Whisperings from the Ghosts of Christians Past: It is Time to Listen to Your Refugee Ancestors

By Bob Ferris

I started out wanting to write a heartwarming and patriotic piece about my ancestors Archibald Alexander and Mary Enos to celebrate the 4th of July.  Dear Archie was a surgeon who served in the Revolutionary War, sailed on ship holding a letter of marque, was captured and imprisoned on the infamous hulk Jersey, and then cast overboard when the British thought him dead.  According to family legend, Mary found her husband-to-be washed up on the shore.  It's a nice story about sacrifice, hardship, happenstance, and, hopefully, love.  Could be true and I've been combing the beach a lot of late looking for treasures so this resonates with me.

Unfortunately, current events and my deeper research of the players involved picked the scab of a deep wound in our family that morphed into a guiding principle of this country.   That principle seems now to be forgotten or misremembered by many.  It's a pair of new pants versus a new pair of pants type of issue that clearly confuses some folks.  That nearly all of our Founding Fathers (and Mothers) were Christians of some sort is absolutely not the same as them intending to found a Christian nation (1,2,3,4).  But let's look first at the sandy lovers and their families to understand why they would embrace and practice a religion, but not want to be governed or judged by one.

Perhaps the workshop of Joseph Enos looked something like the above from Colonial Williamsburg.  Joseph had apprentices including his nephew Richard who was the orphaned son of his brother Abraham.  The rule of three referred to in his apprenticeship papers is essentially linear algebra.   

Lovely Mary was the daughter of a cordwainer or someone who makes shoes from new leather rather than a cobbler who repairs footwear.  Her father, Joseph Enos, was likely of French descent and from Huguenot persuasions only a few generations away from fleeing country-to-county because their brand of Christianity did not conform with that of the ruling powers.  The Catholic Church in France was more than a little insistent that all folks living in France at this time worship just as they did.   And as a consequence Mary's forbearers went from lives of relative opulence to a more humble existence simply for the beliefs they held that were similar but not the same as those in power.  (And much the same happened to Catholics in England.)

From here.

Brave Archibald came from similar circumstance.  The Alexanders were Scots who became Ulster Scots in 1652 or the so-called Scotch-Irish over their Presbyterian beliefs and their blood ties to the Stewarts who were Catholic.  Archibald's family fled Oliver Cromwell's regime to Ireland in his great-grandfather's time and then many of the Alexanders were ousted from Ulster in 1736 by the high rents charged by the landowners who wanted them and theirs to be part of the Church of England and nothing else would do.

The main lane of Manorcunningham in Ulster where the Alexanders settled.  Even today it is small with only 675 souls.  The Alexanders must have done well because Robert's father William was know as "the corpulent" due to his size and girth.

Archibald's father, the immigrant, was a Presbyterian minister named Robert Alexander who came to the Colonies with his two brothers (probably William and Archibald).  Rev. Alexander was a learned man said to be educated at colleges in Dublin and Edinburgh who had collected a small library which he was forced to toss overboard during a storm while in transit from Ireland to Philadelphia.  Young Robert, now book-less, wrote out some of these drowned tomes longhand from memory and used them for teaching until the volumes could be replaced.  He obviously took education seriously even to the point of founding a school in what was then Augusta County, Virginia when he and his family moved south from Pennsylvania to join other Scotch-Irish refugees about a decade after his landing.

Education seemed to be in the Alexander blood.  Robert's grandson Archibald Alexander was the second president of Hampden-Sydney College and the founding president of Princeton Theological Seminary.  John Hampden and Algernon Sydney were British martyrs to the causes of representative government and religious freedom.  

Robert ran what was called the Augusta Academy from 1749 to 1762.  Why is this little ten-student, college preparatory school worth mentioning?  Because that institution was reconfigured and renamed Liberty Hall Academy sometime around the start of the Revolution and remained such until endowed by a large gift from George Washington himself in 1796.  Liberty Hall Academy was then renamed Washington Academy until in became Washington College in 1813.  The institution eventually transformed into Washington and Lee University after the Civil War and following its five-year leadership under Robert E. Lee.  It is important to this narrative to understand that although this institution had its roots in educating Presbyterians many of whom later stood in pulpits, this school founded by and for Presbyterians does not have a sectarian affiliation.

So while the sample size is small (i.e., two), what conclusions should be drawn about the sentiments of the general population of the colonies fighting to become a country from this chance, shoreline meeting between Mary from Delaware and Archibald of Virginia?  Minister and mathematician Robert Alexander would probably say nothing, but that view changes when you factor in the stories of scores of other folks listed on these electronic pages.  There many in our broader family have stories to tell.

For example, both my mother and father descend from the Pilgrims who sailed on the Mayflower after living in exile in Holland.  Moreover, my late father's Dutch ancestors seemed frequently to be Walloons of a mostly Huguenot leaning pushed towards Amsterdam from France or Belgium and then somehow, magically finding themselves on ships bound for the New World where they could enjoy the privilege of arriving on an occupied foreign landscape with little or no supportive infrastructure.  By all accounts those early days at Fort Orange (Albany) and New Amsterdam (New York) were a little challenging.

Distant great-grandmother Mary Towne Estey on my mother's side understood the difference between embracing a religion and being ruled or judged by a religion.  She and her sister were hanged as witches in 1692 during the infamous Salem Witch trials.

Additionally, the only known shared ancestors of my parents in the New World were the Johns family who were Quakers which was a sect that experienced its own set of encouraged migrations such as the Chews going from Virginia to Maryland and then on to Pennsylvania.  The Quakers also seemed to attract some of the country-bouncing Huguenots like Marie Ferree.

This is the family tree of Isaac Lefever who escaped with Marie Ferree and her family.  He married Marie's daughter is part of our lineage.

Madame Ferree was a woman of noble birth who fled from Picarde, France to Germany and from Germany to England where she and her family hit the religious refugee slip-and-slide of the time heading directly to Pennsylvania and settling in a place named Paradise where the descendants had reunions until 2014.  All of these ancestors held on to their beliefs and were persecuted by governments beholding to a certain religion or sect that was not theirs.  The word "persecuted" seems a little weak in this context as titles and lands were taken; whole families were nearly wiped out (see above Lefever family tree); and once comfortable lives absolutely destroyed.  But they survived and remembered.

It is important when looking at the past and current events where the term refugee originated.

In this I think too about Gouverneur Morris who wrote much of the US Constitution including the Preamble and coining the phrase "We the People" as a slap in the face to those pushing state's rights.  He was half-brother to Declaration signer Lewis Morris in our line so is an uncle of sorts.  Gouverneur's mother was a Huguenot.  Gouverneur was something of a peg-legged rogue, but by most accounts a fairly religious gentleman.    He was undoubtably marked by his mother's experience and wrestled with the idea of whether or not Catholics should be allowed to serve in elected positions or even be covered under a religious freedom clause in New York.  Gouverneur and others debating these issues at the time realized the distinction between being allowed to practice one's religion freely versus being ruled by a church.  What's more, many of the Founding Fathers understood that freedom of religion should apply to all religions including Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism regardless of what the proponents of Dominionism or their power-hungry allies might argue today.

So back to Mary and Archibald.  My work on their nice story got derailed, in part, after seeing a news story about Trump's spiritual advisor Paula White calling on the power of Jesus to smite the "demonic" forces wanting to thwart his re-election.   There are times in my life when I think about our ancestors looking down on us in judgement.  Have we lived up to their expectations and honored their sacrifices in founding this country? Are we staying true to the ideas expressed in the Preamble of the Constitution which I view not as a documentation of conditions of the time but rather a vision statement of what the Founders wanted for the future as a result of their Revolution?  I suspect that they would judge some of us good and some of us bad in this regard, but I cannot imagine they would not be uttering some sort of colonial version of WTF upon observing this thrice-married, Gucci-bag carrying, Prosperity Gospel-thumping, Rasputin-wannabe having the ear of a sitting president.   Gadzooks or zounds, maybe?

Am I picking on Paula and her ilk?  Probably, but I was equally influenced by Jerry Falwell Jr. and his un-Christian remarks regarding the conditions faced by children detained at the border and his displeasure that someone would criticize these conditions considering the huge challenge of caring for a child adequately for anywhere from $150.00 to more than $700.00 a day.  This is an interesting argument considering that two adults making $15 per hour generate $170.00 per day gross from which they are supposed to house and feed themselves as well as provide rich and full lives for whatever offspring they may have which I am assuming includes beds, toothpaste, and soap.   But Mr. Falwell apparently thinks we should have sympathy for the detention center folks and the private prison profiteers?

I often emphasize the soldiers in our family and the battles, but we also have many, many clergy in our ranks and a lot of them were educators too.  Above is a Matthew Brady portrait of the Rev. Isaac Ferris who was Chancellor of New York University from 1853 to 1870.  Isaac's family has English roots and his wife Leticia Storm comes from Walloon Calvinists and is the great-great-great granddaughter of Dirck Storm.  This history of experience is deep and tangled.  A portrait of Isaac hangs in my office.

In my own imaginary discussions with the hundreds of ancestors stretched across nearly 400 years in this new land, I doubt there would be much resembling a "you guys nailed it" or "this is exactly where we hoped you would be" rolling forth at this point.   Looking at this more broadly, I wonder what education champion Robert Alexander, for instance, would think of the idea that our federal government spends ten times more on fossil fuel subsidies than education when a full-cost accounting analysis is employed or about the present attacks science and the apparent celebration ignorance.  Or what would his Jersey-alumnus son think of the private prisons holding refugees simply looking for a better life when opportunities collapsed elsewhere?  And what would dear Mary think of children being separated from their mothers?  Mary was not wed until she was in her early thirties and would have probably found children beyond precious.  I shudder to contemplate what all of them and others on this site would think of our present state including the assault on the democratic cornerstones gained in the Revolution (1,2,3,4), but I digress and should wrap this up.

My point in all of this being it is important to know and understand these origin stories as we cruise forward or make course corrections as a nation. Our country was a bold and shining statement unlike all others at the time.  We retain that quality by remembering that and holding to it in the context of today's world.  We lose it if we are not vigilant in protecting ourselves from the very conditions that catalyzed the Revolution in the first place: an overly empowered elite, policies too driven by corporations, and a government steered by a particular church or sect that preaches love but practices intolerance.  If you think that Mary and Archibald would be happy with our current condition, have a happy 4th!  Otherwise you might spend a little time before and after the fireworks thinking about what you can do to honor this pair and this country's founding principles.  My sense is that there is some serious work to do.