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.
Newspaperman, Belfast and Derry
MacKnight was born near Rathfriland, County Down, the son of Irish-speaking Presbyterian smallholder. 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). Deficient in extempore preaching, MacKnight changed course. In 1829 he joined Belfast's leading paper, the News-Letter, becoming its editor within the year.
At the News Letter MacKnight maintained criticism of the undisputed leader of Catholic Ireland, Daniel O'Connell. He depreciated O'Connell's focus on repeal of the Acts of Union, with the prospect it entailed of a Catholic-majority parliament in Dublin. MacKnight believed that patriotic sentiment might have been better channelled into a revival of the Irish language (something for which O'Connell had declared himself "sufficiently utilitarian" to have no interest).
At odds with the unionist but Tory proprietors of the News Letter, in 1846 MacKnight moved to Derry where he was to edit the Londonderry Standard (1846–1847, 1854–1876). The paper advocated "the interests of the orthodox presbyterians of Ireland" (in implicit opposition both to unitarianism and to the pan-Protestant political union with the Ascendancy Church of Ireland proposed by the sometime Presbyterian Moderator, Henry Cooke). 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". Both papers had excoriated landlords (including the powerful Marquis of Londonderry) for failing to reduce rents during the Great Famine. Proposing that "landownership is, to a certain extent, a public trusteeship". It was an editorial line MacKnight continued.
The Tenant Claim of Right
With William Sharman Crawford MP, MacKnight formed the Ulster Tenant Right Association supported by a group of radical Presbyterian ministers. In a pamphlet published by the Association in March 1848, The Ulster Tenant's Claim of Right, MacKnight argued "all proprietary right has its foundation in human labour'" and that "Aristocracy and landlordism, must be based upon realised, PUBLIC UTILITY". He also remarked that Ireland was the only country in the world where, 'the bulk of the population are treated as aliens on the soil of their birth'".
In Ireland, it was the tenant, not the landlord, who expended every penny on improvements which enriched the landlord's property: this was, "the customary fate of Irish tenant industry, even in Ulster itself; while this barefaced, revolting robbery is openly perpetrated by men, who, in the British Parliament, are wont to boast of their own superior landlordism, and who clutch at Coercion Bills, with a greedy avidity". 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".