John Murdoch (editor)

[1][5] In his youth in Islay, Murdoch associated with the family of the laird, Walter Frederick Campbell, including his son, the famous Gaelic folklorist and literary scholar, Iain Òg Ile (1822–85).

Murdoch's commitment to the Gaelic language revival and his hostility to the absolute power granted to Anglo-Scottish landlords by Scots property law are both believed to be rooted in his experiences while living on Islay.

[3] In the 1850s and 1860s, Murdoch spent a number of years living in Dublin, where he encountered Irish nationalism and the radical ideology that led to the Land War.

He was a close friend of its founder, Charles Gavan Duffy, and maintained relationships with others such as the editor A. M. Sullivan, with whom he shared common literary interests and a mutual disdain of landlordism.

He further believed that this could only be changed by the crofters and peasants standing up for themselves in a campaign of direct action similar to the Irish Land War.

James Hunter credits Murdoch with bringing together urban middle class Gaels, who had lost contact with crofts and crofting but had retained a sense of their Gaelic cultural identity, and the crofting communities of the Highlands and Islands[12] Murdoch was possibly the single most influential individual in the creation of the atmosphere and situation that resulted in the Highland Land League, The Crofters' War, hearings of The Napier Commission, and the resultant Crofters Act of 1886, which according to John Lorne Campbell, was nothing less than "the Magna Carta of the Highlands and Islands",[13] and which, according to Roger Hutchinson, "legislated for fair rents, compensation for improvements to land and property, and above all for security of tenure to crofters in South Uist, Barra, and everywhere else in the north and west of Scotland.

The men of that large region, whatever their language or religion, could after 1886 exercise their right to vote in local and national elections without the threat of serious reprisal.

Donald MacCallum, a minister of the Established Church of Scotland and one of the few Protestant clergymen to actively challenge the Anglo-Scottish landlords.

MacCallum's campaigns at the time of the Crofters War sought to use the Bible to justify reforming the laws regarding land ownership, a regular theme in Murdoch's writing.