Shaping America’s political landscape

The United Irishmen and the 1798 rebellion in Ulster was very much influenced by events in America – their War of Independence and getting their freedom from Britain.
While this had a profound influence on the history of this country, in a way, it probably did not approach the influences that flowed in the other direction and that shaped the history of the United States. We are all too familiar with the great wave of emigration to the “New World”, which started after the famine in the 1840s but there had been an earlier wave just as important.
That emigration in the 1700s was mainly from Ulster from where a quarter of a million people, mostly Presbyterian and of Scottish descent left for America. They were descendants of the settlers, who had been brought into the country to replace the displaced Irish, during the Plantation of Ulster a hundred years earlier. Many years later they were described by President Theodore Roosevelt as a grim, stern people, strong and simple, powerful for good or evil.
In recent years we have seen where the current President Obama can claim ancestry from Moneygall, Ronald Reagan from Ballyporeen in Tipperary, Kennedy from Wexford and Nixon from Kildare.
However, the province of Ulster can lay claim to 17 presidents, going right back to the seventh president, Andrew Jackson. The list included Ulysses S Grant, Roosevelt, whose mother came from Larne, Truman, Nixon and Carter. The Bush family can trace back to William Gault, who was born in Antrim and Clinton is a relative of Lucas Cassidy, who left Fermanagh around 1750.
There was also a very strong Irish connection with the original American Declaration of Independence and the early years of the new country. The great Seal of the United States was designed by Charles Thompson, an emigrant from Derry and the first copies of the Declaration itself was pointed by John Dunlap, who had worked for a printing firm in Strabane before he emigrated.
There were 56 signatories to the Declaration and they were the delegates to the Continental Congress. Ten signatories were Irish or of Irish descent and, of these, eight were of Ulster Presbyterian stock. Seven were first or second generation emigrants. Of the three men born in Ireland, little is known of George Taylor except that he was the son of a minister who emigrated from Ulster in his early 20s.  Matthew Thornton was a physician whose parents emigrated from Derry when he was three-years-old. James Smith, a lawyer, was born in Dublin and his father became a farmer in Pennsylvania.
Charles Carroll has been described as the wealthiest man in all the colonies and had a 10,000 acre plantation in Maryland. He was the longest surviving signatory and lived until 1832. He was the only Catholic signatory and his cousin, John Carroll became the first ever Catholic bishop appointed in America.
When the Declaration was signed it was sent to different towns and cities where is was read to the public. Again, there was an Irish man involved.
The first public reading of the
American Declaration of Independence was made by the son of Ulster emigrants.
Colonel John Nixon gave that first reading in Philadelphia on July 8, 1776 – 235 years ago this week.