James MacKnight (McKnight, MacNeight) (1801–1876) was an Irish journalist and agrarian reformer whose call for Fair Rent, Fixity of Tenure and Free Sale ("the Three Fs") briefly surmounted Ireland's political and sectarian division.
In the United Kingdom general election of 1852 the all-Ireland Tenant Right League, which MacKnight formed in a joint initiative with Charles Gavan Duffy, helped return 48 pledged MPs.
Pulled between Catholic and nationalist sentiment in the south and the strength of Protestant and unionist feeling in the north, the League and its Independent Irish Party did not survive the elections of 1857.
In Ulster, MacKnight supported tenant-right candidates committed to the legislative union with Great Britain, while remaining sharply critical of British government efforts to address Ireland's continuing agrarian crisis.
He aspired to the Presbyterian ministry, and after reading Greek and Latin at the school of David Henderson in Newry, in 1825 entered the collegiate department of the Belfast Academical Institution (established on liberal principals by the former United Irishman, William Drennan).
[5] From 1848 he also edited the Banner of Ulster (a twice-weekly journal set up as the organ of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church) attacking in his first editorial the violent anti-popery of the proselytising "home missions".
McKnight painted a vivid picture of the effects on the tenant of having no assured interest in the soil: "..when they see all their industry, and all their toil, beyond the bare means of the merest crawling subsistence, regularly going to the pampering and enrichment of a small privileged oligarchy, who have no sympathy with them beyond that which men usually bestow upon animals of an inferior species, they quickly lose the spirit of self-exertion".
[7] (At a dinner in Derry to honour Crawford for his single-handed legislative efforts, MacKnight did not hesitate to invoke the alternative to legal redress, the activities of the Hearts of Steel and, more recently, of the "Tommy Downshires'" who meted out their own justice to landlords and their agents).
[14] In the north they had contended with the opposition, sometimes violent, of the Orange Order,[11] and with the threat of landlords to withdraw their consent for the existing Ulster Custom if their Conservative nominees were not elected.
[16] (In the Banner, MacKnight, who had had a low opinion of the bill, nonetheless welcomed it as a first departure in the Commons from the principle that anything beyond the rights of the landlord is a question of private bargain).
In 1870 speaking at meetings in Ulster and conferring with William Ewart Gladstone, the prime minister in London, McKnight sought to shape what was to be the first of the Irish Land Acts.
[2] At a tenant right conference in Ballymoney in April 1870, however, his proposed set of resolutions on the completed bill were shelved through the interference of Thomas MacKnight (no relation) and other Whigs/Liberals, anxious to show party discipline.