Review: Ulster and Scotland

Abstract

Senator John Kerry, like every contender for the American presidency, tried to play the Irish card. Many voters indeed seemed to assume that his Catholic father and even his iconic initials JFK entitled him to do this. His surname helped too, but only until he had to make it clear that 'Kerry' had replaced the name of his grandfather, Fritz Kohn, a Czech Jew who had fled to an America which he hoped would be free of anti-Semitism. John Kerry did, however, have Irish or, more precisely, Ulster roots on his mother's side. She could trace her descent directly to an Ulster-Scottish Presbyterian cleric, the Rev. James McGregor, who in 1718 took many of his congregation from the parish of Aghadowey on the banks of the lower Bann on the hazardous journey to the New World. Like many more Ulster dissenters they felt betrayed by the Williamite settlement and the victimisation they suffered from the established and Episcopal Church of Ireland. The township they founded in New Hampshire, and which prospered over time from good farming and linenmaking, was called Londonderry. Some of the original settlers had indeed manned the Maiden City's walls in the great siege thirty years earlier.