John Dunlap and the politics of cultural commemoration
By Pauline Hadaway
As the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, Northern Ireland’s Ulster-Scots institutions have renewed a long-standing claim that Presbyterians of Ulster-Scots descent played a decisive role in founding the United States and shaping the Declaration. The Ulster-Scots Agency points to prominent American revolutionaries with Ulster family connections, including Thomas McKean, commander of the Pennsylvania Associators, Maghera-born Charles Thomson, secretary to the Continental Congress, and John Dunlap, the Strabane-born printer who produced the famous Dunlap broadsides that carried news of the Declaration to the American public.
These claims acquired fresh political significance earlier this year when Communities Minister Gordon Lyons awarded £426,000 to the America 250 funding scheme administered by the Ulster-Scots Agency. Meanwhile, Lyons’ DUP colleague Gregory Campbell MP fired a broadside of his own, accusing the Irish government of “misappropriation”. After An Post issued a commemorative stamp honouring Dunlap, Campbell objected to what he regarded as the Republic’s claim upon “this famous son of Strabane, an Ulster-Scot, a Presbyterian”.
Presbyterian traditions of dissent and individual liberty clearly made their mark on revolutionary thinking, while many brave Ulster Presbyterians played a prominent political and military role advancing the Patriot cause. Yet claims of ancestral ownership diminish the historical achievement of the Declaration itself, as a document which emerged from and belongs to a much wider intellectual and political world.
John Dunlap’s life illustrates the depth and complexity of that world. Born in Strabane in 1747, he sailed to Philadelphia at the age of ten, where he was apprenticed as a printer. He later rose to become printer to the Continental Congress and to fight alongside George Washington at Trenton and Princeton. Raised within a Presbyterian culture, shaped by Scotland and Ireland, Dunlap made his life and career in revolutionary America. To claim that he belonged to Northern Ireland is not simply anachronistic – he was born almost 180 years before Partition – but imposes modern identities upon a world that was far more fluid and interconnected.
Events taking place across the North and tributes like the Republic of Ireland’s commemorative stamp, rightly celebrate Dunlap’s role in Irish, British and American history. Yet, as many of the events themselves show, his story belongs to something larger than either modern Irish nationalism or Ulster unionism. In a lecture hosted by the Grand Orange Lodge as part of the America 250 programme, British Conservative peer, Daniel Hannan put forward the constitutional inheritance of 1688 as evidence of Britain’s contribution to the American Revolution. The Glorious Revolution established the principle that Kings rule under law rather than by divine right alone, while the English Bill of Rights affirmed parliamentary government and
John Dunlap and the politics of cultural commemoration
By Pauline Hadaway
As the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, Northern Ireland’s Ulster-Scots institutions have renewed a long-standing claim that Presbyterians of Ulster-Scots descent played a decisive role in founding the United States and shaping the Declaration. The Ulster-Scots Agency points to prominent American revolutionaries with Ulster family connections, including Thomas McKean, commander of the Pennsylvania Associators, Maghera-born Charles Thomson, secretary to the Continental Congress, and John Dunlap, the Strabane-born printer who produced the famous Dunlap broadsides that carried news of the Declaration to the American public.
These claims acquired fresh political significance earlier this year when Communities Minister Gordon Lyons awarded £426,000 to the America 250 funding scheme administered by the Ulster-Scots Agency. Meanwhile, Lyons’ DUP colleague Gregory Campbell MP fired a broadside of his own, accusing the Irish government of “misappropriation”. After An Post issued a commemorative stamp honouring Dunlap, Campbell objected to what he regarded as the Republic’s claim upon “this famous son of Strabane, an Ulster-Scot, a Presbyterian”.
Presbyterian traditions of dissent and individual liberty clearly made their mark on revolutionary thinking, while many brave Ulster Presbyterians played a prominent political and military role advancing the Patriot cause. Yet claims of ancestral ownership diminish the historical achievement of the Declaration itself, as a document which emerged from and belongs to a much wider intellectual and political world.
John Dunlap’s life illustrates the depth and complexity of that world. Born in Strabane in 1747, he sailed to Philadelphia at the age of ten, where he was apprenticed as a printer. He later rose to become printer to the Continental Congress and to fight alongside George Washington at Trenton and Princeton. Raised within a Presbyterian culture, shaped by Scotland and Ireland, Dunlap made his life and career in revolutionary America. To claim that he belonged to Northern Ireland is not simply anachronistic – he was born almost 180 years before Partition – but imposes modern identities upon a world that was far more fluid and interconnected.
Events taking place across the North and tributes like the Republic of Ireland’s commemorative stamp, rightly celebrate Dunlap’s role in Irish, British and American history. Yet, as many of the events themselves show, his story belongs to something larger than either modern Irish nationalism or Ulster unionism. In a lecture hosted by the Grand Orange Lodge as part of the America 250 programme, British Conservative peer, Daniel Hannan put forward the constitutional inheritance of 1688 as evidence of Britain’s contribution to the American Revolution. The Glorious Revolution established the principle that Kings rule under law rather than by divine right alone, while the English Bill of Rights affirmed parliamentary government and