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9 It was time for a change. In 1771 James McHenry faced a situation shaped both by domestic events and by history itself. McHenry certainly hoped that his health would improve with rest in a more wholesome setting. James was young, born in Ballymena (near Belfast), County Antrim, probably on November 16, 1753, and so was only sixteen, about to turn seventeen. His family insisted that he had worn himself out, studying too long and sleeping too little, leaving his body weak and in need of recuperation . It could not have helped that his only sister Anna had died that year at the age of twenty, possibly of typhus.1 Her death and his own illness gave him the determination to retrieve what he could of his well-being in the colonies. But why did McHenry choose the colonies? A trans-Atlantic voyage from northern Ireland to British North America was far more dangerous than a trip to the spas of Germany or the milder climate of the Mediterranean . Of course, one took risks traveling anywhere—Roman malaria and Barbary pirates posed their own perils. Those destinations, however, did not offer the opportunities found in the colonies. Ambition prodded him to consider the colonies rather than Europe—the family’s recent dealings with mortality left him resolved to make the most of his life, and the colonies offered a new start. He was in good company. Many Scots-Irish viewed British North America with hope, if not envy. Such was the case, for example, with “William Drennan, then a young medical student at Edinburgh, [who] enthusiastically sympathized with the Americans. To him America was ‘the promised land [he] would wish to view before [he] died,’ as well as the place he intended to emigrate to should he fail an examination.” For most of the eighteenth century, the Scots-Irish flooded the American colonies in search one “Of a Persevering Temper” James McHenry 10 chapter one of that Promised Land. So the journey McHenry now made involved a path well worn by his people; he could count on being received by other ScotsIrish Presbyterians, perhaps especially because he was among the lucky few with some property and a solid start to an education.2 In the colonies he might also be able to rise above the limited future northern Ireland, his homeland, offered him. Ireland should have been more hospitable. Most of the Irish Presbyterians had been “transplanted” from Scotland in the seventeenth century, some as early as 1607. The emigration had been encouraged by King James I, a Scotsman who had hoped to tie the Emerald Isle to England by bonds of loyalty to him. Given large parcels of land, the Scots-Irish built castles, established their own schools, and settled towns like McHenry’s, Ballymena, on the River Braid in County Antrim and located about twenty-three miles northwest of Belfast.3 But history was not on their side. James I had died leaving the ScotsIrish Presbyterians as “dissenters” in a land dominated by the English and their established Anglican church. Anglicans were, nonetheless, a minority and felt themselves politically and socially threatened by both the Catholic majority and the Presbyterians. So the Anglican Irish Parliament not only retained many of the previous centuries’ oppressive laws, it created more.4 Soon the persecution began. The government barred Trinity College to Presbyterians and imprisoned members of the denomination wholesale. Then, on October 23, 1641, Ireland’s desperately suppressed Catholics rebelled , massacring thousands of Protestant colonists. Those not killed in the initial uprising wandered the countryside and most either starved or froze to death. Eight years later, Cromwell invaded and subjugated the island, temporarily banishing the Presbyterians of Down and Antrim to Munster because they would not sign the “Engagement” oath promising fidelity to the government.5 Oppression continued through the 1660s. Presbyterian services and schools were forbidden, and the law now required tutors, College Fellows, and the clergy to conform to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. Magistrates had to take the Anglican sacrament or swear never to attempt a change in church and state. The Test Act (1673) embodied all of this, requiring that all officeholders swear allegiance to England and her established church; this continued well into the eighteenth century.6 While the persecution had diminished in the eighteenth century, Presbyterians still could not hold many governmental offices, for “[t]o many leading Anglicans the Presbyterians presented a greater threat to their church [3.138.124.40] Project...

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