Good morning to ye all. My name is Thomas McClaughry. I was born in the year of our Lord 1717 in the parish of Clonbroney, County Longford, Ireland. I lived for 76 years, and went to my blessed reward in the year 1793, in the town of Salem, in the new American state of New York.

     I confess I know not how I come to stand before you so many years after my shade departed this good earth. I hope it is not the work of The Old Deluder, Satan, whose mischief is always afoot. That nice man who summoned me here to speak today, says that my appearance is made possible by some kind of magic of 21st century science. In my day, I heard stories about how the Scotsman James Watt learned how to harness the power of steam to make great engines do the work of hundreds of horses and men. So in the 240 years to come I suppose, given the Lord's blessing of freedom to create things new, His people on earth may have done even more wondrous things. But of that I can know nothing, and I must trust that my inviter speaketh the truth when he says that Satan had nothing to do with bringing me to this event.

     I know not why I was chosen to appear before you. I was not of the gentry nor was I of the nobility born. I was but a poor farmer of no distinction, save honesty and a reverence for the Author of All Things. But I did share one thing with many other Scots who migrated first from their homeland to the plantations of Northern Ireland in the time of James I, and thence to the American colonies. That was a love of freedom of thought and action, and a firm resistance to the forces of tyranny so powerful in my day. I pray thee, allow me to tell you of my family's journey.

     My grandfather Andrew McClauchrie – to use the old Scots spelling – was a farmer and free trader in the parish of Urr, four leagues west of the town of Dumfries, in the southwest of Scotland along the River Nith that flowed – and so they tell me, still flows – into the Solway Firth.

     The term trader, in our time, meant two different things. It meant one who brings farm products and beer into the market town, to trade for tools and clothes for the women folk. But after the union of the crowns of Scotland and England in 1707, "trader" took on another meaning. It meant what the government people called "smuggler", bringing in goods at night in a dark ship from the Isle of Man or even further off, to be sold to the good folk of Galloway without paying the burdensome import taxes levied by the Parliament in far off London.

     Which one my grandfather was, I know not. Quite possibly he was both. But I do know that he had an adventurous son, my father, named Matthew. The years from 1684 to 1688 were called in Scotland "the Killing Times". They were the years when a cavalier named Sir John Graham of Claverhouse, called by us Bloody Clavers, rode with his troop of cruel dragoons and devastated our people and our countryside with fire and sword.

     The purpose of this cruel agent of the Crown was to strike down our independent Presbyterian kirk, the church of Scots folk seeking only to worship the Lord in their own way. For us Covenanter Presbyterians, that way of worship was direct, as spoke the Good Book, taught to us by the pastor of our choosing. We wanted naught to do with the meddling of the corrupt popish prelates in the pay of the London government, with their fine clothes and haughty ways, and we scorned their English Book of Common Prayer.

     As the times grew worse and more bloody, my grandfather decided to repair with his children to the Ulster Plantations, in the north of Ireland. The soil was better, and the settlements had been relatively peaceful since the popish uprising of 1641. But when bad King James II tried to rally the Catholic Irish to regain for him the throne he had been forced to yield, war came again to Ireland.

     The English Parliament brought Dutch William to the throne. William was a firm Protestant who had defended his country bravely against the invasions of the popish armies from France and Spain. He was also married to Mary, the daughter of James II, and she came with him to rule as William and Mary. I am told that this town is named after Dutch William, and that the university in it is called after the two of them. It is well that such fine rulers are thus remembered.

     In 1690 William came to Ireland to stamp out the deposed James and his Irish and French Catholic armies. Faced again with the travail of war, most of my family chose to make the short trip back over the sea back to Galloway, where the Presbyterian cause had prevailed and the killing times had ended.

     But my Father was a bold young man, 25 years of age. He decided to stay and join William's army to fight against James' army. Why? Because if James again seized the throne, he would take away our right and freedom to worship as we chose. And so Father became a grenadier, and fought for William in the terrible battles of Carrickfergus and the Boyne. His brave sweetheart Margaret Parks could have fled back to Galloway, but she stayed with him until the fighting was over. William's army prevailed, James fled to France forever, and at last peace came to the Scots settlements in Ireland.

     So my parents Matthew and Margaret married in County Longford, around 1700. I was the fourth of their nine children. And for a while things went well.

     One reason for the success of us transplanted Scots was that by moving to a new land we had broken the traditional links of kinship. Our place in our society was no longer determined by our dead ancestors, the ghosts of the ancient past. No longer had we to know our proper place. We were free from all that. We could work as we chose, move about as we chose, and seize opportunity when we saw it.

     In Scotland we had among us lairds and earls and viscounts, lording it over us. Those titles of rank came not with us to Ireland. In our new homes we cast off that yoke. Freedom! What a wonderful thing it was!

     But we were never free of the Crown and Parliament in London, as I will, with your leave, explain.

     Our people, now called the Scots Irish, were very industrious. Farms and homesteads, churches and mills rose fast among the desolate wilds of Tyrone and Monaghan. Before long the Scots Irish plantations had become the most prosperous part of Ireland. Our chief product, in my father's time, was woolen goods. Through our hard work and the blessing of a free market, our shepherds and weavers began to grow prosperous.

     But there were powerful interests in England that took alarm at our success. These were our competitors – English sheep raisers and mill owners and shipping interests. And so these interests took their complaints to Parliament, to seek protection.

     And in 1699 they succeeded. Parliament afflicted us with the unjust and unfair Woolens Act. It prohibited Scots in Ireland from selling into a foreign market – leaving the English to set their own monopoly prices there.

     I tell you true, I was but a humble farmer, but this was clear to me: whenever government steps in to destroy a free market, the most productive and virtuous people will suffer, and the most unproductive and corrupt will gain at their expense.

     One thing, however, helped us to endure the Woolens Act. That was the abolition of the tithe of agistment. I suppose that in this day no one has heard of such a thing, and it is well that they have not. The tithe of agistment was a special tax on our sheep. When it was abolished around 1700, sheep-raising became profitable again, the Woolens Act notwithstanding. The abolition of this animal tax taught me well, that reducing tax rates will stimulate people to produce more wealth. It is a precept that no generation ought ever to forget.

     But another difficulty soon loomed. It was called rack renting. Few among us were landowners. We came to Ireland as tenants or subtenants. We had been so in Scotland, but a great inducement to come to Ulster was the much longer term of land leasing – typically 31 years. This was offered from the beginning of the plantations, in 1610, to the end of the 17th century.

     With long leases and only moderate rent increases, we tenants worked hard to improve our leaseholds. It is amazing what fruits come from the security of tenure, and better yet, of outright land ownership!

     But ownership we had not. And when the leases began to come due around the time of my birth, our landlords – who rarely lived among us, and who were always in debt from their finery, gambling, and dissipation – sought to take so much from us that we could no longer make a living on the land we had improved for generations. Indeed, all too often two or three Irish Catholic families would bid the higher rent, and live together on a farmstead created and improved by Scots, but in terrible poverty. Being rack rented off our land was a powerful reason for us to look westward – to the American colonies.

     And yet another tribulation afflicted us in those early years of the 18th century. William and Mary were tolerant. They were content to allow people of all faiths to go their own way in matters of religion – so long as they did not conspire with foreign powers to undermine the British throne. But by 1703 both William and Mary were dead, and with their passing came an era of dreadful intolerance.

     The Anglican High Church crowd held Mary's sister Queen Anne in their clutches. They persuaded her to insist that all officers of the crown take the sacrament according to the prescriptions of the Established Church. That meant the Anglican Church with its bishops, all of them in thrall to the Queen in London. This was known as the Test Act. It was said to be aimed at Catholics, who were denied all offices, but the Anglican bishops quickly used it to oppress us Presbyterian Scots.

     Unless our pastors took the Test Oath, the government would not allow them to preach in our churches. The government would not allow us to open schools unless authorized by the Anglican Bishop. The government forced us to pay tithes to the Anglican Church of Ireland, though we held to our own Presbyterian faith. The Anglicans even hired agents to bully us into paying the tithes - this was called tithe farming.

     All of this was eminently unjust. We Scots in Ireland had supported the authority of the King during Cromwell's wars. We had defended Protestantism in Ireland against the efforts of James to restore a Catholic state. But the High Church crowd in London and Canterbury demanded our subservience to their popish High Church practices. We Scots, whether in our first homeland or in a new land such as Ireland or America, do not countenance such demands. I truly hope that can be said about my descendants in the America of your day.

     And so more and more we Scots Irish looked for a path out of our troubles. Droughts, though painful, we could withstand. But when the government choked off our opportunity to trade freely – when it punished our woolen and linen industries with taxes and restrictions – when it tried to force upon us the despised High Church practice – take all that together, and you can see why we Scots Irish have a powerful dislike for too much government. Add in the curse of rack renting by shortsighted and greedy absentee landowners, and you can see why we Scots Irish began to view America as a shining land of our dreams.

     In truth, we knew little about America. It was a thousand leagues away over the stormy Atlantic. We heard that fierce savages roamed its lands. And of course, the American colonies were yet subservient to the same Crown and Parliament that we had come to so detest.

     But led by pastors of the kirks, my people began to migrate west. At least five thousand of us went west in 1717, the year of my birth. A second wave set off in my twelfth year, and of this I have a clear memory.

     In 1729 my father sold his possessions to a relative of my mother's, and we took passage with 21 members of our family in a ship called the George and Ann, headed for Pennsylvania. At Glenarm, our last port stop in Ireland, we docked to replenish our water and food supplies. My father headed down the gangplank toward the dock. But he slipped and fell, and broke his leg. This injury made it impossible for him to continue. He, my mother, my sister Sarah and I got off and made our way back to the farm we had sold. My three brothers and four sisters continued on the ship.

     Now a normal Atlantic crossing in those days was about six weeks. The George and Ann was nineteen weeks at sea. When it did make land at Cape Cod, all seven of my brothers and sisters were dead. Only one of the 21 McClaughry family members survived the voyage.

     But my time did come, much later. In 1764 a fine man named Rev. Thomas Clark became involved in a church war, over whether a pastor should kiss the Holy Book. I can't even remember now which side we were on, and forsooth, what matters it if one kisses the Book or no? It is man's relation to God that is important.

     But the controversy made Rev. Clark go to America. There he eventually secured a patent on a fine piece of land in upstate New York. In my day we called it New Perth, after the most fertile part of Scotland. When the colony of New York later became a state, the name was changed to Salem.

     And so, I, my wife and our four sons took sail for America, hoping to fare much better than my ill fated brothers and sisters 36 years before. The voyage was uneventful. After two years with kin in lower New York state, my good wife and our sons settled with Rev. Clark's congregation in Salem. The Clark patent was but a tiny hole in a vast wilderness, inhabited by fierce natives called Iroquois. The life of a frontier settler was not for the timid or lazy. But unlike the Ireland that we had left behind, we had something more priceless than rubies. We had Freedom.

     We owned our own land in fee simple, with no feudal superior or rack renting landlord. We could worship as we chose, and choose our own pastors to preach the word of God. There were no pompous prelates to send out lackeys to tax us and force upon us their despised prayer book. And we were free to trade in a large and growing market of the Thirteen Colonies. This freedom was worth all the struggle, danger, and privation of those early years on the frontier.

     Only a few years after I settled my family in Salem, the foolish and greedy Parliament in London sought to tax us Americans without our consent. Just as they had done to our forebears in Ulster, they sought to restrict our commerce upon the high seas to benefit their English merchants and shipmasters. They drew a line down the American continent and forbade our people to move to the rich lands beckoning to us to the West.

     Unlike most English or Dutch or Swedish or even settlers who came directly to the Colonies from Scotland, we Scots Irish Americans had our still-vivid memories of persecution by Crown and Parliament. Thus we were quick to take up the cause of separation and independence.

     The young Mr. Jefferson of Virginia, who I am told studied law here in this town, put our case well, in that wonderful document called the Declaration of American Independence. Wrote he: "When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce our people under absolute despotism, it is our right, it is our duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for our future security."

     And that we surely did. No group of Americans was more overwhelmingly for American independence than the Scots Irish. I was then in my 59th year, but my four sons stood to the militia colors, and helped wreak havoc on Burgoyne's invading British army. When the war finally ended in 1783 with America free and independent, together we rejoiced at our hard won victory.

     For ten years more I lived, dying quite an old man at age 76. Today I sleep in the Revolutionary War Cemetery in old Salem, and I am proud that each Fourth of July some kind person comes by to plant an American flag next my gravestone, in honor of my four soldier sons that fought for American Liberty.

     You are here, they tell me, to discuss the Refounding of America. It is well that you should do so. This nation was settled long before I arrived from Ireland, but my generation and that of my sons were the ones that first founded the United States of America as an independent nation among the nations of the world.

     It was my sons' generation that gave America the Declaration of Independence. Their generation shed their blood to vanquish a powerful and overbearing foe. Their generation produced a wondrous Constitution to guide this nation into its bright future.

     I know nothing of America since my passing in 1793. I truly hope that those who followed me have remained vigilant in defense of our founding principles.

     In this brief appearance it is my earnest desire to leave you a message from that grave into which I was lowered over 200 years ago. It is from me, a humble farmer who loved freedom, and also from the countless patriots who in my day gave this wonderful land its first principles.

     Always remain true to our first principles and America will remain free and prosperous among the nations of the world.

     Those principles are few but of great importance, and ought to be written in living light on the hearts of all true Americans, and of friends of Liberty wherever they may be:

• to stoutly guard the liberty of every individual, for without liberty life itself is worth but little

• to preserve equality of rights under the law, so that no man may exact special privilege because of his exalted status or powerful friends

• to establish an independent judiciary, beholden not to political causes, but only to the law of the land

• to celebrate free labor and free markets, opportunity and enterprise, which must needs be the engine of our prosperity

• to honor free thought – even heresy – without which a people must descend into servility and oppression

• to govern lightly and tax lightly, so that government may not take from the mouth of labor the bread that it has earned; and finally this indispensable precept:

• to protect private property ownership, and to ever seek ways to see it distributed as widely as possible among the people of our land, so that all may own their share of the golden dream of America.

     In my day a man named Thomas Paine was a famous champion of liberty and independence. I remember well the message he published to his fellow citizens. He wrote saying, here on this great and yet unsettled continent, "we have the power to begin the world over again".

     And so we did. And so must you, my descendants, and you descendants of generations more who came to these shores in search of the American promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

     Refound America? Aye, let us do it, again and again. Let us do it every time that ill chosen policies and anti-freedom politicians try to undermine our eternal founding principles. And from these shores let the lamp of human freedom shine undimmed into all lands and unto all peoples, until the end of time itself.

     And now, my fellow Americans, and your guests from other lands here today to celebrate the cause of freedom, I must bid you farewell. I am grateful to have had these moments with you. Whatever mysterious power has called me from my peaceful graveyard to address you today now seeks to return me thence.

     I sleep in the black earth, in a small New York village, confident that others so bold and clear-eyed as I once was, still stand vigilant on guard for Liberty.

     Friends – fail me not, nor fail ye America, nor fail ye all humanity. Freedom is won by courage and often by the shedding of blood; it is preserved by brave men and women who hold it as their highest value, speak and act boldly in its defense, and advance its gleaming banners throughout the world.

     Be ye those brave men and women.

     And now – farewell.