‘It’s all here to be told’: Ulster’s role in the American declaration of independence
by Allan LEONARD
25 August 2026

The Linen Hall library in Belfast hosted a panel discussion as part of its USA-NI 250 exhibition programme, marking the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence. The event, “The American Declaration of Independence: American and Ulster Contexts, Links and Legacies,” was chaired by Dr Frank Ferguson of Ulster University, who also serves as chair of the Linen Hall Library’s board. The panel brought together Dr Andrew Holmes (historian of Presbyterianism at Queen’s University Belfast); Aaron Callan (Alderman, Causeway Coast and Glens Borough Council); Paul McGuigan (documentary filmmaker at Northern Star Pictures); and Heidi McAlpin (manager of the Ulster Scots Broadcast Fund (USBF)). The event was introduced by Patsy Horton of the Linen Hall.

Who were the Ulster Presbyterians?

Ferguson opened the historical discussion by asking the panel and audience to think carefully about what “Presbyterian” actually meant in the 18th century. Between 250,000 and 300,000 people emigrated from Ireland to America during that period, the majority Presbyterian and from the north of Ireland. He claimed that before the 1770s, the Presbyterian organisational network was “one of the few institutions that actually brought the colonies together”. 

But Holmes cautioned against treating “Presbyterian” as a fixed category. He said that a third and three-quarters of those who identified as Presbyterian did not attend church regularly. Many who arrived in America as Presbyterians became Methodists or Baptists as they moved to the frontier and lost access to a formal church structure. “The Southern Baptist Association today probably has more Scots-Irish in it than the Presbyterian communities,” he observed. And while Presbyterians could be thought of as naturally loyal and respectable — the tradition of Viscount Brookeborough and James Craig — they could equally be seen as radical and rebellious, as in the Society of the United Irishmen, founded in Belfast in 1791. What mattered, he suggested, was whether it was the lived experience of exclusion or the theological and philosophical principles of Presbyterianism that drove their involvement in the American rebellion: “Is it because they are Presbyterians or is it because of their Presbyterianism?”

Callan, speaking from the perspective of the Roe Valley and northwest Ulster, emphasised the material drivers of emigration. Land was the central issue. The Anglican establishment controlled most of the land in Ireland; Presbyterian tenant farmers, who had fought in the Williamite Wars and felt the promises made to them had not been kept, faced increasing economic pressure. When the British Crown, following the Seven Years’ War, blocked further expansion beyond the Appalachian Mountains, the same frustrations that had driven people to leave Ireland were now being replicated in the colonies. Figures such as Reverend William Martin, who took five shiploads of his congregation from the Roe Valley to the Carolinas, and Colonel William Preston of Virginia, who signed the Fincastle Resolutions, were driven, Callan argued, as much by economic necessity and the politics of land as by theological principle. “It’s all driven by economics and land for a lot of them,” he said, “and wanting to get prosperity.”

Telling the story on screen

McGuigan described how his film for RTÉ came about. In 2017, Ancestry.com produced an advertising campaign using a modern, multi-ethnic recreation of the famous Trumbull painting of the signing of the Declaration, planting the idea that the document’s legacy was inseparable from migration. By late 2024, with the USA 250 commemorations approaching and the BBC already working on a sweeping two-part series, McGuigan was looking for a different angle.

His wife, a former professional genealogist, suggested approaching the story from the Irish perspective — specifically through the descendants of the signers. McGuigan was initially sceptical: “There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of you finding anyone today that goes back to 1776 from here.” Two weeks later, she produced a book called Suspected of Independence by David McKean, opening at page fourteen: “My family emigrated from Ballymoney.” McKean, it transpired, was a former US ambassador to Luxembourg and chief of staff to John Kerry — and a direct descendant of Thomas McKean, the last signer of the Declaration. 

The film, “Freedom Founder: Thomas McKean and the American Revolution”, was commissioned by RTÉ in November 2025 and shot in January 2026, partly in a snowstorm at the historical sites in Delaware and New Jersey. “You get a tingle up your spine sometimes,” McGuigan said of standing at Thomas McKean’s grave in Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, snow falling, while David McKean stood bookending the story. 

Broadcasting, education, and the curriculum

McAlpin gave an overview of the Ulster Scots Broadcast Fund’s contribution to the USA 250 commemorations, noting that the sheer scale of the Ulster-American connection “bowls me over — even just touching the surface of this story, how big it is, how seismic, how important and how relevant it is today”. She asked the room whether any of them had learned this history in school. The answer, she said, was the same as her own: “No. And it’s to our shame.”

The USBF’s slate for USA 250 included McGuigan’s RTÉ film; “Declaration”, a two-part deep-dive series on BBC Northern Ireland by Double Band Films; the ongoing “Mahon’s Way” series with presenter Joe Mahon on UTV, which devotes several episodes to USA 250 connections across Northern Ireland and into Donegal and Monaghan; a two-part series by GB News presenter Dougie Beattie on “Architects of America”; and “America’s Ulster Story”, the Nerve Centre’s multimedia educational resource developed with historian Mark Thompson. 

McAlpin highlighted the significance of the moment for education policy. The Northern Ireland curriculum is currently being redrafted, and with the new Ulster-Scots and Ulster British Commissioner Lee Reynolds and Irish Language Commissioner Pól Deeds in post, there is now a legal requirement for Ulster Scots content to be embedded across all key stages: “It is now legal to have these stories embedded in our curriculum”. She gave examples of projects in Saintfield and Magherafelt that are working with Francis Hutcheson and Charles Thompson connections in the US. 

Questions and discussion

The discussion was opened to the floor with questions that pushed at some of the less comfortable aspects of the Ulster-American story.

An audience member raised the Paxton Boys — a group of Scots-Irish frontier settlers responsible for the massacre of Conestoga Native Americans in 1763 — and asked whether this was a negative legacy that the commemorations were adequately acknowledging. Ferguson was direct: the programming had consciously sought to engage with those difficult histories. “We’re not running away from or hiding any of those elements,” he said, while acknowledging that there had historically been a tendency to romanticise the frontier. Holmes added his characteristic caution: “I am uncomfortable with heroic narratives and interpretations of the past that divide people into good things and bad things.” What mattered was asking why particular stories were being told from particular perspectives — and recognising that the choice of emphasis was always a dialogue between the present and the past.

A second questioner raised the complexity of the Ulster-Scots category itself, claiming that: up to 40% of those who emigrated were not Presbyterian; many were Scots who had spent only a few years in Ulster before moving on; and almost all of the educated and moneyed emigrés had owned enslaved people. Holmes and Callan both acknowledged these points, with Callan noting that figures such as Hercules Mulligan — a Scots-Irish spy for George Washington — had owned enslaved people while fighting for liberty. “There’s a lot of context, a lot of grey,” he said. “And you take the frontier, for example — the relationship between the Native Americans and the Ulster-Scots group, it fluctuates over time.”

I shared my American emigration story, having lived in Northern Ireland for over 30 years, and described how my own family genealogy first drew me towards the Ulster Protestant dimension of American history — a bloodline I was able to trace back to Thomas McKean’s mother, Letitia Finney. I noted that the Scots-Irish contribution to American history is simply not taught in the United States. I asked McAlpin and McGuigan how the learning gathered through these productions might be reflected back into education on both sides of the Atlantic.

McAlpin responded with cautious optimism. While she acknowledged it was “above my pay grade” to prescribe curriculum reform in the United States, she pointed to the more tractable opportunity in Northern Ireland. With the curriculum redraft under way, the new commissioners in place, and a legal requirement to embed these stories across key stages, “It’s all here to be told.” The approach, she emphasised, had to be nuanced rather than didactic: “It’s not gonna be told as like a propaganda machine. It’s not gonna be told as like this is what happened, and that is that. Because all things are being discovered all the time.” She described the Education Authority as having “a work on its hands” to unpick the politicisation that had allowed certain historical voids to grow — but expressed confidence that the collective will, the resources, and the academic network now existed to make it happen. “It’s an exciting time.”

Ferguson closed with a reminder of the library’s own role in the story, founded as it was during the same era of Enlightenment ideas flowing across the Atlantic. He thanked the panel, noting that the event could easily have continued for several hours. A further session on the same topic was scheduled at the Linen Hall on 27 August.