Ulster Presbyterians and the Scots Irish Diaspora, 1750-1764

B. Bankhurst

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137328205
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Bankhurst examines how news regarding the violent struggle to control the borderlands of British North America between 1740 and 1760 resonated among communities in Ireland with familial links to the colonies. This work considers how intense Irish press coverage and American fundraising drives in Ireland produced empathy among Ulster Presbyterians.

1

Atlantic Migration and North America in the Irish Presbyterian Imagination

Protestant migration was a highly visible and contentious phenomenon in Ireland throughout the eighteenth century, one that touched upon the lives of a large proportion of the population – especially in the Presbyterian hinterlands of the north. Communities felt the absence of those who had left. Congregations noticed empty pews in meetinghouses; landlords felt the sting of rents left unpaid by departed ­tenants; and onlookers living near ports witnessed the annual migration of families as they made their way to waiting ships. One such worried observer was Edmond Kaine, an agent on the Barrett Estate in County Monaghan, who claimed to have watched one hundred families travel through the town of Clones on their way to the ocean in March 1719.¹ Constant seasonal migration and the ever-present opportunity to emigrate determined how ordinary Presbyterians imagined America and how they perceived British imperial expansion more broadly.

By the middle of the century, transatlantic migration had become an established part of life throughout the province. It was a life strategy open to Protestants of all backgrounds. Those who could not afford the cost of the voyage – £3 5s in the early 1770s – could sign a contract of indenture, whereupon the cost of the voyage was covered in exchange for a service contract.² These ‘redemptioners’ usually served a term of between two and four years’ service in America before setting out on their own in search of cheap land in the west. In the 1720s one-in-five migrants crossed the ocean as indentured servants.³ The majority of those who left Ireland in the wake of the potato crop failure and meagre harvest of 1739 paid their fare through indenture.⁴ The possibility of migration for Presbyterians across the social spectrum ensured a broad audience for propaganda advertising the high quality of life across the Atlantic. James Leyburn notes that the inclination to migration was not simply the product of economic or religious circumstances: ‘there was also the constant stimulus of widespread propaganda – broadsides, letters from the colonies, [and] pamphlets’.⁵ This material – to which could be added the consistent printing of shipping advertisements in local newspapers – dogged prospective migrants throughout the year. The prospect of migration and an idealized image of America became embedded in the Ulster Presbyterian consciousness through the ever-present white noise of merchant propaganda. Such ephemera served as a constant reminder of the existence of the Atlantic empire and buoyed Ulster Presbyterians’ sense of imperial belonging.⁶

Much of the passenger traffic between Ulster and America was the product of chain migration. Chain migration is a phenomenon whereby an anchor community of immigrants, once established, encourages the further migration of friends and family from the home country. Many emigrants maintained correspondence with their relatives in Ulster.⁷ Authors of these letters often included favourable information about the colonies in the hope that they could entice friends and relatives to emigrate. These letters were often meant for a larger audience and not the recipient alone. Sometimes shipping agents or newspaper ­editors printed and distributed copies of emigrant letters, thereby further increasing their circulation and appeal. One such letter was published in the Pennsylvania Gazette in October 1737. The letter was originally sent from a migrant named James Murray who had sent it to a ­minister in County Tyrone named Baptist Boyd. The paper explained that Murray had sent the letter to ‘his Countrymen, to encourage them to come over thither; which, that it might have the Effect on the People, was printed and dispers’d in Ireland’.⁸ He told of the cheapness of land and its fertility, telling Boyd, ‘The young Folke in Eireland are aw but a Pack of Couards, for I will tell ye in short, this is a bonny country.’⁹ In 1789, John Denison wrote to his brother Samuel, then living in County Down, describing the province of Pennsylvania. Denison told his brother that he had built his new life upon Irish foundations by employing skills that he had learned in Ulster to earn his wages in America. He made 10s a day weaving linen before saving enough to buy land 150 miles north of Baltimore in Franklin township. John told Samuel that a man could buy an acre of land at good prices – in his area about the equivalent of 20s – with minimal taxes. John wished to see his brother again and told him ‘if you ware hear and setled nigh to me I would not see you want untill you would have time to fix yourself’.¹⁰ In the same year John Dunlop, a printer from County Tyrone then established in Philadelphia, wrote to his brother, Robert Rutherford, imploring him to send his son Billy to Pennsylvania before the Irish Parliament moved to restrict emigration. Dunlop told Rutherford that while he may not wish to come over himself, yet it might be the best option for his son: ‘People with a family advanced in life find great difficulties in Emigration but the young men of ireland [sic] who wish in the world where a man meet as rich a reward for good conduct and industry as in America.’¹¹ These shared letters circulating around the Irish countryside were perhaps the most significant ‘pull’ factor enticing Presbyterians across the ocean.

The complex web of family relations that linked Ulster to America is illustrated in the preface of the journal kept by the South Carolina loyalist Alexander Chesney during the American Revolutionary War. While still a teenager, Chesney sailed with his mother, father and seven siblings from Larne to Charleston aboard the ship Mary James in 1772. Their voyage was not an easy one. Alexander’s eight month-old sister Peggy succumbed to smallpox en route. The family’s misery did not end upon their arrival in South Carolina. The outbreak of smallpox on the ship resulted in the quarantining of its passengers and crew on Sullivan Island at the edge of Charleston Harbour. They were kept in confinement for seven weeks before being permitted to set foot on the mainland. The first portion of Chesney’s journal includes a detailed family genealogy. He began the section with his father’s ­family. Chesney’s aunt Martha left for America four years before his family made their voyage. She was ‘married to Matthew Gillespy [sic] who went also to Carolina and [Martha] died there shortly after their arrival’. His father’s other sister ‘Sarah has been married to John Cook who died in Pennsylvania’; she then ‘removed to Pacholet river South Carolina, where her children are married and settled’. Alexander’s family on his mother’s side also contained many migrants. Elizabeth Purdy, Chesney’s mother, was the youngest of twelve children, at least four of whom had also sailed for the colonies. In his youth Chesney remembered his Uncle William, ‘who lived in Glenraire [County Antrim] and went with his family to South Carolina’. Presumably, this uncle was among the many thousands who sailed for the colonies in the 1760s. Finally, his uncles ‘Thomas and John went to Pensylvenia’ where they both settled in the town of Carlisle.¹² When the Chesney family finally arrived in northwestern South Carolina, they found themselves welcomed by family members and other Irish settlers in what had become a thriving Presbyterian community.

Similarly, John Moore and his sister relied upon a continent-wide support network of kinfolk when they found themselves in trouble within months of their arrival in New York in 1760. John had been enticed to leave Ireland by his uncle Robert Cobham who lived near Albany. When the relationship between the two men soured, John and his sister were able to move to Philadelphia where they received support from an aunt who lived in the city.¹³ These were the extensive kinfolk networks that bound Ulster to the North American colonies. Such networks, along with the ever-present possibility of migration, transformed the ways in which Irish Presbyterians imagined the British Empire and their place within it. The formation of a Scottish and Irish Presbyterian Atlantic Diaspora was, at mid-century, a unifying process that integrated the north of Ireland into the British imperial polity. For these reasons, the scope and nature of eighteenth-century Irish Presbyterian migration warrants closer examination.

Ulster Presbyterian migration to America in the eighteenth century

Eighteenth-century mass migration from Ulster to the colonies began in earnest between 1717 and 1719. Before 1717, only a handful of dissenters made their way from Ulster to the colonies. In these years many of the cheap leases issued at the end of the Williamite Wars expired, leading many Ulster landlords to raise the cost of leases. These ‘rack-renting’ landlords hoped to capitalize on the increased demand for land that resulted from years of political stability and population growth.¹⁴ While rents increased, yields from agriculture and industry decreased. From 1715 to 1720 was a period of drought and crop failure. The linen industry also suffered a decline. In 1717–18 the amount of linen exported from Derry to Britain fell from 2,400,000 yards to 2,200,000 yards.¹⁵ In the years 1717 to 1719 between 4,500 and 7,000 people left Ulster ports for America. This was the beginning of a cycle of migration that would repeat itself throughout the century at periods when economic hardship, lease expiration and increase, and industrial recession converged. It differed from those that preceded it not only in size but also in destination.¹⁶ Unlike the sparse migration that occurred between 1680 and 1716, where the principal destination of Ulster migrants had been New England, the bulkhead exodus of the late teens was directed at Philadelphia and other Delaware ports. Once established, Irish settlements in the middle and southern colonies became beacons luring many thousands of immigrants into the trans-Appalachian interior.

The next wave of settlers arrived in the late 1720s, particularly in the years after the 1729 Irish famine. About 15,000 Protestants left Ireland in these years, again preferring to settle in western Pennsylvania. The 1728–9 famine accelerated a migratory trend that had begun following the poor harvests of 1725–6 and resulted in the first of two great waves of Protestant emigration from the north to British North America.¹⁷ The size of the 1728–9 migration was unlike anything witnessed in post-plantation Ireland. It terrified the Anglican gentry who feared that Presbyterian migration undermined the Protestant interest in the kingdom. Catholics did not seem to be migrating; leading many to conclude that plantation itself was in jeopardy.¹⁸ Lord Primate Hugh Boulter wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury describing the dire situation in the north: ‘the scarcity of provisions certainly makes many quit us: there are now seven ships at Belfast that are carrying off about 1000 passengers thither [to America]’.¹⁹ Even if the Irish government outlawed the passenger trade to stem the tide of people leaving, it would do no good. Boulter continued, ‘[I]f we knew how to stop them, as most of them can neither get victuals nor work at home, it would be cruel to do it.’ Between 1717 and 1730 Presbyterian emigration became an issue of national concern. By the mid-1730s annual migration levelled-out and popular anxiety regarding the issue subsided. The issue re-emerged between 1765 and 1775, when the last, and greatest, series of Presbyterian migrations of the century struck the island.

Presbyterians left eighteenth-century Ireland in great numbers for many reasons. Political and religious discrimination, as well as perceived lack of economic opportunity, influenced the decision to migrate. In many respects, Irish Presbyterians were deprived of the full rights of citizenship that they believed were due to them as Protestant subjects who had risked their lives and livelihoods for the Williamite cause. In the early decades of the eighteenth century the Anglican Ascendancy gradually ate away at the limited toleration established by William III. In 1704 a sacramental test was introduced requiring anyone who wished to take public office to first take communion within the Church of Ireland. This effectively excluded all Catholics and Protestant dissenters from most positions of government authority and from holding military commissions. Presbyterian church sessions did not enjoy the support of the civil establishment and marriages administered by Presbyterian ministers were illegal until 1738. On top of this, Presbyterians were expected to pay tithes towards the support of the established Church of Ireland, a church to which they did not belong and whose clergy continually lobbied for the suppression of their religious liberties.²⁰ It was against this background of oppression that the majority of Presbyterian migrants understood or justified their decision to leave Ireland. Whether or not religious grievances stimulated migration to a greater extent than did economic hardship at different points in the century is the subject of much historical debate.²¹ When asked, however, many Presbyterians blamed the Church of Ireland and the parliamentarians at College Green. One commentator claimed that Presbyterians referred to restrictive legislation including the Test Act as a ‘kind of vassallage and slavery’ and they could ‘easily help themselves, by removing to some parts of his majesty’s dominions in America, where no such hardships’ were imposed.²²

In February 1729, the Presbyterian ministers Francis Iredell and Robert Craghead wrote to each of the northern Presbyteries at the behest of the Lords Justices of Ireland asking them to outline their views on the nature and causes of Protestant migration. Thankfully, Tyrone’s report to Iredell survives. The Presbyterian leadership treaded lightly regarding what to say and how to say it. They knew that Dublin Castle was well aware of the complex causes that contributed to Presbyterian migration and was generally unsympathetic to the civil plight of dissenters. The Tyrone memorial outlined the various economic and social reasons for the exodus, including high rents and encouragement from family already in America. For all of this, it is still a politically charged document that attacked the Ascendancy establishment for upholding discriminatory legislation against dissenters. P...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Appendices
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: John Moore’s Crossing, 1760
• 1 Atlantic Migration and North America in the Irish Presbyterian Imagination
• 2 The Press, Associational Culture and Popular Imperialism in Ulster, 1750–64
• 3 He Never Wants for Suitable Instruments: The Seven Years War as a War of Religion
• 4 Sorrowful Spectators: Ulster Presbyterian Opinion and American Frontier Atrocity
• 5 ‘An Infant Sister Church, in Great Distress, Amidst a Great Wilderness’: American Presbyterian Fundraising in Ireland, 1752–63
• Postscript: John Moore’s Return and Reflections on America, 1763
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index