1718 Migration from Ulster to New England

Presbyterians were particularly aggrieved when a law known as the ‘Test Act’ was introduced to Ireland in 1704. Those wishing to hold public office would have to produce evidence that they had taken communion in the Church of Ireland – this effectively barred Presbyterians. Marriages conducted by Presbyterian ministers were not recognised, and children born of such marriages were considered illegitimate. The writer Jonathan Swift, an Anglican cleric, is believed to have been the author of a pamphlet which described Ulster Presbyterians as a ‘knavish, wicked, thievish race’.

Life in Ulster for Presbyterians in the 1600s had not been easy. The 105-day long Siege of Derry in 1689 – the longest in British and Irish history – pitted the forces of King James II against the people. An estimated 15,000 people died of fever, starvation or were killed. The end of the Siege was reportedly heralded by a boy named James McGregor who climbed to the top of the city Cathedral to fire a cannon. Ulster’s Presbyterians enjoyed a brief era of liberty under the new King William III, but when William died in 1702, anti-Presbyterian persecution returned.

In the 1630s communications took place between leading figures from the Massachussetts Bay colony and Ulster Presbyterian ministers. An agent made an exploratory visit to New England, and John Winthrop (the younger) visited Ulster on at least two occasions. The General Court of Massachussetts approved a tract of land on the south banks of the Merrimack River for these Ulster emigrants to settle. Their ship – Eagle Wing – set sail in September 1636 with 140 passengers, but due to severe storms had to turn back. Cotton Mather referred to this attempted migration in his Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) and in a letter to Rev John Woodside in February 1718.

In the late 1600s a sizeable Ulster-Scots community developed in Somerset County, on the eastern shore of Maryland. In 1680, Englishman Colonel William Stevens, who owned land at Rehobeth, Maryland, wrote directly to the ‘Presbytery of the Laggan’ in Donegal requesting that a minister be sent for these people. In 1683 the young Rev Francis Makemie – ‘The Father of American Presbyterianism’ – arrived and began a pioneering ministry that lasted for 25 years. Other Ulster ministers such as Rev William Traill and Rev William Holmes went too.

The petition was carried to New England by Rev William Boyd, the minister of Macosquin Presbyterian Church near Coleraine. It is thought that his father was Rev. Thomas Boyd who had been in Londonderry during the siege of 1689. On his arrival in Boston in July 1718 Boyd met with the local authorities. They were keen to have new settlers, especially people used to farming and frontier life; the colonial government thought that Ulster settlers could be placed on the outer reaches of their colony. Rev Increase Mather wrote that Boyd was a man distinguished ‘by the Exemplary holiness of his Conversation, and the Eminency of his Ministerial Gifts’.

The Shute Petition has been a treasured artefact for the past three centuries. In May 1890, it was displayed at the Scotch-Irish Society of the United States annual congress at the Machinery Hall in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was read aloud by Arthur L. Perry, Professor of Political Economy and History at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, who said:

‘... when I looked upon this tattered and worn piece of parchment, it inspired in me feelings of increased reverence for our noble ancestors … the eagerness of our forefathers to leave the land of oppression for the shores of the free ... precious in the eyes of New England, nay precious in the eyes of Scotch-Irishmen everywhere, is this venerable muniment of intelligence and courageous purpose.’

James McGregor, the boy who had experienced the Siege of Derry in 1689, was to become a ‘Moses-like’ figure in this great exodus story. He was now minister of Aghadowey Presbyterian Church, but the financial hardship of Ulster caused him to take his own family and many others from the congregation to America. In his farewell sermon he said they were leaving ‘to avoid oppression and cruel bondage, to shun persecution and designed ruin, to withdraw from the communion of idolators and to have an opportunity of worshipping God according to the dictates of conscience and the rules of His inspired Word.’

A number of ships (such as the William and Mary, Maccallum, William and Elizabeth, Mary and Elizabeth, Robert and William) set sail from the ports of Coleraine and Londonderry in Ulster, carrying up to 1000 people. They arrived in Boston during late summer and early autumn, but were not enthusiastically welcomed by the Massachusetts Puritans. The migrants had to split up – one group headed north to Casco Bay, Maine where they endured a freezing winter. The following spring they sailed to the mouth of the Merrimack River and then travelled inland to an area called Nutfield; McGregor had been in Dracut, but he joined them at Nutfield in April 1719.

Like many familiar Ulster places, these two emigration ports were brought by the emigrants to New England. In 1722 Nutfield was renamed Londonderry; and in 1743, ‘Boston Township No 2’ in Massachusetts was renamed Colrain.

These brothers were well-to-do merchants in Ballymoney, County Antrim. They apparently sought refuge in Londonderry during the Williamite War. John died shortly before the planned departure in 1718, but his widow, three sons and daughter Janet travelled with James and other family members and neighbours to New England. Janet’s memories of arriving in America were recorded around 1785 by her granddaughter - she remembered 16 people without enough money to emigrate who had indentured themselves to her father, and she recalled that the travellers sang Psalms when they arrived in Boston on the Sabbath.

James was born in Scotland c. 1670, and moved with his parents to Macosquin, County Londonderry, c. 1690. He was a linen draper and tailor, and it is said that he met Janet – the sister-in-law of Rev James McGregor – when she came into his shop to be measured for wedding clothes. She was unwillingly being married to an older man called Lindsay, to whom her parents owed money. She and James eloped that evening and were married by the curate of a neighbouring parish. Their son William Gregg, born in Ireland c. 1695, became the principal surveyor who laid out property lots in the new settlement of Londonderry.

Mary Wilson was born in 1720 on board the ship on which her parents, James and Elizabeth Wilson, were travelling to America. The story goes that a pirate attacked their vessel, and threatened all on board with death, but on hearing the baby’s cries he said if they named the child Mary, after his mother, he would spare the whole ship. He gave the child a bolt of green brocade material for her future wedding dress. Mary Wilson spent the rest of her life in Londonderry, New Hampshire.

In November 1718 the people of Brunswick called Woodside to be their minister. Here he built a ‘garrison house, fortify’d with palisadoes & two large bastions’, which proved a vital place of refuge during an attack by American Indians in 1722. Woodside’s time in Maine was unhappy, however, and ‘after many and grievous calamities’ he set sail from Boston for London in 1720. In a petition to the King in 1723 he claimed to have brought over to New England some 40 families which together comprised over 160 people.

Andrew and Jane McFadden were among the earliest Ulster settlers in Maine, and had probably emigrated on the Maccallum. They named a daughter, as well as their new home on Merrymeeting Bay, after Somerset on the banks of the River Bann. In 1766 Jane’s story was written down:

‘… Jane Macfadden of Georgetown about 82 Years of Age testifyeth and Saith that She with her late husband Andrew Macfadden lived in the Town of Garvo in the County of Derry on the ban Water in Ireland … about Forty Six Years ago my Husband and I removed from Ireland to Boston and from Boston we moved down to Kennebeck-River and up the River to Merry Meeting Bay … As my husband was aclearing away the Trees to Merry-Meeting Bay he Said it was a very pleasant place and he thought it was like a place call’d Summersett on the ban Water in Ireland…’

Robert Dinsmoor was John’s great grandson, and was born in Windham, New Hampshire in 1757. He was a renowned local poet and in 1828 a collection of his Incidental Poems were published in Haverhill, which included a family biography. Some were written to be sung to traditional Scottish and Ulster tunes such as Scots Wha Hae and Boyne Water. Many of the poems use Scots language words and expressions, best known around the world through the poems of Robert Dinsmoor’s contemporary, Robert Burns, Scotland’s National Bard.

The 1718 migration story was told in Dinsmoor’s poem Jamie Cochran:

In Ulster Province, Erin’s northern strand
Five shiploads joined to leave that far off land.
They had their ministers to pray and preach
These twenty families embarked in each.
Here I would note and have it understood,
Those emigrants were not Hibernian blood,
But sturdy Scotsmen true, whose fathers fled
From Argyllshire, where protestants had bled
In days of Stuart Charles and James second
Where persecution was a virtue reckoned,
They found shelter on the Irish shore
In Ulster, not a century before
Four of these ships at Boston harbor landed;
The fifth, by chance at Casco Bay was stranded…

The Thorntons have been described as ‘rigid Presbyterians who had fled from Scotland to avoid the persecutions of Charles II. Many of these colonists and their descendants subsequently emigrated from Ireland to America where they became known as the Scotch-Irish’.

James and Elizabeth Thornton emigrated to Maine from Londonderry, Ulster, with their four-year-old son Matthew, around 1718. In 1738 James Thornton helped found a new town in Massachusetts, which was to be settled by ‘inhabitants of the Kingdom of Ireland or their descendants being Protestants … of the Presbyterian persuasion as used in the Church of Scotland’. The town was initially called Lisburn, named after the town in Ulster, but was later renamed Pelham.

Matthew Thornton spent his early years in Maine and Massachussetts, before settling in Londonderry, New Hampshire in 1740. He was a physician and Colonel of the militia. He married Hannah Jack, also of Ulster-Scots parentage. In 1775 Thornton denounced the ‘unconstitutional and tyrannical Acts of the British Parliament’, helped to draft the first state constitution and was selected for the Continental Congress. He was one of the 56 who signed the Declaration of Independence, and one of three Ulster-born signatories.

He died in 1803, aged 89, in Newburyport while visiting his daughter Hannah McGaw. He was buried at Thornton’s Ferry, New Hampshire.

One of the 35 Scotch-Irish founders of Belfast was John Davidson, whose parents emigrated to America from Moneymore in County Londonderry around 1728, following the brutal robbery and murder of their own parents. In his 1832 Reminiscences, John Davidson said ‘my ancestors on both my father and mother’s side were both from Scotland; were by profession what was then Protestants, they embarked to the north of Ireland … from that they call us Scotch Irish, we are called so to this day’.

The Davidsons initially settled in Woburn, Massachusetts, then Tewkesbury and then Windham, where they were friends of the Dinsmoor family. John’s father bought him a plot of land at Belfast which today is Moose Point State Park. The town was incorporated in 1773.

Peterborough dates from 1739 but grew rapidly in 1759 with the arrival of ‘forty five or fifty families from Lunenburg, Londonderry, and some immediately from Ireland. They all, however belonged to the same stock. They came to this country from the north of Ireland, and were usually called Scotch-Irish’.

In 1839 a descendant of one of these pioneering families, John Hopkins Morison, published a wonderful centennial book charting the town’s history and retelling the traditions of the Siege of Derry. He interviewed the oldest residents such as Sarah M’Nee, then 97 years old, who had been born in Ulster. She remembered their arrival in Boston.

Morison described their homes – a dresser, fireplace, tales of olden days, ‘the preeminence of Ireland’, and a family Bible from which a chapter would be read and then prayers offered.