Theodore Roosevelt
November 15, 2020
Robert Hamilton, Grandma Smith’s 5th great grandfather, was born in Banbridge, County Down, Ireland, on May 16, 1760 and died in Lebanon, Warren County, Ohio, on February 24, 1841. This information conforms to Hamilton’s tombstone and documentation unearthed by many family historians. His parents were most likely Robert Hamilton and Jane (nee) Pennington, flax farmers and manufacturers of linen in their mill.
The Hamilton family came from Scotland, either as lowlanders who had suffered as serfs for centuries, or ‘landed gentry’. We are not sure when Robert Hamilton’s ancestors first migrated to Ireland, but we can surmise they came during the time of the Ulster Plantation project instituted by the British to wrest control from the Catholic Irish tribes in north Ireland.
With Scotsmen first being imported in large numbers in the early 1600’s to the Ulster Province the yoke of feudalism in Scotland promised to be alleviated for those adventurous souls who gambled on 31 year leases in a new land. McCarthy writes further: “….(the Scots had) left Ireland a thousand years earlier as ungovernable, semi-heathen, feisty, fun loving Gaels, now a new tribe returned seasoned by war, reformed by religion, and economically enterprising….but their idyllic Ulster colony inevitably became a nightmare”. (McCarthy, Karen, The Other Irish: The Scots-Irish Rascals Who Made America, 2011.
The Irish Catholic cousins of the Presbyterian Scots may have been evicted from their lands at the end of the Nine Years War in 1607, but they learned to survive by plunder. As the enterprising Scots, lured by long term land leases rebuilt the north of Ireland with farms, livestock, a new merchant class and the religious belief and promise that hard work and self-reliance would be rewarded, the Irish would strip them of their success from time to time by pillaging their lands. After the Irish retreated the Scots would return and rebuild.
This conflict between the Irish and their Gaelic cousins would continue through the rest of the 17th century.
Some Hamilton family researchers argue that our Robert Hamilton was a descendant of Lord Claude Hamilton. Certainly there were Hamiltons who owned large sections of land in County Down dating back to the early 1600’s and encouraged Scotsmen to colonize and transform the land in much the same manner as those in the other 6 counties of the Plantation of Ulster. But this inquiry will start with Robert Hamilton (1760-1841) and follow his descendants to Grandma Smith without regard to his family’s social standing.
HAMILTON FAMILY OF BANBRIDGE
Banbridge was founded around 1694 three years after the end of the ‘War of Two Kings’. The town was built around a bridge which crossed the River Bann and connected an important roadway between Belfast and Dublin. The population included Scottish serfs who emigrated to the Banbridge area and Scottish farmers and linen mills from surrounding towns and the County Armagh.
Family historian, Donna Zurcher, has collected and researched the bulk of Robert Hamilton history in Scotland, Ireland, and the United States and published her research in 1996. The following condenses her findings about the Hamiltons in Ireland:
(Zurcher, Donna, Robert Hamilton's Families, Vol.1, 1996)
• Robert was born to Robert Hamilton and Jane Pennington (possibly from Ballyvally) and baptized in Banbridge’s Presbyterian church on October 5, 1760;
• Two brothers, James (1765) and Alexander (1768), were also baptized in Banbridge;
• Robert’s family possibly started the Hamilton Linen Mills in Banbridge;
• Summary: the Hamiltons of Banbridge left a very small, documentary footprint.
The map below shows the locations in the Lowlands of Scotland which were Hamilton Clan areas ( ‘H’ marks the spot). Zurcher Map
Presbyterianism and the Scots-Irish
Before moving on to Pennsylvania with the teenage Robert, I think it is important to present the role that the Presbyterian religion may have played in his commitment to the War of Independence from 1775-1781 despite privation (woundings in battle, imprisonment, Valley Forge, lack of food, missed payrolls) and the ever present specter of death in battle.
In the summer of 1971 I had the honor to attend and participate in the University of Windsor (Canada) course on the history of the Protestant Reformation taught by Dr. Hans J. Hillerbrand, a recognized expert on the subject. His new book, Christendom Divided, had just been published as part of the Theological Resources series and formed the text for the class.
Having finished eight years of Catholic seminary instruction and prior to starting my graduate theology studies, Hillebrand’s view of the Reformation can best be understood as a creative, revolutionary change across 16th century Europe in these key areas: 1) cultural/social; 2) political; and, 3) religious practices/theological understanding of Christianity. It also filled in critical gaps in my own narrow understanding of that era.
For our purposes we will look primarily at one man and his influence on Scotland and its people, John Knox.
Knox transformed all of Scottish life when he ushered in Calvinism during the Reformation of the mid-16th century. The social, cultural, political, and religious life of the Scots underwent a complete change due to the man described by Arthur Herman as “….a prolific writer and a preacher of terrifying power….(whose) early years had been spent in exile, imprisonment, and even penal servitude chained to a rowing bench in the king’s galleys”. (Herman, Arthur, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, 2001)
Herman describes Knox’s mission to “….(turn the Scots into God’s chosen people and Scotland into the New Jerusalem…and to accomplish it he had to (destroy Scotland’s link to the) Catholic Church”. In a few short decades Knox and his confederates took the poorest country in Western Europe and convinced its people to reject the notion of political authority as divinely transmitted from God through the monarchy, organized the Scottish people to democratize the administration of their churches and selection of their clergy, and over time Knox’s 1560 call for a national education system bore fruit in the late 1600’s with passage of the School Act and within a generation created the highest literacy rate in all of Europe.
Consider these numbers: “By one estimate male literacy (in the low country of Scotland) stood at 55% by 1720; by 1750 it may have stood as high as 75%, compared with only 53% in England. It would not be until the 1880s that the English would finally catch up with their northern neighbors”. This accomplishment would not have been surprising to “…Presbyterian boys and girls who (knew they) must know how to read Holy Scripture”. (Herman)
Perhaps Knox’s singular contribution to and explanation for the Scots-Irish who came to America in the 1700’s and fought bravely in the Revolutionary War was the holy covenant with God described by Knox and another founding father of Scottish Presbyterianism, George Buchanan. Buchanan wrote in his The Law of Government Among the Scots in 1579, seven years after the death of Knox, that “….all political authority ultimately belonged to the people…The people were more powerful than the rulers they created; they were free to remove them at will. The people have the right to confer the royal authority upon whomever they wish….(Buchanan wrote further that) ‘when the ruler or rulers failed to act in the people’s interest then each and every citizen - even the lowest and meanest of men - had the sacred right and duty to resist that tyrant, even to the point of killing him’”. (Herman)
One hundred years before John Locke and nearly two hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, it was Knox and Buchanan who first established the belief within Scottish Presbyterianism that all governing authority is derived of, for, and by the people in a covenant with God.
It is no wonder then that Grandma Smith’s grandfather, Scots-Irish Presbyterian Robert Hamilton, quickly volunteered for the War of Independence after arriving in America in 1775 and had the fortitude to see it through six more years until the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781.
.Books, Articles, Authors Used for this Post:
The Other Irish: The Scots-Irish Rascals Who made America, by Karen F. McCarthy.
Robert Hamilton’s Families, Vol. 1, by Donna Zurcher.
Chrsitendom Divided, by Hans J. Hillerbrand.
How the Scots Invented the Modern World, by Arthur Herman.
America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It, by C. Bradley Thompson, 2019.
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