3 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
I'm confused about the Scottish settlers in Canada one, what's that about?
Comment by lngwstksgk at 03/04/2020 at 00:00 UTC
7 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Hey that was me, and I didn't get much of a chance today to sit down and write (lucky me that April Fools for once fell on a slow day). So, that was me playing Alexander MacDonnell of Abercalder, one of three MacDonnell tacksmen brothers who left Scotland during what has been labelled an early stage of the Clearances (basically, first the tackmen, or landed minor gentry, left in protest of the chiefs' economic profligacy, then their tenant farmers migrated to follow in a type of chain migration, then the poorer people got first pushed into crofting, then finally just cleared in the part of the Clearances best known).
So Alexander and his brothers and his cousin were the tacksmen of Glengarry, Roman Catholic, and Jacobite veterans. Their chief was Alexander Ruadh MacDonnell, who has been pretty certainly, if circumstantially, fingered as Pickle, the Hanoverian spy who absolutely brutalized later Jacobite schemes such as the Elibank Plot (which is what /u/ArdnamurchanPoet was on about in my other thread). Alexander and his cousin John of Scotus burned Alexander Ruadh's papers on his death--which certainly contained spy correspondence from "Pickle". What is not known is whether they were aware of his activities; however, their later stance in the U.S. Revolutionary War suggests to me they may have sympathized with their Chief's actions.
So the MacDonnells sold up and bought passage to New York with several tenant families and settled for a few years before the Revolutionary War broke out. They did indeed serve in Johnson's Regiment of Militia and served time as hostages to General Philip Schuyler--father-in-law to Alexander Hamilton. After this adventure, they decided to head for Canada, where they helped to settle the area that is Glengarry County Ontario today, in Eastern Ontario near the Quebec border. This land was most definitely not "empty" at the time of their arrival, though I have not looked into which indigenous groups in particular were removed, they most certainly were. Alexander MacDonell of Collachie (nephew to Alexander MacDonell of Abercalder, who was "writing" yesterday) was elected to the Ontario Legislative Assembly and became its fourth speaker--despite having notably poor English. He thus knew all the right people to end up mixed up in the Family Compact that lead to the Upper Canada Rising, but died before then (so /u/AbercalderNoMore was being a bit tongue-in-cheek in referencing events after his own death). Another nephew was (seriously...) Alexander MacDonnell, who became the first bishop of Alexandria-Cornwall. He is considered the father of English Catholicism in Ontario (which again, is odd, because he preached mainly in Gaelic). There are several National Historic Sites of Canada connected to this family, though they are not in very good condition.
So yeah, fairly obscure, but fascinating men, and it makes me happy to get people reading about Ontario history. Of interest, the two YTAs I got in the thread were from people who realized the indigenous people were removed, or from one who appears to be Ontarian as well and aware of the Family Compact.
A good book (really THE book) on this is *The People of Glengarry* by Marianne McLean.