went my visitation last year, barley in some inland places, sold for 6 5. a bushel to make bread of ; and oatmeal (which is the bread of the north) sold for twice or thrice the usual price ; and we met all the roads full of whole families that had left their homes to beg abroad, since their neighbors had nothing to relieve them with. And as the winter subsistance of the poor is chiefly potatoes, this scarcity drove the poor to begin with their potatoes before they were full grown, so that they have lost half the benefit of them, and have spent their stock about two months sooner than usual ; and oatmeal is at this distance from harvest, in many parts of this kingdom three times the customary price ; so that this summer must be more fatal to us than the last; when I fear many hun dreds perished by famine.
"Now the occasion of this evil is, that many per sons have hired large tracts of land, on to 3 or 4000 acres, and have stocked them with cattle, and have no other inhabitants on their land than so many cot tiers as are necessary to look after their sheep and black cattle; so that in some of the finest counties, in many places there is neither house nor corn field to be seen in 10 or 15 miles travelling : and daily in some counties, many gentlemen (as their leases fall into their hands) tye up their tenants from tillage: and this is one of the main causes why so many ven ture to go into foreign service at the hazard of their lives, if taken, because they can get no land to till at home. And if some stop be not put to this evil, we must daily decrease in the numbers of our people.
"But we hope if this tillage bill takes place, to keep our youth at home, to employ our poor, and not be in danger of a famine among the poor upon any little miscarriage in our harvest. And I hope these are things of greater consequence than the breaking through a lease, so far as concerns ploughing five acres in a hundred"
After a potato famine from which many hundreds of the peasants died of starvation the English Council at last consented, avowedly for the benefit of the poor, to cancel the prohibitory clause in leases so that a small part of each farm should be plowed.
Two industries in the counties of Antrim and Lon donderry changed the character of the misfortunes of the settlers there, although it cannot be said that they warded off trouble. The Scotch in Ulster should have been prosperous even in years when other provinces of Ireland starved. But the industries of Ireland were crushed out at the behest of English merchants by laws favorable to home products.
The farms in Ulster were small, each having its field of potatoes. The soil was enriched by manure and lime, and after the crop of potatoes had been gathered the flax was sown, perhaps a bushel of seed by a family. Each farm had also its bleaching green where the flax fibres were whitened in the sun, the drying season lasting for more than half the year.
All that has to do with the flax plant must be of interest to lovers of Ulster. When the seed had pro duced the graceful fields of flax, the women of the household kept down the weeds until the pretty blue petals had opened and had in turn given way to rip ening seed-pods. The plants then were pulled or plucked in small handfuls and bogged. " And why do you bog it, Larry?" asked Mrs. Hall, who was familiar with flax culture from childhood.
"Is it why we bog it, dear? Why then, you see, we must all pass through the waters of tribulation to be purified, and so must the flax the bad you see, and the good, in that small plant is glued together, and the water melts the glue, so that they divide and that s the sense of it, dear!"
The plants were held in water by heavy stones in running water if the fibres were to be good in color, although the processes of decay went on more rapidly in stagnant water. Sometimes they were laid out in the fields until a season s grass had grown up about and through them. In due time they were gathered and dried in the open air or over a fire. The coarse brown stalks were then slowly drawn over an upright post or chair-back and beaten inch by inch, this being the " scutching" process. The stalks in the next process were cleaned and split by rude combs of varying coarseness, and known as hackles. The task was tiresome and dirty, so that an itinerant workman usually did this part of the labor, going from cabin to cabin with his store of Dublin news and neighborhood gossip. The rough fibres were then subjected to many scaldings and dryings, until the bleaching greens began at last to appear white with the harvest of flax.
A century ago the hand loom produced finer linen yarn than any that came from the mill. In 1815 Catherine Woods of Dunmore near Ballynahinch, a girl of fifteen, spun yarn which gave 2,520,000 yards to the avoirdupois pound of flax, requiring but 17 pounds, 6 ounces, 3 1/2 drams of flax to go entirely around the earth.
This industry of spinning and weaving was car ried to America by many thousands of emigrants during half a century which preceded the Revolu tionary war. It brought fame and comforts to the Scotch Irish towns both north and south.2 After young Jerry Smith of Peterborough in New Hamp shire, the future congressman, had acquired a little book learning he chided his mother one day for her unfamiliarity with the rudiments of grammar. Mrs. Smith who had borne ten children in twelve years, besides cooking and mending, digging sixteen bush els of potatoes in a day, and earning money by spin ning to educate her boys, replied somewhat warmly : "But wha taught you langage? It was my wheel; and when ye 11 hae spun as many lang threeds to teach me grammar as I hae to teach you, I'll talk better grammar !
The catching of salmon in the waters of the Bann and the Foyle was a great Ulster industry, and the early settlers of Londonderry in New Hampshire must have known its every detail, for many of them had lived near the " Salmon Leap" on the Bann. About the middle of August the salmon spawned in all the streams that are tributary to the Bann and the Foyle. As soon as they could swim they went down to the sea. In January, when they began to return to fresh water, their weight often exceeded ten pounds. A year later their weight had doubled and they were ready for the market. It was natural that the Nutfield settlers should ask the American Indians where they could go for the catching of fish. This was an important occupation; but the linen manufacture was more wide spread, and many of the Scotch Irish who made their wills in America styled themselves "weavers." The industry succeeded the woolen manufacture which had been ruined in 1698 by an English law that forbade export of wool ens from Ireland except to England and Wales.
The linen industry had one unfortunate circum stance peculiar to all manufacture. Depending to a large extent upon foreign markets^or its success, it had years of great prosperity followed by others of ruinous inactivity, and the causes of these fluctua tions, whether economic or political, lay wholly out side Ireland and beyond her control. When a period of depression was concurrent with the expiration of many leases, as once happened on Lord Donegal s Antrim estates, the people emigrated in great num bers to America. Arthur Young has an instructive paragraph on this point : "It is the misfortune of all manufacture worked for a foreign market to be upon an insecure footing ; periods of declension will come, and when in consequence of them great numbers of people are out of employment, the best circumstance is their enlisting in the army or navy ; and it is the common result ; but unfortunately the manufacture in Ireland, is not confined, as it ought to be, to towns, but spreads into all cabins of the country. Being half farmers, half manufacturers, they have too much property in cattle, &c., to enlist when idle ; if they convert it into cash it will enable them to pay their passage to America, an alternative always chosen in preference to the military life."
It has often been said that the landlords in Ireland were always too much embarrassed financially to retain a Protestant tenantry. The highest bidder was usually an Irishman. Loving Ireland he did not wish to emigrate, and felt compelled to get the lease, even if the price was beyond his power to pay. He would share a single Scotch or English farmer s land with six or seven of his countrymen, all ekeing out a miserable existence; and when the unsuccess ful Protestant bidder was far away clearing the New England field for planting, his Irish successors were ready to abandon the land they had obtained at an impossible rental.1 Never over a third and often not over a fifth of the profit went to the tiller of the soil, and the slightest misfortune reduced the profit to the laborer below the point of subsistence. Arch bishop King in a letter to Archbishop Wake, June 2, 1719, sums up the matter from the point of view of a churchman who loved Ireland.
1 i Some would insinuate that this is in some meas ure due to the uneasiness dissenters have in the matter of religion, but this is plainly a mistake ; for dissenters were never more easy as to that matter than they have been since the Revolution, & are at present: & yet they never thought of leaving the kingdom, till oppressed by excessive [rents 1 ] & other temporal hardships: nor do only dissenters leave us, but proportionately of all sorts, except Papists. The truth of the case is this: after the Revolution, most of the kingdom was waste, & abundance of the people destroyed by the war : the landlords therefore were glad to get tenants at any rate, & set their lands at very easy rents ; this invited abundance of people to come over here, especially from Scotland, & they have lived here very happily ever since ; but now their leases are expired, & they obliged not only to give what was paid before the Revolution, but in most places double & in many places treble, so that it is impossible for people to live or subsist on their farms."
Add to these conditions a scarcity of small coin whereby the money required to pay the humble spin ner for his yarn or the farmer for his produce cost the merchant over one and a half per cent ; 2 and the attempts in England to cripple the linen industry, 3 and we are not surprised that the desire to emi grate passed over the land like a fever. Letters like the following show that Archbishop King, at the very outset of the great migration, was doing his best by eloquent appeal to awaken the English con science. He wrote February 6, 1717-18 to the Arch bishop of Canterbury: "I find likewise that your Parliament is destroying the little Trade that is left us. These & other Discouragements are driving away the few Protestants that are amongst us ; inso much that last year some Thousands of Families are gone to the West Indies. No Papists stir except young men that go abroad to be trained to*arms, with Intention to return with the Pretender. The Papists being already five or six to one, & a breed ing People, you may imagine in what conditions we are like to be. I may farther observe that the Pa pists being made incapable to purchase Lands, have turn d themselves to Trade, & already engrossed almost all the Trade of the Kingdom."
Trade between the British Isles and the American colonies went very largely to the Delaware and Chesapeake Bay. Tobacco-laden ships sailed for Dublin, Liverpool, Belfast or Glasgow ; returning to America with trifling cargoes of dress-goods, farm tools, and similar necessities, they gladly added to their revenues by transporting an occasional set tler. There were few large parties of emigrants; if we except those who went to Williamsburg in South Carolina, few came to the South through con certed action until toward the middle of the eight eenth century. Few were led by ministers, but when they had settled along the banks of Christiana Creek, the Octorara, or the Neshaminy, they accepted min isters who had come to serve English Presbyterians, or they sent to Ireland for others.
The relations between New England and Ireland, on the other hand, were almost entirely intellectual and religious. There was no intercourse in trade to stimulate colonization. The migration of 1718 was so thoroughly a deliberate undertaking, clearly conceived and organized, that an agent was sent out to prepare the way. Ships were chartered for the voyage and their holds were filled with the house hold goods of the Bann Valley emigrants. It was this initiative in 1718 which led to an active but short-lived passenger trade between Irish ports and Boston. In this enterprise the Eev. William Homes s son. Captain Eobert Homes, played a considerable part. The next year the more favorable conditions for settlement south and west of Philadelphia began to turn a large part of the traffic away from New England to Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas. This passenger traffic grew so rapidly that merchandise which had been of primary importance in Ulster s trade with the South ceased to be vital to the success of a voyage across the ocean.