St Patrick's Day, New York, 1766 - A toast to the Sons of Liberty and William of Orange

A friend sent me a link today to a long Facebook article about the origins of St Patricks Day. Some I was already familiar with, but this extract was interesting:

"In 1766 the New York Gazette reported on a notable March 17th celebration at the house of a gentleman by the name of Mr. Bardin. Among the toasts raised on the evening were; "the prosperity of Ireland", "Success to the Sons Of Liberty in America" and "The glorious memory of King William of Orange”."

The same extract is referred to in numerous other sources, like this one from 1902 which lists 20 resolutions, so it appears credible enough. I briefly blogged about the Sons of Liberty last year (post here), a pre-Revolution movement seemingly masterminded by a Thomas Young whose parents were from Donegal and who had arrived in America in 1718. It shouldn't be a surprise that families who had endured and survived the Siege of Derry, and later emigrated, brought their stories and memories with them. It is entirely credible that they would have commemorated William of Orange, although I would suggest for different reasons than we might assume today. There are numerous references during the 1700s and 1800s to the melody Boyne Water being played at St Patrick's Day events. 

Masonic Theatre, Louisville, Kentucky - the 3rd Scotch-Irish Congress, May 1891

One of the first things to do when planning an event is to make sure nothing clashes with it. This is where the Scotch-Irish Society of the USA went badly wrong for their third Congress. They chose Louisville, Kentucky (declining offers from San Francisco, Charlotte in North Carolina, and Atlanta) but seemingly might not have checked the city’s calendar.

In terms of population size, it was within the 20 biggest cities in the USA, with around 200,000 residents. That very same mid-May weekend there were, the Society later said, ‘several other public gatherings, whose dates had not been decided when ours was fixed’ - but one of these was the annual Kentucky Derby horse racing festival, a world-famous event which had happened for the past 16 consecutive years. The May Musical Festival was also on at the same time, as was the Democratic State Convention, and the annual reunion of the Elks fraternal society. The city had hosted World Fairs for the previous five consecutive years; Oscar Wilde had lectured there, its first skyscraper had just been built. It was a happening place.

Louisville was jam-packed with people, and the Society had difficulty in getting a suitable venue. In the end they used two - the Masonic Temple Theatre in the morning, and the Polytechnic Hall for the evenings. Both were plush venues, centrally located, and despite the shortage of hotel accommodation for visitors, all went pretty well.

Pre-event publicity invited the general public to attend - ‘the local population, without regard to race, will be cordially welcomed’. The Society had managed to secure 100 private rooms for its most important guests, but with just two weeks to go the Louisville newspapers printed ‘A Call For Hospitality’ on behalf of the Society, seeking AirBNB-style accommodation for visitors in spare rooms of private homes. In the published retrospective  Proceedings the Society thanked the citizens of Louisville for their assistance.

A swish reception was held at Galt House Hotel on the riverfront. There is a hotel there today of the same name, but it is a completely new building dating from 1972. Official headquarters was the Louisville Hotel. As had been the case at Pittsburgh, the Sunday evening event was a vast religious service, with Psalms sung and a sermon delivered, with ‘assembled thousands’ - also described as ‘an immense throng’ - present.

One of those present was Captain J.W. Crawford, a man recently honoured through an Ulster History Circle blue plaque.

What is apparent when you read the reports is that there was a more pronounced sense of ‘Ulsterness’ year-on-year, a specificity that was not so clear-cut in 1889. The organisation was now headed by Ulster-born men like Robert Bonner and Rev John Hall. The now-famous Society logo seems to have made its début in Louisville. A newspaper report said:

...The coat of arms of the society is the red hand of Ulster upon a shield of the Stars and Stripes of the United States. Most of the members have their coat of arms made into a gold badge, which they proudly wear on the lapel of their vests. There is an interesting legend attached to the emblem, which most of the Scotch-Irishmen tell without the least provocation… - The Courier-Journal, Louisville, 13 May 1891

Aaron Baxter, the Glasgow-born mayor of Londonderry had hoped to attend but was unable. Francis Ward of Belfast Chamber of Commerce had planned to be there but fell ill in New York and didn’t make it. Wallace Bruce, who had delivered a poem at Columbia two years before, was now US Consul in Edinburgh and sent his good wishes by telegram.

Inside just two years the Society now had eight State-level chapters. The growth was impressive, building a network of well-connected businessmen and civic leaders in common ancestral cause.

William Kennedy (1799–1871) - from Antrim to the Alamo; defining an Independent Texas

"I could not understand how the settlers of Texas were enabled to repel the armies of Mexico and to found a Republic of their own"

If you ever meet someone from Texas you will quickly see that their allegiance is to Texas first, and America second. As the t-shirt above shows.

The quote above was written by the Dublin-born, Belfast raised and educated, son of Ayrshire called William Kennedy (1799–1871). His father was working as a ‘manufacturer’ in Dublin which is where William was born on 26 December 1799. William trained as a journalist at Belfast Inst which he completed in 1819, and then went to Selkirk in the Scottish Borders to study at ‘Dr Lawson’s seminary for dissenting students’ - Lawson was a Seceder and a man of some renown (biography here). Presumably Kennedy was training to become a Presbyterian minister, however he actually became a writer for the Paisley Magazine, and published a volume of poems entitled Fitful Fancies in 1827 (online here).

He later went to London and worked for the Earl of Durham, an opening which took Kennedy to Canada and the USA. He went to Texas in 1839 and after two years of researches in 1841 he published The Rise, Progress and Prospects of Texas (online here) - which has been described as “the most thorough, comprehensive account of Texas history up to that time, one that set a standard for years to come”. As a result, the year after, he became the Texas Consul in London, and shortly after that he swapped responsibilities and became British Consul to Texas at Galveston.

So enthused was Kennedy that he obtained a grant to settle a colony of 600 families in Texas, "along the Rio Grande and another west of San Antonio, of the Frio and Nueces Rivers”. Sam Houston, President of Texas, signed contracts with Kennedy to form the colony on 5 February 1842.

Kennedy argued that Texas should be independent – neither Mexican nor American. His motive may well have been the protection of British trade in the Caribbean. The Rise, Progress and Prospects of Texas was lauded – “a fuller and more satisfactory answer is given by Mr Kennedy, in the work whose title we have just cited, than in any one which has come to our knowledge.” It included an account of the Battle of the Alamo of 1836 and a poetic description of Davy Crockett, including Crockett’s refusal to swear the citizenship oath of Texas – 

Crockett was not a man to make a solemn declaration without scrutinizing its import. He refused to take the oath … as the ‘future’ government might be despotic (see here)

Some of Kennedy’s bureaucratic correspondences were also published. He protested that ships were being built in Liverpool shipyards for the Mexican government, and he clashed with Daniel O’Connell over the role Mexico should have regarding any future independent Texas state. Texas was of course annexed by the United States during Kennedy’s time, in 1845. He came back to England in 1847 where he lived until his death in 1871.

……………………….. 

Back in his earlier life, Kennedy had written other books, including a fictional biography set in County Antrim. Written by Kennedy, My Early Days claims to be the story of a Walter Ferguson, the son of Allan Ferguson, “a Scottish clergyman, a dissenter from the established form of his country’s faith. Devoted, heart and soul, to the cause in which he had engaged, he bid adieu to his native land, for the purpose of aiding the faithful few, that, amidst danger and privation, caused the seeds of the Gospel to rise and ripen on the shore of Ireland”.

Initially settled as an assistant minister in Belfast, he married Mary Maxwell, the daughter of a rich merchant named Walter Maxwell. Some years later the family moved to Gleno in south Antrim where Allan Ferguson ministered to “about a hundred and twenty families” in a “plain patriarchal looking building”. Walter remembered an old local farmer who played the fiddle, for whom the family would dance. The local schoolmaster was also a Scot in Ulster.

Fortunately for Walter, aged 44, he inherited a huge sum of money - £60,000 – and travelled around Europe.

• My Early Days – was published a number of times – the Edinburgh first edition appeared in 1826 and by 1831 three American editions had appeared. The Boston 1831 edition is online here. It’s a bit of an oddity, but seems to have been popular in its day and does provide some insight into rural Ulster life in the early 1800s. It also suggests that, despite being Dublin-born, Kennedy must have spent his formative years in the country districts around Belfast.

• Wikipedia entry here

• a very interesting modern-day account of Kennedy’s influence upon Texas can be found here.

……………………….. 

PS: Update

• the Belfast Mercury of 29 April 1856 said that Kennedy’s father was a ‘dissenting minister’ and the family lived in Aughnacloy, and speculated that he had died.

• Poets of Ireland by DJ O’Donoghue (1912) also links Kennedy to Aughnacloy (see here).

• County Tyrone historian John J Marshall published a biography of Kennedy in 1920 (see here for reference).

• Kennedy’s friend William Bollaert collected biographical notes which he planned to publish, but which remain just as manuscripts

Mechanical Hall, Pittsburgh - venue for the 2nd Scotch-Irish Congress, May 1890

The Mechanical Hall (sometimes called the Machinery Hall) was built in 1889 by the Pittsburgh Exposition Society. The contract to build it was awarded in May 1889 on the condition that it would be finished by September, for a cost of $130,000. In 1890 it was the venue for the second Scotch-Irish Congress, building on the popularity of the first one which had been held the year before in Columbia, Tennessee.

If Columbia had typified small-town gentrified Southern charm, all historical white columns and large leafy gardens, the city of Pittsburgh was the opposite in every imaginable way - the biggest steel production region in the world, and North of the Mason-Dixon Line, and the vast building little over six months old right beside the railway line. Pittsburgh was in the top ten biggest cities in America at the time, with a population of around 300,000.

The capacity of the Mechanical Hall was 6000, and 12,000 people showed up, as did President Benjamin Harrison. Professor McCloskie of Princeton declared that "Pittsburg was essentially a big Scotch-Irish city".

Another success, and momentum now gathering around the Society. You can’t help but look back and imagine that this was an America on the edge of a new century, on the brink of becoming a world power, with huge new waves of immigration lapping its shores. Perhaps, faced with the inevitable changes ahead, the fresh interest in Scotch-Irishness was about looking back, to re-root the attendees in a sense of who they were and where they had come from, of heroic deeds and time-honoured traditions and values which in their view had made their America great.

Columbia Athenaeum, Tennessee - Birthplace of the Scotch-Irish Society of the USA, 1889

On Wednesday 8 May 1889, the inaugural Congress of the newly-founded Scotch-Irish Society of the United States of America commenced here – today, less than one hour south of Nashville, and half an hour north west of Belfast – in a huge marquee in the gardens which it was said could hold 5000 people. A newspaper report of the time wrote that the marquee might have been formerly used by the evangelist Sam Jones, the preacher who was at that point underway with the founding of the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, also known as the Union Gospel Tabernacle but best known as the Grand Ole Opry. The Scotch-Irish Congress lasted until the evening of Saturday 11 May.

Columbia Athenaeum had been built in 1837, intended to be the home of Samuel Polk Walker, a relative of President James Polk who was of East Donegal ancestry. By the 1850s it was a ground-breaking girls’ school, run by the Episcopal Church, teaching art, music, history, science and business. It had capacity for 125 boarders, plus day students from the local area. The school complex is gone but the Rectory residence is still there today.

A thousand newspapers advertised the event. When the day arrived the town was jam-packed, the railways bringing people from far and wide - ‘a crowded mass of humanity’. The stage in the tent could seat 50 people, including a portrait of Polk and a ‘Harp of Erin’ which belonged to a Mrs Emma McKinney, the ‘instructress of music’ at the girls’ school which operated from the Athenaeum, and who would play it later that day, accompanied by a Hal P Seavy, Chairman of the Reception Committee, on the violin. Not the fiddle. The violin.

Later on, the personal harp of Thomas Moore put in an appearance, inside a glass case, described as ‘Tom Moore’s Harp’ - which is akin to the awful abbreviation of ‘Bobby Burns’ that you come across now and again. Moore’s harp was loaned by a George W Childs of Philadelphia, who had bought it from Moore’s family. It is now in the collection of the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin - photo here. A poem in honour of the harp, but which tried to tell the story of the Scotch-Irish people, was delivered by the wonderfully-named Wallace Bruce, a writer from New York of some repute.

This occasion wasn’t for the hoi polloi, the people who would later be called “Our Southern Highlanders” (Kephart, 1913) or the “Plain Folk of the Old South” (Owsley, 1949). The event was characterised as being ‘free from all the rougher elements’, it had both ‘great dignity’ and ‘intellectuality’. By the time the band parade made its way through the town to the Athenaeum the crowd was estimated at 6000 – 10,000 people. During the afternoon breaks, the visitors ‘repaired to the fair grounds' where they were entertained by horse racing; others took driving tours of the area - presumably by horse and carriage as the motor car hadn’t yet been invented. Old soldiers of both the Union and Confederate armies compared reminiscences; Princeton College agreed to help collate information for future reference.

The newly inaugurated President Benjamin Harrison sent his apologies, too busy to attend, but appreciative of the invitation he had received. Previous President Grover Cleveland did likewise. Author Henry C McCook was in the same boat, but his reply was lengthy and gushed with ancestral pride - “the very backbone of these commonwealths has been drawn from the heathered hills of Scotland and the green hills of Ulster”. 

Emma McKinney later sang this Scots language song –

The puir auld folk at hame, ye mind,
Are frail and failing sair,
And weel I ken they'd miss me, lad,
Gin I cam' hame nae mair
The grist is out, the times are hard,
The kine are only three,
I canna leave the auld folk now,
We'd better bide a wee,
I canna leave the auld folk now,
We'd better bide a wee.

When first we told our story, lad,
Their blessing fell sae free,

They gave no thought to self at all,
They did but think of me;

But, laddie, that's a time awa',
And mither's like to dee,

I canna leave the auld folk now,
We'd better bide a wee,

I canna leave the auld folk now,
We'd better bide a wee.

I fear me sair, they're failing baith,
For when I sit apart,

They talk o' heaven sae earnestly,
It weel nigh breaks my heart!

So laddie dinna ask me mair,
It surely winna be,

I canna leave the auld folk now,
We'd better bide a wee.

I canna leave the auld folk now,
We'd better bide a wee.

• Visit the Columbia Athenaeum website here. It's easy to imagine the Southern belles in their grandeur, and the wealthy businessmen, passing an afternoon here.

When the Psalms are your life

We learn the Psalms as words on pages, as songs, as memorised Scriptures. But when in 1740s Pennsylvania, having already crossed the Atlantic, you decide to pack up your family and meagre belongings and head south into the unknowns of the Shenandoah Valley, a place where no European had ever been before ... suddenly the words of Psalm 23, learned as a child and still as firm as granite in your memory, must have taken on a vast new weight and solemnity. 

"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” – Psalm 23:4

Goodbye Fermanagh, 1912

So once again, politics is big news in Northern Ireland following last week’s election. I have long believed that politics is downstream from culture, and so I will leave the political analysis to those who obsess over statistics. We have a glut of commentators and talking heads to fill our airwaves.

A century ago, politics was to the fore with a variety of options being argued for. Here is a booklet anonymously authored by an ‘Ulster Presbyterian’ which argued for a 5-county solution, ie without Fermanagh.

“…plump for a Northern Parliament, and if Scotland, as is most probable, gains federal independence, the Blue Banner would float supreme over two of the five constituent parliaments of Great Britain … Presbyterian Ulster is at the parting of the ways … "

"Power In The Blood" / "Dust On The Bible"

Thanks to an invitation by two friends, I was at a rare screening of two remarkable films by John T Davis.

“Power In The Blood”, the story of country singer Vernon Oxford’s evangelism tour in Ulster in the mid to late 80s was amazing. When he joined in with a local mission hall's open air meeting at the intense heat of an 11th Night Sandy Row bonfire, the Atlantic Ocean just evaporated.

His visit to Mountain Lodge Pentecostal Church in Darkley (a place my brother and I have sung at) was deeply poignant – including a rendition of Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb, the hymn which was being sung when the bullets raked through the building that Sunday night in November 1983. The meeting was being taped, and audio clips of the singing being interrupted by gunfire were broadcast worldwide on news channels. Three men were killed, many more injured. Some of the congregation today were there that night.

“Dust on the Bible” is a wide selection of footage excerpts from evangelists in action, from Cornmarket street preachers to wee mission halls to a James McConnell rally at the King’s Hall, at around the same era. There was also a brief flash of the long-gone Fishermen's Hall on the Warnock's Road in Portavogie, a building I used to be able to see from my bedroom window as a wee boy.This page on the Queens Film Theatre website gives some info.

Below are two clips from “Power In The Blood” that I found on YouTube, of Vernon playing at the Prison Officer's Country & Western Music Club at the Maze Prison. Surreal as that concept is, it looks - and sounds - a lot like a tiny bar in Tennessee. His version of Where The Roses Never Fade was superb, but it's not on YouTube sadly. The other clip here is of an event on the Shankill Road.

One striking aspect of the films was the bleakness of Belfast, and the squalor of dereliction and bombed-out shells of buildings. We have come a long way.

These are, in my view, world-class art documentaries. They deserve a much wider audience, 20 years on. I am pretty sure that very few people in the world that the films capture even know they exist.

Westminster Seminary, California

Multi-national, multi-ethnic. Value, philosophy, belief transcend the usual human barriers.

A Presbyterian seminary on the west coast of the USA, with this clip fronted by an Asian-American professor. WTS was founded in the 1920s by a former Princeton academic, who believed that the famous university had lost its way. I am told he was in regular contact with people in Belfast. The Gospel isn't just another religious option, it's a whole new operating system.

"Only a Sinner, Saved by Grace"

(clip above is all I could find, and a faster tempo than I’m familiar with)

I read this article recently. I don’t know the author, have come cross the name a few times. Perhaps he will write an equivalent which looks in the other direction.

It irked me on a number of levels. One of these is the implication that sectarian attitudes in Northern Ireland only flow in one direction, out of only one community. There are individuals within all communities who think they are better than others. At a very trivial level, people in my neighbouring village think that they are better than the people in the next village along. Some people in Bangor do think they are better than people from Newtownards, it’s not just a cliché. Every ‘tribe’ around the world has graceless, even supremacist, individuals and ideas. 

Some within cultural Protestantism can think that way. But real, theological, Protestantism is the very opposite. “Grace Alone” is one of the cornerstones of the Reformed faith. What this means is that there is nothing in oneself to be proud of. Here’s an example.

James Martin Gray (1851–1935) was a well-known figure in evangelical circles in the USA. His father Hugh Gray (1805-51) was from Bangor, County Down, and many generations of the family had lived at Gray’s Hill. Hugh’s father James (1782–1859) is named on a gravestone in Bangor Abbey graveyard. It is possible that he was related to Betsy Gray of 1798 Rebellion fame.

Hugh married Letitia Patterson at First Bangor Presbyterian Church in 1834 and they emigrated to New York around 1835. However Letitia died and Hugh later married a Mary Ann Martin. Across the two marriages Hugh was father to eight or nine children, of whom James was the youngest.

James' Wikipedia entry gives lots of detail of his life. Here is a sizeable bibliography of his writings. Some of his writing is still available digitally. He is little-known today, but here are the words a hymn he wrote which is known worldwide, which has a belter of a melody which was written by Daniel Towner:

Naught have I gotten but what I received;
Grace hath bestowed it since I have believed;
Boasting excluded, pride I abase;
I’m only a sinner saved by grace!
 
Only a sinner saved by grace!
Only a sinner saved by grace!
This is my story, to God be the glory,
I’m only a sinner saved by grace!

Once I was foolish, and sin ruled my heart,
Causing my footsteps from God to depart;
Jesus hath found me, happy my case;
I now am a sinner saved by grace!

Tears unavailing, no merit had I;
Mercy must save me, or else I must die;
Sin had alarmed me, fearing God’s face;
But now I’m a sinner saved by grace!

Suffer a sinner whose heart overflows,
Loving his Savior to tell what he knows;
Once more to tell it, would I embrace—
I’m only a sinner saved by grace!

It’s one of those classics which could have featured in a John Ford movie. When you grasp that you have absolutely no merit of your own to bring to the table, then there’s no opportunity for pride. The liberty of 'Grace Alone' is a concept which destroys once and for all works-based religious effort. And so you have no basis to regard yourself as better than anyone else

Gray was in England in 1912 and was recommended to return to the USA onboard the Titanic, but he stuck to his travel arrangements and sailed a week sooner on a different boat. 

The question "What will this do to our community?" tends toward the right answer for the world - Wendell Berry

"If they don't like you, they'll cut off your project"- Huey Perry and how the government conspired to stop his anti-poverty community empowerment initiatives in West Virginia

In the aftermath of the 1960s ‘War on Poverty’ campaign by President Lyndon Johnson, and his 'Poverty Tour’ referred to in this recent post, a young man in Mingo County, West Virginia (a county which was particularly Scotch-Irish in composition and outlook) called Huey Perry, pictured above just last year, decided to get involved in helping his local community. (West Virginia is often said to be the most Scotch-Irish of all of the states. Here are some recent posts on the subject - on Governor William Alexander MacCorkle and also this general article).

The context of the initiative was described by Huey in this 1992 interview:

There was total political control over everything and it was a pattern that evolved and developed over a number of years where the local politicians felt that they had to control every aspect of the community and every aspect of people's lives. And, of course, this was an easy system for them 'cause it perpetuated them into office and kept them into office and so, even the welfare recipients, first would go to the county politicians to get themselves placed on the welfare roles. So, they felt that they had to do that first, although they qualified for the welfare system. They would use that passageway into it, and, of course, this pleased the politicians because they knew they had a voter. As long as they could control this person and make them think that they controlled them, then they were subservient to that system.

Well, Huey got organised but was a bit too successful. And so the government, threatened by the community empowerment he had achieved, and how people had become self-sufficient, pulled his program. During his project he uncovered cronyism, electoral fraud, the siphoning of public funds to buy influence and patronage, and colossal abuses of power by those in authority. And so in 1972 Huey published the whole episode in his book They'll Cut Off Your Project: A Mingo County Chronicle, recently republished by West Virginia University Press.

The picture above is a still of Huey just last year explaining the story of the project (the video can't be embedded here so you’ll have to go to YouTube to watch it). 

Here is the intro to Chapter One:

Standing on the streets of Williamson, West Virginia in the winter of 1966, Huey Perry dazzled a New York Times reporter with the achievements of his native Mingo County’s thirty community action programs. Roads into the back hollows had been repaired; schoolhouses had been renovated. Carpenters assisted by men on relief had torn down abandoned shacks and built and painted new homes. Swimming pools had been fixed; a park overlooking the dramatic valleys had been built. As director of the county’s antipoverty program, Perry swelled with his pride in his work. “This must be the most beautiful community action group in the nation,” Perry told the Times. Thanks to Perry’s tour, the reporter noted that six-hundred children now attended Head Start classes, three-hundred teenagers took part in self-help employment projects, and medical checkups had become routine.The crowning achievement, which had garnered the headlines for the story, rested with the new grocery store: “Poor in West Virginia Town, Worried About the High Price of Food, Open Own Grocery.” Perry called it, “poor power.” By taking over an abandoned store and selling shares at ten dollars a shot, unemployed residents in the area had refashioned the shelves into a community grocery store, which ultimately had triggered a sharp reduction in food prices.

For the thirty-year-old Perry, described as “a tall, rangy young man,” by the Times reporter, it was “important for the poor to mobilize their resources collectively.” The story takes a turn here: the reporter did not buy completely into the storybook idealism unfolding on the back streets of Williamson and in the tiny settlements of Big Branch and Cinderella. She had been sent to Mingo County to chronicle the controversy as much as the accomplishments. “Grocers are angry,” the reporter noted. “Other businessmen are uneasy. Old line politicians are upset.” The local state senator and members of the Chamber of Commerce had already gone to Washington, charging that the Mingo County antipoverty program “was attempting to create a political machine by mobilizing the poor.” Federal investigators had already arrived. A local businessman told the Times: “It’s all a Communist plot.”

This community-level grassroots politics is just as much part of the Scotch-Irish story as are the Presidents in the grandeur of the White House. Even in that context, starting with Andrew Jackson, ‘our’ Presidents were men of the people, not from the aristocratic class. I would argue that ours is a 'bottom-up' culture, with genuine 'people-power' as the driver. You can see this in the Scottish Reformation of the early 1500s just as much as in the hills of West Virginia in the 1960s, never mind here in Ulster over successive centuries.

• Here is a recent and thought-provoking post by Elizabeth Catte, linking and contrasting Huey Perry's work and experiences with the JD Vance Hillbilly Elegy view.

• Her article – There is no neutral there: Appalachia as a mythic “Trump Country” – is essential reading.

The Colrain (Massachusetts) Flag, 1812

A SCOTCH-IRISH SETTLEMENT, 1735
The town of Colrain in Franklin County in north west Massachusetts was settled in 1735, having originally been called ‘Boston Township No. 2’, but then renamed in 1743 for the Ulster emigration port town of Coleraine. One of Colrain's early settlers from Ulster was a Matthew Clark, born in Carrickfergus around 1700. Others were called Smith, Ulster-born yet descendants of ‘Scotch Presbyterians’. One source describes these first settlers as ‘intensely Protestant and generally Presbyterians and next to the devil they abominated the king’. In a short history of the town, author Belden Merims wrote that –

'And settled it was, by a hardy band of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians seeking freedom to worship as they wished. They had not found that freedom in eastern Massachusetts, where they had come as early as 1720 from northern Ireland, which they had not found hospitable. However, in 1743 they renamed their town Coleraine after Coleraine, Ireland ...

REVOLUTION AND THE ‘COLRAINE RESOLVES’, 1774
The Boston Tea Party took place on 16 December 1773. About six weeks later, the men of Colrain gathered to author the Colrain Resolves, on 31 January 1774 - so therefore a year earlier than the Fincastle Resolutions. Colrain then only had a population of 297; the leading men of the town were Hezekiah Smith, Daniel Donelson, William Stewart, James Stewart, John Woods, John Morrison, Joseph Caldwell and Thomas Bell – provoked to action because they were convinced that ‘the sole authority of the British Parliament is unjust, arbitrary, inconsistent and unconstitutional … when our valuable liberties and privileges are trod under foot … it is the duty of every true-hearted American to free themselves from impending ruin …’. Merims wrote –

… Colrain’s Scotch-Irish settlers had no love for the English. Resentments festered, and in January, 1774, at (John) Wood’s Tavern the prominent men of the town gathered and drew up what became known as the Colrain Resolves. Predating the Declaration of Independence by 18 months, the six resolves declare the rights of the individual, objection to taxation without representation, legal authority for independence, the right of the group to self-government, the necessity for action, a listing of specific grievances, the necessity for independence rather than mere reform, and the struggle for independence transcending the individual.'

This interesting article says that the Scotch-Irish were more literate than others in the region, and that these Resolves have ‘a clarity which those of other towns lack’. Here they are in full. 

THE COLRAIN FLAG, 1812
A generation later, in May 1812, Colrain was the first place to raise a US flag at a public building, which was the local schoolhouse. The flag was made by two sisters called Rhoda and Lois Shippee, and had 15 stripes and 15 stars, which was the design of the first official US flag up until 1818. A memorial stone marks the spot today.

FURTHER READING:
• Here is an 1844 history of Colrain, lots of great detail included. It is interesting that the minister of the Presbyterian church there in 1769, Rev Daniel McClallen, had been born in Pennsylvania in 1737 but educated in Ireland. He was perhaps related to one of Colrain’s leading citizens, Hugh McClallen who was born in Maghera around 1743. Daniel’s grave can be seen here, Hugh’s can be seen here.

• The Early Settlers of Colrain, Mass. by Charles H. McClellan (1885) is online here. The author proposes that James Stewart of Colrain had been present at the Siege of Derry in 1688

• The Scotch-Irish in Colrain, A Community Study in Eighteenth Century Massachusetts by Nancy Dolberg (published 1976) 

Rev Hugh Knox (1727–90), newspaper advert, late 1700s

He was one of the subjects of a previous post, due to his formative influence on the young American revolutionary Alexander Hamilton. Here’s a newspaper advert for some of his books. Even though in the remote Caribbean, Hugh Knox maintained regular correspondence with prominent people in America and Britain. Yet another potentially brilliant uncovered story.

"We the People" (forget the celebrity President)

As the media world continues to obsess about Trump, one of our own prominent radio journalists told his audience today the every night he watches Fox News just to see what Trump has been up to. (He's a smart guy, I hope he was jesting - but it was a quip with significance, and shows the scale of the Trump personality). It's tragic and yet also perfect - perfect because for our celebrity age we now have the ultimate celebrity villain giving other celebrities opportunity to say publicity-grabbing things about him, which feeds the media machine and a generation of one-time news journalists who have become little more than gossip columnists then sensationalise and excitedly regurgitate the latest remarks and tweets, and invite other semi-celebrities to comment on them too.

Meanwhile, one journalist in particular has stuck to time-honoured methods by getting beyond the spokespeople to the real people. Chris Arnade is a man you need to read. Here is his latest Guardian article. This is what my recent post 'The President's Poverty Tour' was getting at. Arnade has a pile of similar articles, he takes great photographs (shown here) and he will be visiting Britain in a few weeks' time.

• Follow Chris Arnade on Twitter here.

Sidney Edwards Morse on the Scotch-Irish, 1822

Another source,  a good generation before the ‘Famine Irish’ arrived in vast numbers, showing the usage of the term Scotch-Irish, this time in a fairly academic volume entitled A New System of Modern Geography or a View of the Present State of the World (Boston, 1822). The author, Sidney Edwards Morse, was a brother of the inventor Samuel Finley Breese Morse, and the family was of Ulster descent. The book is online here. 

The Morse brothers were both born in the 1790s; their father Jedidiah Morse born in 1761 was a Congregational pastor in New England and a descendant of Armagh-born Ulsterman Rev Dr Samuel Finley, a President of Princeton College. Jedidiah had published similar stuff in 1819, again using the term ‘Scotch Irish” (source here), and even earlier in 1810 (source here) and 1802 (source here). The earliest of his publications with the term seems to be 1789 (source here), where he also describes those in North Carolina as "descendants of people from the North of Ireland, and are exceedlingly attached to the doctrines, discipline and usages of the church of Scotland. They are a regular industrious people".

The breadcrumb trail of usages of the term ‘Scotch-Irish’ seems to be now be pretty much a continuous stream from the 1718 emigration families right up into the 21st century.

The President's "Poverty Tour", Appalachia, April-May 1964

Due to his seemingly endless flow of the bizarre, the incompetent and the ridiculous, since his inauguration Donald J Trump has become even more of a figure of ridicule and hate. I can’t think of a media outlet apart from Breitbart which could be considered anything other than anti-Trump. In some cases I think the media has rushed to exaggerate and misrepresent. But he has made it easy, very easy for them to do so. I am not a fan of Trump, but I am drawn towards the people who put their trust in him at the ballot box, who saw him as being their last opportunity for change in the corporate-political empire.

At least now the media is doing its job again, having been sycophantic Obama-worshippers for the past 8 years (giving only passing coverage to bombing campaigns and drone strikes, for which statistics vary, the destabilisation of other nations through ’springs’, etc), and who right up to the last minute were openly backing Clinton, who was just another establishment candidate. Yes Trump is a billionaire. But the establishment – media, Democrats and Republicans – all openly hate him. And that's a big reason why so many people voted for him.

However, what this media Trump-a-geddon has done is wipe out some of the intelligent journalism which was starting to emerge during 2016, which sought to explain Trump's rise, and which revealed a hidden demographic - a forgotten, abandoned, American underclass far from the urban and coastal élites. The people of last year's bestseller Hillbilly Elegy, which became a bestseller because it connected the journalist class with people they did not know even existed. For a brief few months, those people had a voice, albeit a small one. Now they are once again forgotten as all eyes are focussed on Trump himself. 

So the ‘progressive’ chatterati are virtue-signalling at an industrial scale, every Trump gaffe causing Twitter-tsunamis. Mutual back-slaps of how right on they are. Middle class progressive evangelicals are just as prone to this as anyone else, except they add a bit of Jesus into the mix. They enjoy pointing out online how they are more like Jesus than others are. This used to be called "raising legitimacy to ultimacy", and is a form of Luke 18 Pharisaism. The posturing - whether just to make political points, or when also wrapped in a theological gloss, is tiresome and self-aggrandising.

Well, forget Trump. He is merely the outworking of those forgotten millions. And underneath the fashionable outrage, the progressives are as disinterested in the working class and underclass as ever before - whether Trump voters, UKIP voters, Brexit voters, post-industrial parts of Scotland that I have been to and know people in – or in our own context, people in estates which are still in the grip of paramilitarism. Few of Northern Ireland's 'trendy vicar’ types would be seen dead at a band parade or inside an Orange hall, either through their own choice or the soft policies of those they answer to within their congregations. I have seen many churches on the 12th July and on other parade dates, situated along the parade routes with hundreds of 'unchurched' people standing outside, but with the doors shut and the building deserted. It's not only bad evangelism, it's bad neighbourliness, it's bad community engagement.

Previous Presidents also made publicity capital from these forgotten millions. Below is a film of Lyndon Johnson in the ‘Rust Belt’ and Appalachia in 1964. You can imagine how these images were carefully staged for maximum effect. Just like today. This 2014 retrospective makes for interesting reading.

Whether President or progressive tweeter, they are one and the same, both are merely exploiting the poor for their own publicity advantage.

• PS - I know those who do care, and a number of young ministers who are not scared to get their hands dirty and get stuck in. They're not doing the posturing. They're doing the hard work, far below the radar. Full credit to them.

• PPS - after posting this piece, I see that the Lancashire Post in the north west of England has a similar perspective. I have always had a soft spot for John Pilger’s view of international politics, as this article demonstrates so well.

"We didn't know that Presbyterians had suffered too"

 

Last Friday evening I had the privilege of speaking to West Belfast Historical Society on the subject of the Covenanters in the 1600s. I tend to stick to doing talks in my own local area but one of the Society’s members had heard me give the talk in Newtownards about 18 months ago, and invited me to give it to WBHS. As the date approached I was a bit apprehensive; demographically West Belfast is overwhelmingly Catholic, and the meeting was to be in a Catholic church parish centre. So I made doubly sure that everyone understood the ground I’d be covering, a few weeks beforehand.

Stories of the Reformation, of standing up against successive monarchs (the great majority of whom were 'Established Church'), of defying the state, of being arrested and imprisoned and executed. Of ‘18,000 martyrs” as it says on the grand memorial at Greyfriars Kirkyard. It all went really well, and the conversations afterwards were great. A comment that a number of people made to me at the end, independently of one another, was "We didn't know that Presbyterians had suffered too”. 

There is a lesson here. It is critically important to share stories beyond our own communities. We need to rethink how the 1600s are discussed and understood.

• In 1689 no Presbytery meetings were held from March until September, and when these resumed it was to hold 'a solemn day of thanksgiving for the great mercy of a begun relief from bondage' (source here).

• A deputation of ministers was sent to London to bring a message to the new King William "former and present sufferings, well known to those who lived amongst them ... that all sufferings for nonconformity may be for the future prevented" (source here)

The more I read the more I am convinced that the 'innumerable crowds of people' who greeted William at Carrickfergus 'with continual shouts and acclamations' were expressing their great relief that at least 50 years of struggle against previous monarchs and parliaments had finally come to an end.

Maybe there will one day be scope to re-frame these important stories.

The Revolutionary Knoxes: Ulster-Scots origins of Major-General Henry Knox (1750–1806) and Rev Hugh Knox (1727–1790)

Not long after Newtownards man Rev John Moorehead (previous post here) had emigrated and became the first Presbyterian minister in Boston around 1728, founding the church called “Church of the Presbyterian Strangers”, he conducted a wedding.

It was just the second one he had ever done. The date was 17 February 1736, the happy couple were William Knox (born c. 1712) and Mary Campbell - just like Moorehead they were fresh Ulster emigrants (possibly from near Belfast, but more likely having emigrated from Belfast - although other sources say William was from Londonderry) coming to terms with life in the New World, and from most accounts it seems life as outcasts, unwelcome in English-dominated Boston. A number of early Presbyterian churches had been burned down by “hostile Yankees”, such as nearby Worcester (source here), and I have seen another source - which I can’t put my finger on just now - that describes one being destroyed during its construction.

William Knox appears to have become a soldier, because in the same church records (online here), on 3 August 1749, “Mary Knox, wife to Capt. Wm. Knox, had a son baptised called Henry”. The “Church of the Presbyterian Strangers” was on Bury Street, later Long Lane, now Federal Street, and the Knox family home was at 247 Federal Street.

William had a successful shipbuilding business and bought a wharf at Boston Harbour, but the business failed and he later abandoned the family and went to the Caribbean where he eventually died, on St. Eustatius island, in 1762.

[A Knox relative already in the Caribbean was Rev Hugh Knox, who had been born in Ulster around 1727/28. He was ordained in New York in 1755 and was appointed minister on the remote island of Saba, where he stayed for 16 years, before moving to the island of St Croix around 1772. Some sources say he was a formative influence upon the young Alexander Hamilton, helping to raise the boy after his father had died when he was aged just 11, and his mother just two years later. Hamilton is known today through the biographical musical of his life. Some of Rev Hugh Knox’s sermons were later published, including An Essay on Civil and Religious Liberty in 1777]

Henry Knox was a boyhood friend of David McClure (previous post here), did well at school, got a job in a bookstore, and was embroiled in the Boston Massacre of 1770 when soldiers opened fire on a mob who were attacking them. Henry had tried to intervene and prevent the bloodshed which eventually took place.

Henry went on to become the youngest major-general in George Washington’s army, then chief artillery officer, and when Independence was won, Knox was appointed Washington’s Secretary of War. No doubt he and Alexander Hamilton wold have met many times in Washington’s service, and might have talked about their common Ulster-Scots influences - because Rev Hugh and Henry were correspondents (see here)

Sir John Melville of Carnbee, Fife – buried Inch Abbey, Downpatrick, 1628

 

This man came to Ulster in the early 1600s and once had a grand gravestone at Inch Abbey, Downpatrick (pictured above). It is described in detail in Walter Harris’ The ancient and present state of the county of Down (1744) and also repeated in the footnotes of Rev George Hill's Montgomery Manuscripts. Harris mistakenly called him James rather than John, an error which was repeated by Hill. The inscription is described as follows:

"S. Anno 1628. d.
"Then on the top of the Scutcheon in one quarter,
I.M., and in the other quarter, A. R. At the foot of the
Scutcheon on one side are these words thus placed: —
" Christo et Cruce
In Spero.
and underneath this inscription : —
" INSIGNIS. MILES. MELVILLUS. CARNBIA. PROLES.
MOLE. SUB. HAC. LAPJDUM. MORTUUS. ECCE. JACET.
SCOTIA. NATALEM, CELEBRAVIT. HIBERNIA. FUNUS.
INTUS. HABET. TUMULUM. SPIRITUS. ASTRA. COLIT.
SEXAGINTA. OCTO. FELICES. VIXERAT. ANNOS.
QUADRAGINTA. NOVEM. EX. HIS. ANIMOSUS. EQUES.
MILLE. ET. SEXCENTOS. VICENOS. EGERAT. ANNOS.
ET. OCTO. CHRISTUS. CUM. TUMULATUS. ERAT."

This would suggest he was 68 years old (‘sexaginta octo’), so was therefore born in 1560, and it seems was a knight for 49 years so therefore had been knighted around 1579-80. He is identified as 'Sir John Melville of the Carnbee family at Inch, near Downpatrick' in the 1881 book Scottish Arms being a Collection of Armorial Bearings. It appears that he was a man of some influence; having been knighted by King James VI, Melville assisted in 1593 to revise the means of tax collection in Scotland (source here).

Carnbee is a parish in Fife, where the Melvilles lived for many generations, as far back as the late 1200s. They had been in Scotland since at least 1165 as shown in a charter from King William the Lion of Scotland to Galfrid and Gregory de Melville (source here).

The volume The East Neuk of Fife by Rev Walter Wood (1887) records the Melvilles having arrived at Carnbee by 1296. There is a short biography of Sir John and his second wife Alison Ross (the ‘A.R.’ on the gravestone) which speaks of them having to sell their Granton estate near Edinburgh in 1598. Interestingly, Sir John had been declared a rebel, having begun to build a mill on the land of King James VI at Kingsbarns without royal permission. Perhaps these events were what caused him to move to Ulster. Carnbee was then acquired by the Moncreiff family.

PS: It is worth mentioning that the Echlins and Monypennys, also from Fife, came to east Ulster in this period, both families settling at Portaferry, just a boat trip from Inch. An earlier Melville from Fife was an ally of John Knox’s during the Reformation, and was hanged in 1548 for his involvement in the murder of Cardinal David Beaton.

……………..

PPS: Herman Melville (1819–91), author of Moby Dick, was descended from this Sir John Melville: "Herman Melville, the most powerful of all the great American writers, was born on the 1st August 1819, in New York. His father, Allan, was the fourth child of Major Thomas Melville. The family was of old Scots lineage, being descended from that John Melville of Carnbee who was knighted by James the Sixth”. Allan Melville had visited Scotland on a genealogy visit in the early 1800s, armed with a family tree. He also traced Boston Tea Party patriot Thomas Melvill (1751–1832) and General Robert Melville (1723–1809) to our same Sir John - source here.

 

"The Silent Ulster Vote" - a podcast from 2012

I am thankful to Bruce Carlson of My History Can Beat Up Your Politics for posting this on Twitter earlier. I’m only 15 minutes into it and it’s really excellent - detailed, packed with content, a lot of which I had never heard before. Listen to it here: 

Ulster Historical Foundation - "The Northern Muse" - 60th anniversary

This event next Saturday evening promises to be truly excellent. I'm especially looking forward to seeing inside historic First Presbyterian Church in Rosemary Street in Belfast, and to hearing Nigel and Dianna Boullier playing authentic old-time County Down fiddle tunes. Nigel is the author of the remarkable Handed Down: Country Fiddling and Dancing in East and Central Down (available here).

• Book your ticket online; the Foundation is a charity and donations are suggested at £25 per person. Click here.

"You're Scotch-Irish, aren't you?" - Michael Stipe of REM

I had expected some of this. I had met Stipe before, in Athens, Georgia, at the time when R.E.M. had just signed with Warner Brothers and was about to release Green. At the end of the conversation, he began studying my face. "You're Scotch-Irish, aren't you?" he said.

"No," I said. "I'm not."

"You have a very Scotch-Irish face."

"I'm not Scotch-Irish."

He reached out his hand and touched the back of it to my face. "You have Scotch-Irish cheekbones," he said. "I'll bet you have that somewhere in your background. I'm very good at figuring out where people came from."

(from this 2003 interview in Esquire magazine)

Niall Ferguson on the plantation of Ulster, Virginia, Canada and Australia

There are some drawbacks in the script, but the general approach is pretty good.

"proud of his Scotch-Irish heritage" - Vick's VapoRub & the Richardson family of Greensboro, North Carolina

Lunsford Richardson II (1854–1919; Wikipedia entry here) is a name not many people know today. But his product is a world-famous brand. Here’s an article from the latest edition of the official North Carolina magazine, OurState.com. His original name – Richardson’s Croup and Pneumonia Cure Salve – was too long for the small jar, so he gave the honour to his brother in law, Dr. Joshua Vick.

Richardson’s son Jacob Henry Smith Richardson (1885– 1972) was a successful salesman for the firm, and he is said to have been "proud of his Scotch-Irish heritage” (source here). The Richardson-Vicks Collection is held at Greensboro Historical Museum.

Lunsford was a renowned advocate of African-American rights, borne out in October 1944 by the WW2 liberty ship S.S. Lunsford Richardson being named after him with a plaque affixed stating it had been at the "special request of the leading Negro citizens of North Carolina to honor the memory of a white friend." 71-year-old Watson Law, a Black friend of the Richardsons, was present at the official launch event at Brunswick, Georgia. Henry's attitudes seem to have been similar:

... Richardson was proud of his Scotch-Irish heritage and considered the South more "American" than other regions whose populations included more immigrants. He named North Carolina's racial heritage as one of its assets in an article about how the state could survive the Depression and improve its economy. His correspondence and writings contain numerous references to his racial attitudes, including a letter to the South African Information Service comparing apartheid to segregation in the American South ...

The Richardsons were of course Presbyterians, very involved in First Presbyterian Church in the town. According to this 1980 source, the first Ulster-Scots settlers in the Greensboro area arrived in 1753, a direct 'church plant' from Nottingham Presbyterian Church in present-day Maryland. Rev David Caldwell (bio here) was one of the town's outstanding historical figures - today an Historical Centre stands in his memory.

NB: Lunsford Richardson I (1808–56) had been a Democratic Senator in the North Carolina State Legislature for a time around 1854. He owned a mill on Little River in Johnson County, which was at risk of collapsing during a flood on 14 July 1856. He tried to save it but was drowned, a tragedy witnessed by his wife and daughter, and some men who were trying in vain to rescue him. A general biography of the family is included in Makers of America; biographies of leading men of thought and action which is online here. It traces the Richardsons to England and Scotland; the Scotch-Irish element must have been intermingled through the generations. The same book says this:

… the men have proven themselves capable, combining the shrewdness of the Scotch and the wit of the Irish. For two hundred years and more, the Scotch-Irish race has been a potential and beneficent factor in the development of the American Republic. All things considered, it seems probable that the people of this race have given color, to a great extent, to the history of the United States ...

 

The Avett Brothers - Away in a Manger

The words have been attributed to Martin Luther, the other more familiar tune written by Ulster-born William James Kirkpatrick. Here are the wonderful Avett Brothers of North Carolina playing it. It is a bit of a cliché perhaps, like most Christmas songs it has been over-done and the familiarity can breed contempt. Yet underlying the schmaltz is a deep eternal truth - that through Jesus Christ, God provides what He demands. And through faith alone in Christ alone we are made right with God. He didnt come as a moral teacher. He came to be Mediator and Substitute. The Gospel is truly ‘Good News’ because the pressure is off. Christ has done it all. Amazing grace.

Duncan MacNab (1820–96) and Saint Patrick's Scottish origins

Duncan MacNab (also spelled McNab) was a Catholic missionary to the Australian aborigines. Born in Morven in the Scottish Highlands, nearly 100 miles north of Inverness, he arrived in Melbourne on 29 July 1867 along with the Archbishop of Sydney, John Bede Polding, on board the ship Chariot of Fame. McNab became a great champion for aboriginal rights and he features in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

His entry there gives a clue as to his departure from what had been 20 years of parish life in Scotland – "He dabbled in Gaelic literature and at Airdrie in 1862 fell foul of Irish parishioners, probably by arguing the Scottish birth of St Patrick”.

There is a huge full-page letter from McNab in the 28 June 1862 edition of the Glasgow Free Press newspaper where he lays out his case and counters his critics. Some weeks previously McNab had been accused in the pages of the paper by a fellow Catholic priest as follows – “I know well he hates everything Irish … [he is] a fair type of his Scottish order, in his contempt for, and opposition to, everything Irish: people, politics, habits, all except the Irish faith … an anti-Hibernian spirit in our Scottish friends? And yet where would they have a church today … were it not for the always open purse of poor despised and sneered-at Pat?" It is pretty rough stuff.

If the subject was controversial, McNab wasn’t going to lie down as he gave a lengthy ‘archaeological dissertation’ address on the subject in St Margaret’s schoolroom in Airdrie on 25 September 1865, which was published in Dublin by James Duffy the year after (online edition here). According to the history section of the church’s website, McNab had given a similar talk in Bathgate too.

Matters came to a head after he published a pamphlet to prove that St. Patrick was born in Scotland, and followed this with a lecture at Bathgate that was seen as being anti-Irish. Certainly rivalry between Scots and Irish Catholics was common at the time, among the clergy as well as the laity, and Father McNab was undoubtedly one of its victims.

There are some other brilliant stories about McNab there:

He dealt with repeated rumours that the Orangemen were preparing to attack his church and raze it to the ground, by letting it be known that he kept gunpowder in the house and would blow the church up rather than have it desecrated. It appears that this was no idle threat either, as Father Van Stiphout records that he found a small keg of gunpowder in a press in the house when he came there in 1893. 

• A 1989 thesis about McNab can be found here.
• His Wikipedia entry is here.

I really do need to pull together all of the Patrick-related Scottish and Ulster-Scots material I have gathered up over the years and get it published as a booklet or online.

NB: Many other writers, before and after McNab (such as Professor James H Todd of Trinity College Dublin and the Royal Irish Academy, who was also a Treasurer of St Patrick’s Cathedral in the city) have agreed with him that Kilpatrick near Dumbarton is the most plausible birth place for Patrick. However, the birth place issue is just one small part of a larger collection of Scottish Patrick traditions which today’s storytellers and tourism initiatives choose to ignore.

William McKeague and "The Star Spangled Banner", 1750

Music travels. It turns out that around 1750 a Fermanagh man, William McKeague of the Sixth Enniskillen Fusiliers, composed a tune called “The March of the Royal Inniskillings”, probably based on an earlier Irish tune called “Squire Bumper Jones” from 1723. “The March of the Royal Inniskillings” was later picked up by John Stafford Smith in England and travelled across the Atlantic where it went on to become a world-famous anthem. Article here.

Ballyrawer, 1930s

My Wilson ancestors lived in a wee house at Ballyrawer/Ballyraer outside Carrowdore for generations. It was sold out of the family and was bulldozed just a few months ago. My aunt Betty supplied me with these photos just a few weeks ago. One shows the house, photographed from just across the Woburn Road within the old Crommelin ‘plantin’ of Carrowdore Castle which I mentioned here before in this post, around 1930. My great uncle Henry Wilson (1923–2003) and his sister Rhoda Wilson (1927-201?) are standing at the front gate, then just weans. Also below are the Wilsons’ maternal grandmother, Lizzie Kerr (1889–1966, who married Hugh Wilson, 1886–1967) and her mother Mary Kerr (d. 1945), presumably photographed around the same time.

My thanks are due to distant relative John Blair from Ajax in Canada (he is a descendant of these same Kerrs) who was able to confirm for me the tradition of a generation of our ancestors living in the house at no rent for a generation. John has pinned that down to a timeframe from 1879 (the houses were described as 'free for 17 years) until at least 1930 (described as 'free').

'Roots and Wings" - Reformed University Fellowship, Nashville, Tennessee

I posted about these folks years ago, and have just recently been reminded of them thanks to Sandra McCracken's new album entitled God's Highway. She has an earlier song called 'Portadown Station', inspired by, yes, our very own Portadown railway station. In 2015 she released Psalms, a collection of her own reworking of some of the Psalms. She has a certain Iris DeMent or Emmylou Harris quality; she is one of the Indelible Grace collective, whose album Live at the Ryman Auditorium is absolutely superb. Listen to the whole 18 track concert here; documentary film is below.

Cool heads and sharp minds

I like having friends with all sorts of opinions. It is good to stretch a bit to listen to what others think. It's even more impressive when somebody leaves a former opinion and changes their mind. A high-profile person who has done just that recently is Glasgow-born economic historian Niall Ferguson - recent Boston Globe article here.

Back in September he intriguingly suggested that the incoming President of the USA should appoint a 'Council of Historians', because history is the only example we can learn from, and understanding history and culture is very very important - article here. People in high office in Northern Ireland would do well to pay attention.

Ferguson was pro-Remain, an advisor to the Remain campaign, but has now changed his mind and is publicly announcing that on reflection he should have supported 'Brexit', the campaign to Leave the European Union. Here are some video clips from YouTube.

Denis Kearney was a new name to me but the parallels are fascinating; Kearney's great rival in Irish-American Californian politics was Frank Roney, someone who has featured on this blog previously. Niall Ferguson is a man worth listening to.

"the greatest realignment in modern politics could take place rather quickly if the right national leader found a way to bring the Scotch-Irish and African-Americans to the same table"

After the circus that was the US Presidential election, here's a man with something to say. This might be the best speech I've heard from any American politician in a very very long time. Former Senator James Webb is the author of Born Fighting (2005) and has visited Northern Ireland on many occasions.

"...I think of a great friend of mine, a fellow marine named Mac McDowell, who served in my company in Vietnam. In fact, we were wounded on the same day. Mac has been very loyal to me, even though he was a conservative Republican. He runs a gun shop on a shooting range in Erie, Pennsylvania.

When I decided not to continue the attempt at the presidency, he sent me an email. He said, “This guy Donald Trump,” he says, “the Republicans hate him, the Democrats hate him, the media hates him, I think I found my guy.”

His sentiment of uniting Scotch-Irish and African Americans will seem to some like pie-in-the-sky. That is until you read Carter G Woodson of course. And Barack Obama. And Rosa Parks. And Gianno Caldwell. And I suspect many many others. Values can unite above ethnicity.

Rosa Parks' Scotch-Irish great-grandfather, James Percival

Yes, that Rosa Parks. As this article from 1992 about her autobiography entitled Rosa Parks, My Story, states that her "Scotch-Irish great-grandfather was imported to Charleston, S.C., as an indentured servant". Similar comments are here in an article in The Washington Post in 1995.

He was James Percival (1832–1920), an indentured servant on the Wright estate of the town of Pine Level, Montgomery County, Alabama. He married African-American Mary Jane Nobels, who was a midwife and slave on the same estate. They had nine children.

Like everyone, Rosa Parks would have had 8 great-grandparents, of which James Percival was only one. Yet James Webb saw fit to mention her in his book Born Fighting, because, like Barack Obama, she apparently mentioned her Scotch-Irish ancestry in her own writings. That is surely significant. If anybody out there has the original source I would be very interested.

NB: There can however be an unhelpful 'elasticity' with the usage of the term Scotch-Irish, so it's always important to verify the sources. Sometimes it has been used too broadly, being used to mean someone whose ancestry was from either Scotland or Ireland, so not necessarily Ulster at all.

Alexander Mahood (1878–1968) - from Portavogie to Kansas

Emigration to America is a constant stream. People I went to school with live there, I have two cousins who live there. Obviously they emigrated within the past generation, not in the 1700s. They’ve never shot a musket or fought in a Revolution but they are just as important (maybe more important) than earlier migrations. We should try to connect better with those folk. I wonder if stats exist somewhere?

Outgoing President Barack Obama has re-stated his Scotch-Irish roots in a major interview in The New Yorker magazine. Here's the extract, and it's even more direct than the speech he ave back in the summer:

Obama will go down in history as the first African-American President, and he derives immense pride from that, but he never fails to insist on the complexity of his story. “I’m half Scotch-Irish, man!” he said. “When folks like Jim Webb write about Scotch-Irish stock in West Virginia and Kansas and so on, those are my people! They don’t know it, always, but they are.” (full article here)

Kansas is in the Mid-West, disparagingly described as 'flyover country' to the urban elites on the west and east coasts. Our people live there too. Below are two clippings reporting on a Portavogie man who was born around 1878 who emigrated to the USA around the turn of the century I assume, and lived in Kansas City. I am pretty sure my ancestors would have know him before he left. I wonder did Mahood ever encounter Obama's grandparents?...