Marking the 250th Anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence – A Critical View…

John Gray is the Chair of Reclaim the Enlightenment

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Who could not be inspired by the opening words of the American Declaration of Independence signed by Congress on the 4^{th of} July 1776.

For a very different take consider what the celebrated escaped slave, Frederick Douglass had to say in 1852.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him … the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

Let us explore where it all went wrong.

But first back to beginnings and the glorious dawn, one in which Ulster Presbyterians played a significant part.

At least four of the 56 signatories to the Declaration of Independence were first generation immigrants from Ulster. One of them, Charles Thomson, born in Maghera in 1729 arrived as a penniless orphan in 1739. Evidently a hugely talented man he became a lawyer. He was notable and unusual in his advocacy on behalf of the native Indians who called him ‘the man who speaks the truth’. From the outset he was a supporter of the revolutionary cause and served as secretary to the Continental Congress.

The Declaration of Independence was printed by John Dunlap from Strabane.

The influence went further back than that. Francis Hutcheson from Saintfield was the most influential Irish radical philosopher of the 18^th century. While running a dissenting academy in Dublin in the 1720’s he wrote his major philosophical works.

Amongst his propositions perhaps two were crucial: ‘That humanity should seek ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’. Vitally in the context of developing events in the 18^th century he argued that ‘the people have the right of defending themselves against the abuse of power’ and carried that proposition further arguing that colonists ‘may justifiably constitute themselves into an independent state… if the mother country attempts anything oppressive towards a colony… the colony is not bound to remain subject any longer’.

Hutcheson was appointed to the influential position of Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University in 1729 and inspired a generation of students destined for the Presbyterian ministry in Ireland and others who emigrated to the American colonies. His texts were taught at the leading American universities, and the leaders of the American revolution were influenced by his work. Amongst them was Thomas Jefferson who played the leading role in drawing up the Declaration of Independence.

It has been estimated that during the eighteenth century as many as 200,000 Presbyterians emigrated to the future United States. One cause of their disaffection was the religious disabilities they suffered. The legitimacy of their marriages and funerals was called into question and they were disbarred from public office. Although these restrictions often remained in abeyance the threat remained.

More significantly their hardships on the land triggered particular peaks in emigration. Successive bad harvests could be a push factor, but rack-renting by the great landlords led to acute hardship and pervasive discontent.

From the 1750’s onwards these grievances accelerated. Many families who had arrived from Scotland in the 1690’s had been granted leases on relatively generous terms. By mid-century those leases were running out and rents had trebled. Now landlords, and notably the Donegalls in County Antrim, seized the opportunity to demand large fines equal to three or four times the annual rent for the renewal of leases. These were often beyond the means of sitting tenants who faced eviction when their leases were taken on by moneyed middlemen.

The situation was exacerbated by crop failures and a recession in the linen trade in 1770-1772. It was a situation which sparked the emergence of an agrarian resistance movement and mainly in County Antrim, the Hearts of Steel.

They described their circumstances thus;

… they have reduced us to such a deplorable state by such grievous oppressions that the poor is turned black in the face , and the skin parched on their back, that they are rendered incapable to support their starving families, that nature is but barely supported, that they have not even food, nor yet raiment to secure them from the extremities of the weather…

In December 1770 one of their leaders, David Douglas of Templepatrick was arrested. His followers determined to secure his release and marched 1,200 strong on Belfast. There they first wrecked the house of Waddell Cunningham, a leading merchant and middleman. The military fired on them killing three but they refused to disperse.

The situation was so threatening that the Sovereign was forced to release Douglas.

It was a temporary reprieve as the Lord Lieutenant issued a proclamation and warrants were issued for the arrest of many of the ring leaders, though landlords were to be disappointed by the unwillingness of juries to convict.

It was against this background that between 1770 and 1774 at least 12,000 Presbyterians emigrated to the American colonies.

One well documented exodus involved some 1,000 members of mainly covenanting families from districts including Ballymena, Ballymoney, Kellswater and Vow who sailed to South Carolina in 5 ships between August and September 1772. This was an exodus that can then be directly connected to support for the American revolution.

The movement was led by the Rev. William Martin, Minister at Kellswater, and a prominent figure in covenanting circles. It may have been triggered by conflict between members of his congregation and bailiffs and he preached warning that they were threatened by evictions and poverty.

He himself had received a call from his co-religionists already in South Carolina. Now in December 1771 he advertised in the Belfast News-Letter inviting ‘well disposed families that have a design to embrace this favourable opportunity to go to a country where they may enjoy the comforts of life in abundance, with the free exercise of their religious sentiments’.

The emigrants on arrival enjoyed a free allocation of land with heads of families securing 100 acres each and other adult members of each family 50 acres. As early as 1773 Martin was able to erect his own covenanting church.

Although their settlement had been of only a few years duration they knew where their loyalties lay once the American War of Independence broke out and reached South Carolina. In 1780 Martin preached a sermon describing how ‘their ancestors had been driven out of Scotland and Ireland; how they had come here and made a new life and were free, only for the British to try to deprive them of everything again’. He encouraged the recruitment of two companies of militia to resist.

Retribution followed; he was arrested and his house and church were burnt down but following the British defeat he was to re-emerge in a prominent if sometimes controversial role.

More generally the later migrants had often found themselves consigned to virgin territories on the western edge of existing settlement where they became battle hardened in periodic conflict with the native Indians.

Thus, it was that they were central to a crucial victory in the revolutionary war, the Battle of King’s Mountain, on the border between North and South Carolina in October 1780. The Patriot militia described as ‘the Overmountain men’ routed a Loyalist militia force. 43 of the patriot force have been identified as having been born in Ulster, and some were young recent immigrants with 21 having been born after 1750. Thomas Jefferson described this as ‘’the turn of the tide of success’. Indeed, it put an end to Loyalist hopes in the south east and ultimately led to Cornwallis’s entrapment and surrender at Yorktown in 1781. This in turn led to the overall British defeat in the war.

More generally it has been estimated that at least one third of the patriot army came from an Ulster Presbyterian background.

Constitutionally the new and emerging nation was initially governed by the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union adopted in 1781, however these were wholly inadequate for purpose as they gave the federal government no taxation powers, a crucial matter when it came to maintaining an army, and provided no central mandate for conducting foreign affairs.

Thus it was that a constitutional convention was summoned in May 1787 and by September it had agreed a new constitution. This was influenced by English common law including the legacy of the Magna Carta, and by enlightenment thinkers such as David Hume, John Locke and Montesquie.

It was a wholly republican constitution and it provided for a separation of powers between the elected House of Representatives, the Senate, and the President, with judicial oversight provided by the Supreme Court.

However the constitution contained within it an enduring taint. This was a slave owning democracy. Washington, Jefferson and even Benjamin Franklin all owned slaves. 70% of congressmen at their first meeting were slave owners. While northern leaders believed that slavery would fade away and did not wish to enshrine provision for it in the constitution, the six southern states refused to sign up unless slave owning was provided for.

This was done in spades. Although slaves were denied the vote it was agreed that they could be counted to three-fifths of their number in determining the electoral weight of each state, a provision that advantaged the slave owning states, indeed in the first congress the slave owning states commanded 45% of the seats in the House of Representatives It also included a provision for the return of escaped slaves to their masters, and permitted the continuance of the African slave trade until 1808.

So it was that one of Frances Hutcheson’s moral strictures – that slavery was ‘a reason for abhorrence and indignation’ was wholly evaded.

On a more positive note some states demanded further protections for individual rights and the first ten amendments to the constitution carried in 1791 constituted a Bill of Rights though these hardly applied to slaves.

Given circumstances in Ireland it was understandable that Presbyterians almost universally welcomed the American revolution and the new constitution. They did so entirely uncritically. Thus the United Irish Northern Star did indeed declare that ‘every breeze from the west brings us news of fair liberty’. Their increasingly estranged and conservative opponents led by William Bruce and Henry Joy in their 1794 ‘Thoughts on the British Constitution’ did look at the new American constitution and declared in its favour. For them ‘it is a declaration in writing of most of the primary principles of that very British one …’ and was ‘deservedly boasted, and well calculated… for the manners of the inhabitants’. This was surprising because in defending the British constitution they had proclaimed the virtues of an hereditary monarchy and of a largely hereditary House of Lords. Clearly the American constitution had done away with any hereditary element.

It may be that it was in response to Bruce and Joy’s publication that the Northern Star in September 1794 published an article entitled ‘Striking Resemblances Between the British and American Constitutions’. Perhaps the author did accept the structural similarities between the two constitutions but was certainly writing with tongue in cheek when he referred to the ‘few trifling’ differences between the two.

Thus amongst other things ‘the King can make peace or war, while the President cannot… The King can prevent any law from being enacted, which the President cannot’. Furthermore the King cost £2 million a year while the President had a salary of £4,000.

The British House of Lords was hereditary while the American Senate was elected as was the American House of Representatives. Meanwhile members of the British House of Commons represented ‘their own money’, and two thirds of them enjoyed government appointments.

Finally the Americans had already amended their constitution at a peoples convention while in Britain to suggest such a thing was an act of treason.

We need not doubt that the author’s final sentence in which he declared that ‘the English constitution is deservedly the wonder of the world’ was deeply satirical.

Neither the United Irishmen nor their opponents saw fit to criticise the skewing of the American constitution in favour of slavery!

It was only in the nineteenth century and from 1830 onwards that the Belfast Anti-Slavery Society became increasingly strident in its criticism of the American constitution and the actual extension of American slavery. As the United States expanded a subsequent compromise was made by which any new slavery free state had to be matched by one where slavery was permitted. Thus by 1860 the original 6 slavery states had expanded to 15.

The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act particularly enraged abolitionists as it made the provision of any assistance to an escaped slave a criminal act. Worse still in 1857 in an infamous case the Supreme Court ruled that the constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of black African descent. Thus even in states that had abolished slavery blacks were to be denied citizenship. It was no accident that the Chief Justice who wrote this judgement which helped trigger the Civil War was himself a slave owner and advocate of slavery.

We deservedly make much of the Presbyterian pioneers from Ulster and their role in the American revolution but we are less frank about their role in slavery or indeed in the extirpation of the native Indians

Take the first of those American presidents with Ulster connections that we so uncritically laud, Andrew Jackson who was President from 1829 – 1837 and who was controversial even in his own time.

He was the one with the most immediate Ulster connection. His parents had emigrated from Boneybefore near Carrickfergus in 1765 and he was born just two years later. He was unusual for his humble beginnings as his parents died at an early stage. Their family home in Ulster is a visitor centre, but I do wonder what legacy visitors find there?

Jackson made his mark in early conflicts with Indians but became famous for his role as the general leading the American forces in the crucial defeat of the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1814. During his lifetime he owned 5 plantations and between 95 and 150 slaves and whipped them as punishment. Applying hickory oil was a euphemism for whipping and hence Jackson’s nickname ‘old hickory’.

Jackson was also a key figure in encouraging the western expansion of white settlement at the expense of the native Indians. He signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 which legislated for the removal of all Indians east of the Mississipi. This led to the expulsion of the Cherokees in a mid winter forced march in which 4,000 of the 16,000 expelled died, an episode that became known as the ‘Trail of tears’.

For a truly horrifying account of the interaction of frontier settlers and the Indians we have to travel to Pennsylvania earlier in the 18^th century. Presbyterians immigrating from Ulster had found Puritan New England hostile territory and flocked to Pennysylvania with its more tolerant Quaker regime. In 1720 the administration there thought it had found a use for these new arrivals – ‘We were apprehensive from the northern Indians… [and] thought it prudent to plant a settlement’ but they found these Ulster settlers ungovernable – ‘[They] alleged that it was against the laws of God And nature, that such land should be idle, while so many Christians wanted to labour on it, and raise their bread’.

Inevitably tensions arose and in December 1763, buoyed up by the view that Indians were ‘Canaanite’s’, the settlers, now described as the Paxton Boys, engaged in an unprovoked attack on the Indian village of Conestoga Town where they massacred the inhabitants. Some Indians escaped and found shelter in the neighbouring Lancaster Workhouse. They were pursued there and massacred. The Paxton Boys now 300 strong marched on Philadelphia intending to put to death all Indians found there.

None other than Benjamin Franklin managed to mobilise a larger militia force to halt the advance of the Paxton Boys who agreed to disperse when it was agreed that they should submit their complaints in writing. Their argument was predictable – ‘All Indians are perfidious and deserving of annhilation…’ They also wanted a bounty for Indian scalps.

Benjamin Franklin’s verdict was emphatic – ‘The Indians would have been safe among any other people on earth, no matter how primitive, except these Christian white savages’.

Much later poetic justice was meted out on the leaders of the Paxton boys. They sided with the Patriots in the revolutionary war and in July 1778 were killed in what became called the Wyoming Massacre. It was Indian warriors fighting on the loyalist side who did the deed.

That instinct to settle beyond existing frontiers, to colonise new terrain extended beyond the Indians. It can be seen in the expansion into what became Texas and in involvement in the Mexican War of 1846 – 1848. One cannot argue a direct connection but surely some of the seeds of the insatiable United States empire building lie here..

Returning to the issue of slavery the Belfast Anti-Slavery Society which was primarily driven by evangelical Protestants increasingly focussed on the role of the American churches. The issue came to the fore during the visit of the Frederick Douglass, in 1845. It transpired that the Free Church of Scotland had been raising funds from slave owning Presbyterians in the southern states. Now he urged ‘send the money back’ in excoriating terms –

A man becomes the more cruel the more the religious element is perverted in him…if they are woman-whippers, cradle-plunderers, and man-stealers before their conversion, they are women-whippers, cradle-plunderers, and man stealers after it, and religion is to them but an additional stimulant to re-enact their atrocious deeds.

The Belfast body supported the refusal of communion with Presbyterian supporters of slavery. In the United States the church actually split on the issue and southern Presbyterian rudely rebuffed approaches from the Irish General Assembly on the matter.. It also turned out that many Baptists and Methodists were equally guilty.

In September 1853 another American visitor, a Mr McKim, Secretary of the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society, identified another problem;

He had met many persons in this country who were for abolition, but who, as hundreds of others had done on arriving at the other side of the Atlantic, afterwards threw up these feelings, on the change in their position when they went to the United States – in fact, then they became the patrons of the slave system.

That was why Mary Ann McCracken at the age of 89 was to be found in 1859 handing out anti-slavery leaflets to those embarking on an emigrant ship.

McKim’s allegation was a matter of fact; Ulster men who settled in the south, and including former United Irishmen, were amongst those who became slave owners. One example was John Neilson from Ballycarry who settled in Virginia and became a prominent architect working for both Presidents Jefferson and Madison. When he died in 1827 he left ‘eleven slaves’. He had maintained contact with the McCracken family and nominated none other than Mary Ann as executor of his will.

Meanwhile at the lowest level the Irish found themselves in competition with blacks and could even be the underdogs. One traveller reported how he had seen black slaves throwing bales of cotton off a bluff to a Mississipi barge where Irish labourers were expected to catch them at great peril. The witness asked the owner why he put the Irish in danger and got the reply that the slaves were worth money while the Irish were worth nothing.

At the time of the American Civil War the Irish fought on both sides, indeed there were specifically Irish regiments on each side. An estimated 150,000 fought on the union side, while 20,000 fought for the Confederacy. The disparity in numbers arose because the huge weight of immigration from the famine onwards, and overwhelmingly of Catholics, arrived in the north.

On the Confederate side 16 colonels were Irish. Few of them actually owned slaves, but an exception was Jack Thorington who had been born in Armagh in 1810 and became a lawyer in Montgomery, Alabama. As per the 1860 census he owned 33 slaves and no less than 20 of them were children aged 12 or under. One is bound to ask was he breeding up slaves for sale?

Of course the most notorious Irish supporter of the Confederacy was the Young Irelander, John Mitchel, originally from a Unitarian background in Newry. Already celebrated in Irish circles for his dramatic escape from Van Dieman’s Land as recounted in his best-seller, the Jail Journal, he not only supported slavery but advocated the re-opening of the African slave trade and he sacrificed two of his sons in the Confederate cause.

Meanwhile Mitchel’s fellow Young Irelander and escapee from Van Dieman’s Land, Thomas Francis Meagher, became general of a celebrated Irish brigade on the Union side, almost all of whom were Catholics.

While the Catholic church formally opposed slavery that had not been the case with many of its American adherents. Daniel O’Connell, in contrast to his Young Ireland opponents, had been an outspoken opponent of slavery. When some slave owning supporters of his campaign for the repeal of the union sent him funds he sent the money back.

While newly arrived Catholics formed the core of Irish recruitment to the Union army one should not assume that they actually supported black emancipation. Irish immigrants were at the heart of the draft riots in New York in the summer of 1863 that turned into an anti-black pogrom.

A century later there were echoes of these attitudes when Bernadette Devlin arrived as the heroine of the Irish civil rights struggle and was ceremonially given the keys to New York. She went to Harlem and gave them to the Black Panthers. Cue Irish American outrage. It was one thing to sing ‘We shall overcome’ as part of the Irish struggle; it was quite another thing to insist that it’s message should apply for blacks in the United States.

After the Union victory black slavery was finally abolished in 1865. No such liberty was extended to the native Indians who suffered from broken treaties and wars of extermination. They only gained automatic citizenship in 1924 but continued to suffer from policies of ethnic cleansing including sterilisation and the seizure of their children for placement in Christian boarding schools right up to the 1970’s.

For blacks the emancipation of 1865 was to prove a false dawn. Initially the Federal government sought to force through reform or ‘Reconstruction’ in the south but in 1876 there was a very closely contested Presidential election. It was only in 1877 that a corrupt deal was done by which the southern Democrats accepted the Republican victory but on condition that federal forces were withdrawn from the south.

Thus the federal government abandoned Reconstruction and left the outcome in the hands of state governments. What were called the Jim Crow laws were adopted in the southern states which dictated segregation and placed huge obstacles to black suffrage compounded by the actual violence of the Klu Klux Klan. These injustices were only resolved by Supreme Court judgements and new constitutional amendments in 1964 and 1965.

There are still major loopholes which impede American democracy. At state level the re-location of polling facilities far from disadvantaged communities is designed to dissuade them from voting. President Trump’s efforts to increase the requirements for voter registration could have the same effect. Gerrymandering or the re-drawing of the boundaries of electoral districts is still in fashion. I had thought that we invented gerrymandering. Not so. The term is named after a Governor of Massachusetts, one Eldridge Gerry, who in 1812 re-designed an electoral district shaped like a salamander. You see – Gerry and mander!

Although the courts have been increasingly cowed during Trump’s reign that is not enough. He has made use of Presidential pardons to release many who by any reasonable assessment were guilty of serious crimes. Conversely he has misused the judicial system to instigate the prosecution of political opponents and often on wholly specious grounds.

Fundamental to the disfunction of the American political system is the way that big money determines outcomes. It was ever thus. The Presidential campaigns in 2024 spent 5.5 billion dollars. Perhaps that is one of the reasons that no viable Labour Party ever emerged to challenge the big two, both parties of capital.

It must be a mystery to all of us as to why the Americans cannot impose appropriate gun laws. That second amendment to the constitution granting the right to bear arms was passed when people still remembered being unarmed at the time of the revolutionary war. Now the National Rifle Association is paymaster of millions of dollars to enough congressmen to ensure that the two thirds majority needed to repeal the second amendment can never be achieved, and so the annual slaughter of innocents in homes, on streets, in colleges and schools goes on.

Particularly in present circumstances it may seem bewildering that United States support for Israel’s genocidal actions in Palestine and now the Lebanon seems unshakeable. The millions of dollars provided to politicians by The American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Christians United for Israel no doubt help seal the deal.

Any number of metrics suggest that the United States is a fundamentally unequal and unjust society. It has the highest level of income inequality in the developed world. Although it is the richest nation in the world 11% of the population or 37 million people live in poverty, and 28% of the population are functionally illiterate. Americans have the lowest life expectancy in the developed world. It is the only such country where the death penalty still reigns, and has a prison population of two million which is larger than that of some states.

There are inevitable and virtuous links between the United States and Ireland but too many suggest that we should go a step further and adopt their societal model. That way disaster would lie.

The curren6 disastrous Iran war threatens finally to undermine the imperial ambitions of the United States. It was easy in 1846 when they went to war with Mexico and annexed California and other future states. It was easy too in 1898 when they went to war with Spain and established their hegemony over Cuba and the Phillipines, or in 1953 when they collaborated with the British when they overthrew Mohammed Mossaddegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, because he embarked on the nationalisation of the oil industry.

It is of course in the Americas that they demand particular allegiance. It was in in 1973 that they engineered the overthrow of President Allende’s left wing government in Chile in favour of the torturing dictator, Pinochet. It was even easy to decapitate Chavez’s Venezuelan government and to secure that country’s oil. Let us forget the absurdity of Trump’s claims on Canada. More seriously he appears to be intent on overthrowing the Cuban regime by literally starving the country of essential resources. Imperfect that government may be but it did replace the corrupt and brutal Batista regime that the Americans supported.

The new Iranian war is more in line of succession to the disastrous wars in Vietnam, and more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. These have increasingly shown that military might alone applied without any sensitivity to the arena involved ultimately fails.

And who is the United States answerable too if in the course of these ventures it shall we say oversteps the mark. It has for long rejected the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court over American personnel. Trump has gone a step further by imposing sanctions on the judges of the court.

He defies the rule of law both at home and abroad.

Of course emigrating to the United States was a magnetic draw for those living in dire poverty or facing direct persecution in other countries. They did not seek perfection, rather they merely sought the possibility of a better future and many actually achieved that outcome in a country that rapidly expanded across the continent while simultaneously industrialising.

As the lines on the Statue of Liberty put it;

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

Not now in the era of the Mexican wall and kidnappings carried out by ICE on American streets.

Despite all my reservations about what happened afterwards we must recognise the American Declaration of Independence as a landmark moment in human history and the American Constitution adopted in 1787 as the first modern republican constitution. Ulster Presbyterians certainly played a significant part in these developments and in the revolutionary war and those who stayed at home were in turn inspired by them.

And what of that unwritten British constitution that was in part a model for the American one. When Americans demonstrate against Donald Trump bearing banners saying ‘no kings’, I am reminded that we still have the anachronism of an hereditary monarch and his dysfunctional family. We still have a bloated House of Lords where some hereditary peers hang on, bishops sit, and much of the remaining number are the nominees of failed prime ministers or the cronies of others. I could go on.

So what of the American Ulster Scots now? Over two and a half centuries the links grow fainter. In the 2000 census only 1.5% of Americans defined themselves as Ulster Scots. Of course the early settlers merely defined themselves as Irish and the Ulster Scots designation was an invention of the late nineteenth century. It does not seem to have stuck in the United States. In other ways old bonds loosened, thus many Presbyterians left that strict discipline for the warmer embrace of the Baptists and Methodists. As with other immigrant groups many came simply to see themselves as Americans.

But the question does arise as to how those who still claim Ulster Presbyterian descent view Donald Trump’s co-option of God in pursuit of bloody war, indeed how he takes on the mantle of Christ himself? It is of course a problem for American Catholics of Irish descent too – many appear to have been ensnared by Trump’s moral conservatism despite his personal immorality. Now that he has attacked the Pope will they waiver?

One then comes up against a harsh reality – that no constitution can offer an absolute defence against tyranny where that tyranny has a popular mandate. There is no question that Trump won the popular vote in securing a second term as President, and in securing majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, he removed key checks and balances on his conduct. In the meantime by packing the Supreme Court he at least partially disabled the last line of defence as was evident in a judgement just this year diluting some of the protections of the 1965 Civil Rights Act, and another confirming the right of the President to dismiss the heads of supposedly independent state agencies, and, unsurprisingly, he immediately dismissed the non-partisan leaders of the Federal Election Oversight Agency.

It does have to be acknowledged that the court, however conservative, has baulked at some of Trump’s most outrageous proposals, and most notably his attempt to remove the automatic right to American citizenship of those born in the country.

Some rather apocalyptically see parallels with the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler. A feature of that disaster was the way that conservatives foolishly thought that they could tame Hitler and helped clear his rise to power. One could say the same of many American Republicans with regard to Donald Trump.

And yet quite recently we have seen how a popular democratic revolt in the face of a rigged constitution can succeed. Victor Orban’s 16 year semi dictatorship in Hungary in the name of a white Christian order had seemed unassailable and yet he was overthrown in a landslide victory for the opposition. Trump had made no bones about backing Orban – ‘I am with him all the way’. Let us hope that Orban’s downfall is a harbinger for a similar revolt in the United States.

Even at this 250^th anniversary can one detect that Trump’s overreach has gone too far? He seized control of the anniversary celebrations from a bipartisan congressional committee, and handed the organisation to a private company. Perhaps it was the wrath of God that was evident in an oppressive heatwave and thunderstorms. Much of his programme became a monumental flop.

Perhaps some Americans of Ulster Presbyterian lineage will now play a part in another and peaceful rebellion, and alongside those from a Catholic or non-religious background, or is that too much to hope. I do speak in solidarity with the many fine Americans who I have known and who have given me and mine hospitality and who say ‘not in my name’. That includes my half sister, now an American citizen, and her family in Brooklyn, New York. Their struggle continues.