During the civil wars of the seventeenth century, the victorious party frequently found it difficult to dispose of their captives. In England many of them were sent to the plantations; and perhaps the idea which this practice communicated to the public, of the value of captives transported to the colonies, may have first instigated those acts of kidnapping against which we have found the Long Parliament protesting. Scotland had no such means of disposing of her prisoners, whose numbers were frequently very inconvenient. Many of them were sent abroad to be soldiers under those continental leaders who were considered on the same side with the victorious party at home; others were subjected to a sort of slavery in this country; but wherever their lot might be cast, their captivity would be very apt to be abbreviated by some revolution in the fortunes of war. A person who preserved accurate notes of political events as they passed under his eye, kept the following very business-like account of the distribution of the common soldiers taken in the battle in which Montrose was made prisoner:—
"Tuesday, 21st May [1650].—This day the two hundred and eighty-one common soldiers taken at Kerbester, that were in the Canongate prison—the house ordains forty of them, being forced from Orkney, and have wife and children, to be dismissed. The house gives six of them, being fishers, to the lieutenant-general; also other six fishers of them, given by the parliament to the Marquis of Argyle; and six of them being lusty fellows, given to Sir James Hope, to his lead-mines. The remnant of them the house gives to the Lord Angus and Sir Robert Murray, to recruit the French regiments with, to be transported out of the country to France."[14]
It may be questioned if these gifts were very valuable to their receivers, or if the coerced labour they inferred was worth possessing. Certainly so little valuable was the mere human being to the community, some thirty years afterwards, that the liberal and patriotic Fletcher of Saltoun pleaded hard for the establishment of slavery in Scotland, not as a privilege to the aristocracy, but as a boon to "so many thousands of our people who are, at this day, dying for want of bread." He saw that sheep and oxen, being property, were cared for and kept alive, and, by a process of reasoning which he seemed to consider a very natural one, he thought that he had but to convert his fellow beings into property, to let them be also cared for. Yet, like all men who conceive social paradoxes, he was haunted by the shadow, cast before, of the revulsion of common sense against his proposal, and thus anticipated the obloquy it would incur. "I doubt not that what I have said will meet, not only with all the misconstruction and obloquy, but all the disdain, fury, and outcries, of which either ignorant magistrates or proud lazy people are capable. Would I bring back slavery into the world? Shall men of immortal souls, and by nature equal to any, be sold as beasts? Shall they and their posterity be for ever subjected to the most miserable of all conditions, the inhuman barbarity of masters, who may beat, mutilate, torture, starve, or kill, so great a number of mankind at pleasure? Shall the far greater part of the commonwealth be slaves, not that the rest may be free, but tyrants over them? With what face can we oppose the tyranny of princes, and recommend such tyranny as the highest virtue, if we make ourselves tyrants over the greatest part of mankind? Can any man, from whom such a thing has escaped, ever offer to speak for liberty? But they must pardon me if I tell them, that I regard not names but things; and that the misapplication of names has confounded every thing."[15]
His plan of social reorganisation was, that "every man of a certain estate in this nation should be obliged to take a proportional number of the poor, and employ them in hedging and ditching his grounds, or any other sort of work," while the young were to be "educated in the knowledge of some mechanical art." Here we have one of the earliest undoubted expositions of communism. But Fletcher called things by their accepted names, and for Saint Simon's industriel and chef, we have slave and owner; for Fourier's Phalanges we have gangs. Nor does the illustrious patriot flinch from describing in their proper harsh colours the coercive means necessary for thus keeping society in fetters. We recommend to M. Louis Blanc the passage where he says:—"These things, when once resolved, must be executed with great address, diligence, and severity; for that sort of people is so desperately wicked, such enemies of all work and labour, and, which is yet more amazing, so proud, in esteeming their own condition above that which they will be sure to call slavery; that, unless prevented by the utmost industry and diligence, upon the first publication of any orders necessary for putting in execution such a design, they will rather die with hunger in caves and dens, and murder their young children, than appear abroad, to have them and themselves taken into such a kind of service."
There is spirit—almost sympathy in this picture of the desperation of savage liberty; and the enthusiasm with which the lover of his own freedom describes the love of the poor outcasts for theirs, sounds as if it gave the lie to the sincerity of the project. It seems to have had no supporters. The state of "the labour market" did not make the possession of human beings a desirable investment, and landed gentlemen were not anxious to become the owners of their poorer neighbours, for the general good of the community. Kidnappings and deportations for political purposes, still continued to be occasionally practised. One memorable instance was the far-famed story of Lady Grange, to which we propose to dedicate a separate notice, in virtue of our having perused some documents with which the world at large does not seem yet to be acquainted. There is little doubt that occasionally a person who showed a disposition to impart dangerous Jacobite secrets was spirited away to France, to give an account of his views and intentions, under circumstances in which he might not be so likely to forget the obligations he had incurred to the exiled house. Generally speaking, however, kidnapping was worthless in a commercial sense; though Lovat, whose actions were scarcely in conformity with any particular social rule, choosing to have in his service a well-trained London footman, without paying him, got possession of his person, and kept it as safe in his own custody at Castle Dounie as if he had taken him to Algiers.
It was, however, when the Scottish trade with the plantations began to open up, soon after the Union, that the disgraceful practice of kidnapping and transporting children became prevalent. The power possessed by many of the chiefs, as independent local judges, with but a nominal responsibility to the control of the crown or the intervention of the supreme courts, gave facilities for this traffic, which poor human nature seems to have been incapable of resisting. The victims were sometimes persons tried and convicted before the hereditary tribunal; and since they must be punished, it were pity to allow an opportunity to be lost, by which the infliction might be turned to the profit of the judge or his friends. Thus we find Lovat, desirous to propitiate the favour of Duncan Forbes, offering his brother a gift of "a few Strathglass rogues," clansmen of his next neighbour and hereditary enemy, whom he had caught in his own domain, and convicted in his own court. He had at first proposed to send them to America; but, as they are "handsome fellows," he offers them to Forbes, for his nephew's Dutch regiment. "I shall send them to him," says the accommodating chief, "without any expense in keeping of them; for I will send immediately orders to carry them south with a guard. There is a captain there of Arthur's regiment, who will receive them and deliver them to Arthur; and I'll send him other two Camerons that are in your prison—tall fellows; and five such good men will do him more service, now that the Dutch expect a war, than thirty men next season."[16]
It was in reference to such practices that the engineer officer, who, while employed in laying out the military roads through the Highlands, preserved so many shrewd remarks on the manners of the people, added the following to his budget:—
"When any ship in these parts is bound for the West Indies, to be sure, a neighbouring chief, of whom none dares openly to complain, has several thieves to send prisoners to town.
"It has been whispered their crimes were only asking their dues, and such-like offences; and I have been well assured they have been threatened with hanging, or at least perpetual imprisonment, to intimidate and force them to sign a contract for their banishment, which they seldom refused to do, as knowing there could be no want of witnesses against them, however innocent they were; and then they were put on board the ship, the master paying so much a head for them. Thus two purposes were served at once—viz.: the getting rid of troublesome fellows, and making money of them at the same time."[17]
But our more immediate concern, in the present instance, is with no frightful feudal baron, presiding over chains and dungeons, in the mysterious recesses of his own solitary moated tower. The offenders exposed in Peter Williamson's history, were grave, sober burghers—bailies and town-councillors of one of the most worshipful and respectable corporations in the United Kingdom—men of peace, staid in their demeanour, cautious in their walk of life—careful not to rub their smooth, well-brushed broad-cloth against any impure thing. Their proceedings had the fairest and most innocent appearance: men of industry and business themselves, keepers of their bonds and engagements, they were but somewhat rigid in exacting industry and punctual performance of obligations from others. "Kidnapping," "crimping," "deforcement," "slavery," were words unknown in their vocabulary,—they did but hire servants: it was nominally for a period of years, it might happen to be virtually for life; it might be to bear the burden, under a tropical sun, in the steaming swamps of the Antillas—still it was a mere contract. They would have been frightened by the name of a slave-ship, but they meekly acknowledged that they freighted vessels "in the servant trade," with "cargoes of boys."
"For them alone did seethe
A thousand men in troubles wide and dark:
Half-ignorant, they turn'd an easy wheel,
That set sharp racks at work to pinch and peel."