Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661)
the famous Presbyterian minister would have been on board the emigrant ship Eagle Wing in 1636, with his friends and fellow ministers if, as he put it, "I saw a call for New England I would follow it". He was the author of Lex Rex (1644), which declared that "every man is born free". The book was a challenge to the "divine right of kings" claimed by King Charles I, who declared it to be treasonous and ordered it to be publicly burned. During Rutherford's time as Professor at St Andrews University one of his students there was Ayrshire-born...
Alexander Hutcheson (1635-1711)
who matriculated from St Andrews in 1653 and came to Ulster to become minister of Saintfield Presbyterian Church in 1657. He was in Saintfield in 1689, the year that King James II's army damaged through County Down, killing hundreds of civilians in 'The Break of Dromore' and also 'The Break of Killyleagh' - Saintfield is more or less exactly between the two places. In June 1690 Hutcheson is said to have “followed King William to Dublin” and was one of a group of seven ministers appointed by King William III to distribute the Regium Donum funds. His son was...
John Hutcheson (1670-?)
who was minister of Downpatrick Presbyterian Church from 1690-97 (and Armagh from 1697-1729). John Hutcheson "took an active part in politics, encouraging the 'bearing of arms' on the Williamite side", and so would also have experienced 'The Break of Killyleagh'. One of his sons was the renowned...
Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746)
who had been born at the family home at Saintfield, at thanks to a bequest from his late grandfather moved to Glasgow University in 1713. In 1725 Francis married Mary Wilson, who was a Presbyterian from Corboy in County Longford (a congregation many families of which emigrated to America, including the parents of Dr Thomas Young of the Boston Tea Party and the Sons of Liberty). Her father, also Francis, “had distinguished himself as a Captain in the service of William III”.
Hutcheson would famously write that “wherever any Invasion is made upon unalienable Rights, there must arise either a perfect, or external Right of Resistance…. Unalienable Rights are essential Limitations in all Governments." - words which would of course reappear in Philadelphia in July 1776.
One of Hutcheson's students in Glasgow was Donegal-born...
Francis Alison (1705-1779)
whose parents, Robert and Mary Alison, probably remembered the Siege of Derry and King James II's armies being encamped in the hinterland of the city, and of them rounding up thousands of civilians to for a human shield outside the city walls. Alison emigrated to Philadelphia in 1735 and became a tutor to many of America's 'Founding Fathers', such as John Dickinson, instilling into them Francis Hutcheson's writings and concepts of liberty. His students included four signatories of the...
Declaration of Independence in 1776
and also Charles Thomson, the Upperlands-born Secretary of the Continental Congress. In 1782 he designed the Great Seal of the United States, which he described as "an American eagle on the wing and rising". His name appears on the bottom of the first printed edition of the Declaration of Independence, known as the Dunlap Broadside.
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