February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
None of his men showed up for work and no one he approached would look at him, much less speak with him. Although he didn’t know it at the time, Boycott was now the focus of a campaign of ostracism that soon would spread throughout Ireland and eventually add a new word to the English language.
The context for the campaign against Boycott was a severe agricultural crisis that spawned the nationalist movement known as the Land League. After two decades of good harvests and falling rates of tenant evictions, the first of seven consecutive poor harvests hit Ireland in 1878. In addition, prices for many Irish farm products plummeted, making it virtually impossible for small farmers to pay their rents. By 1879, tens of thousands of Irish tenant farmers faced both starvation and eviction. There was even talk of the unthinkable: another famine.
The agricultural crisis struck just as Irish nationalists John Devoy and Michael Davitt had joined forces with Charles Stuart Parnell to demand home rule for Ireland. As part of this effort, Davitt organized angry tenant farmers into the Irish Land League to demand not only home rule, but land reform. As the League put it in its Declaration of Principles: The land of Ireland belongs to the people all of Ireland, to be held and cultivated for the sustenance of those who God decreed to be the inhabitants thereof.
In a country where 70 percent of the land was owned by only 2,000 people while 3 million tenants owned none at all, this was a powerful and popular message.
The League called for the redistribution of property from landlords (who would be compensated) to tenants. To bring this about, tenants began to withhold their rents. Some resorted to violence, destroying crops, maiming cattle, and in a few cases murdering landlords or their agents. Landlords responded with mass evictions on a scale not seen since the Famine. The struggle became known as the “Land War” and its revolutionary potential sent chills through the Protestant Ascendancy
Another tactic employed in the Land War was social ostracism. Those who aided landlords by collecting rents or carrying out evictions found themselves cut off from all social contact. This was especially true for those “land grabbers” who took over an evicted farmer’s holding. As Parnell put it in a speech to farmers in County Clare, “When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet him, you must show him in the streets of the town, you must show him at the shop-counter, you must show him at the fair and at the market-place and even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely alone — by isolating him for the rest of his kind, as if he were a leper of old, you must show him your detestation of the crime he has committed.”
It was Captain Charles Boycott’s fate to become the most famous example of this tactic. The press in England and the U.S. ran frequent stories detailing his mounting frustration in the face of the protest. The estate’s tenants refused to pay their rents, to assist in evictions, or to till the land of an evicted family. With the harvest looming, he made a desperate appeal to British officials for help. Eager to weaken the Land League, they provided the embattled Boycott with 1,000 British soldiers to protect 50 Cavan Orangemen brought in to harvest the estate’s crops. The operation cost the government