249 years ago during a bitterly cold January and February, they were on two ships...Samuel Laird, 41, his wife, Margaret Gibson, 36, and their three sons James, 14, John, 6, and Samuel, 2. Samuel and Mary are my great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents.
They left Belfast, Ireland on Christmas Eve, 1766. Ireland was not their native country; they were religious refugees from Scotland. During an intense religious war between the Scots and the Church of England, they were known as Covenanters, people who believed that God was the head of the church and not the reigning monarch of the time.
They paid bitterly for their beliefs; the picture you see here is known as the Covenanter's Prison, in a place called Greyfriar's Churchyard...in 1679 it was used to house about 1100 male Covenanters through a bitterly cold winter...an area that had practically no shelter from the elements. Men were given four ounces of bread daily as they survived those months that had temperatures well below freezing each night. Most didn't survive and were buried in the churchyard in unmarked graves.
Whereas Scots had been in charge of their own churches for generations, the new King declared them illegal. In response to the deadly tyranny imposed upon them, Scots fled their native country to welcoming havens, such as Ireland, where The Lairds did.
A generation later, when Samuel Laird was a young man with a family, they begin to hear about a most wonderful place...The United States of America...a place where people of different faiths were allowed to believe and worship as they saw fit, alongside people of other faiths, or those of no faith at all...a peaceful co-existence with the hallmark of respect...respect for those who thought differently, with no violence, bloodshed, or social ostracism because of different ways of thinking, or how they happened to be born.
The family was split for some reason aboard two ships the Nancy and The Early of Hillsborough, both leaving around Christmas Eve of 1766, bound for America...a place that had to seem like a dream to them, to be able to live openly, unafraid of being put to death simply because they thought differently from others.
The trip was ghastly. The Nancy was advertised as being 300 tons...that translates into being able to comfortable carry 300 passengers, the number who were loaded on-board.
In reality it was only 80 tons and should have had no more than 80 passengers, which sounds remarkably like some of the dreadful vessels carrying current religious refuges across the Mediterranean Sea, often with deadly consequences. Those tragic instances happened on these two boats as well, with disease running rampant, the dead being thrown overboard.
Nonetheless, the ships arrived with the Laird family alive, although Margaret would die a few short months later from a shipboard illness.
Arriving in Charleston, The Laird Family, along with many other families they already knew from Ireland collectively made their way to an area known as Due West, SC, where together they formed the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, which still operates today. There is a school there for its seminarians, Erskine College...and on the grounds next to the church there are the graves of Samuel and Mary Laird. Some of their descendants made their way to Alabama, the Camden area, establishing churches still in existence.
These families came to an America that opened it arms to people who thought and believed differently and were able to peacefully with those who thought otherwise.
That was and is the hallmark of our country...and if it swayed from that thought through the years, better and wiser men and women always reminded us that it is a basic tenet of being an American.
Is the assimilation an easy task? Not usually. It requires a great deal of kindness and caring on both sides to make it work...and it also makes us look at others and realize the parts of us that are similar are vastly greater than those which mark us as different.
This holds true in all aspects of our lives, whether it is pointing out the qualities of men compared to women, blacks compared to whites, one race compared to another, gay people compared to straight, people we just don't like because they don't think the same way we do on certain subjects...if you will simply be honest with yourself, you have to admit that the things we want out of life are not really different than those around us...a happy life, opportunity for all, a place to live in peace.
Are there those whose differences frighten us, such as terrorists? Of course there are...they scare me! However, we have always had terrorists among us...such as the Ku Klux Klan, reigning terror on Jews, Catholics, and any others who do not think the way they do, and they do it in the name of Jesus, even using a flaming cross as an instrument of terror, versus one I see as a symbol of great love.
Try to imagine the feelings of our fellow Jewish brothers and sisters when The Temple was bombed by a Christian terrorist group, the KKK, in Atlanta in 1958, or the countless number of lynchings by the same all over the United States. How about when the Christian terrorists set off the bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing the four young black girls, killed because their skin was not a color the KKK deemed appropriate.
As a Christian, I despise seeing hate being used by wacky fringe groups using Christ's name as a reason to inflict pain on others, such as the Westboro Baptist Church, or other mainline churches who do the exact same to gay and lesbian people, pillorying them in the community, attempting to pass legislation against their civil rights...and my Muslim friends decry the same. The fringe Muslim terrorist groups no more represents them than the KKK Christian terrorist group or The Westboro Baptist Church represents mainstream Christians throughout the United States. In the wonderful novel To Kill A Mockingbird, it reminds us that a Bible in the hands of a mean man is worse than a bottle of whiskey is in another...in other words it can be used for good or evil.
The important thing, however, is that we make the distinction, and when we see the Bible or any other religious book being employed as a means for evil we have to recognize it for what it is and stand up against it.
Samuel and Mary Laird came to America, the land of hopes, dreams, and a better way of life, just as hundreds of thousands did in the ensuing years...and because of who we are as Americans, that dream will continue, because as Americans, that is who we are, and will continue to be.
As an American, it is my responsibility, along with all other Americans to make sure that dream stays alive, not only in our laws, but in our hearts...as others come to American for the same reasons our ancestors did...just like The Lairds.