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CHAPTER 2

Revolutionary Masonry

Republican and Christian, 1757–1825

Historians of religion point to republicanism and democratization as central developments in American religious life in the revolutionary era. Beginning in the 1760s, a new republican ideology that incorporated both Christian and Enlightenment ideas into its hegemonic framework expanded Christian ideas of liberty and community to encompass not only the church but the nation as well. Though American Protestantism was not constitutionally connected to the legal structure of the state, it did come to align itself with the new American nation. At the same time, a host of evangelical populists led a religious revolt against the learned clergy, decorous congregations, and centralized authority of the dominant Anglican, Presbyterian, and Congregational churches, which resulted, by 1850, in the numerical triumph of Baptists and Methodists. The revivals that erupted in the 1790s were part of a tumultuous democratic revolution in American religion, coincident with a broader revolt against elite domination throughout the culture. Although the Protestantism that emerged from the Revolution was closely identified with the new American nation and its democratic spirit, so too—and perhaps even more so—was a more overtly Christian and republican Freemasonry.¹

In the middle of the eighteenth century, changes in Freemasonry were closely related to transformations in American society. Beginning in the 1750s, a large number of mechanics, lesser merchants, and military men proposed a new form of Freemasonry, which they termed Ancient. These ambitious and politically active men transformed the fraternity. Embracing the ideals of virtue and merit, the brotherhood now proclaimed itself to be in the vanguard of new efforts to build a republican society. By the 1790s, as their order expanded rapidly throughout the interior, Masons described it as embodying the republican values of morality, education, and Christianity.

A growing convergence of Christianity and Freemasonry around Enlightenment ideals marked the first quarter of the nineteenth century. In the Revolutionary War, military lodges were more effective than Christian churches in building ties among Continental Army officers. Avoiding the extremes of both sectarianism and nonbiblical rationalism, following the war Freemasonry attracted ministers and other members of liberal-leaning denominations, leading to a high incidence of Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Unitarians among its leaders. At the same time, Bible readings and Christian prayers and rituals entered more overtly into lodge meetings. In contrast to the colonial period, when civic ritual had centered on the monarchy and the church, with Christian ministers blessing public institutions, in the postwar era, following the revolutionary shift to republican ideals and symbols, Masons were increasingly called on to solemnize public enterprises, even going so far as to lay the cornerstone at the foundations of Christian churches.

As Alexis de Tocqueville has stated, intermediary institutions between the authority of the state and the will of the people stabilized the emerging American republic, by working to create and shape public culture.² Freemasonry was one of these organizations, which emerged from eighteenth-century polite societies that transformed following the revolution into institutions that played a significant role in shaping public opinion. Many of the leading advocates of American independence were attracted to the Masonic brotherhood, whose efforts to bring together men from different regions and backgrounds in an increasingly republican and Christian framework they saw as a harbinger of the new American society.³ Masonic symbols and ceremonies thus came to be employed in public rituals, closely identifying the fraternity with the new American nation. Though soon to be contested by gender, class, and racial criticism, Freemasonry encouraged nationalist rhetoric and practices that contributed to the larger effort to create a common social discourse. At the same time, orthodox Calvinists warned of a Masonic infiltration of government and church that threatened to undermine the full and free participation of all Americans in civil society. Yet until the fraternity’s unraveling, following the Morgan affair of 1826, Freemasons weathered these criticisms through their close association with brothers such as George Washington and their prominent participation in the civic ceremonies of the young republic.

FROM MODERNS TO ANCIENTS

On the evening of June 24, 1737, Benjamin Walker, a sugar baker, peeked into a tavern window to see what was transpiring at a meeting of the Boston Masonic Lodge. Earlier that day the lodge had taken to the streets for its annual Saint John’s Day procession. Walker noted in his journal, “Great Numbers of people of all sexes and sizes [assembled] to see them walk thro the streets.”⁴ Men such as him, who stood below the rank of gentleman, could not go behind the honorable society’s closed doors. By the end of the century, however, urban craftsmen and country gentlemen whose broadening aspirations attracted them to the status and sophistication of Freemasonry would dominate this society that had previously brought together the most prominent men in America’s seaport towns.

The catalyst for this transformation was a dispute over proper ritual procedures between two factions in British Freemasonry. In the 1740s, the novelty and fashionable appeal of English Freemasonry had begun to fade. The number of lodges declined. Satires and mock processions lowered the dignity of and public respect for the fraternity. Ineffective and indifferent leaders, apathetic members, and exhaustion from rapid expansion all figured in what one London Mason termed the order’s “low repute.”⁵ In the midst of this weakness, the London Grand Lodge denied membership to several journeymen Irish Masons living in London because they could not demonstrate knowledge of ritual changes made by that body to keep out imposters. Infuriated by this rebuke, in 1751 a group spearheaded by this Irish faction and led by Laurence Dermott, a journeyman painter who had been the master of a Dublin lodge in 1746, met to organize a rival Grand Lodge.

Calling themselves Ancients, after their desire to restore the original degree rituals, the insurgents named the existing London Grand Lodge members Moderns for tampering with the fraternity’s essential ceremonies. Dermott then effectively exaggerated the matter to give the impression that the Moderns had so far departed from the sacred and unchanging rites and customs as to be illegal and unauthorized.⁶ His new book of constitutions, the Ahiman Rezon (Help to a Brother), while otherwise closely following James Anderson’s Constitutions, chided the Moderns for their ritual innovations, neglect of the Saint John’s Day feasts, perfunctory ceremonies, and irregular times of meeting. In contrast, the Ahiman Rezon emphasized stricter ritual observances and tighter administrative practices.⁷ By all accounts, Dermott was a forceful character and able administrator who gained prestige for the new fraternity by receiving official recognition from the Grand Lodges of Ireland and Scotland. Serving as grand secretary of the new lodge for thirty-five years, he eventually cajoled, bullied, and molded the Ancients into an equal to the premier Grand Lodge. One measure of his success was the acceptance by the London Grand Lodge of its new name—in its own minutes.⁸

Though the immediate occasion for the indictment of the Moderns lay in a dispute over rituals, social differences underlay the rise of Ancient Freemasonry. Dermott later described the original members as “Men of some Education and an honest Character but in low Circumstances.” The 1751 membership rolls indicate that most were “mechanics,” journeymen painters, shoemakers, and tailors, of a similar character to those who had earlier established the lodges for Masonic craftsmen. One of the new Grand Lodge’s first acts of business was to provide support from its charity fund for members in debtors’ prison. In his Ahiman Rezon, the Ancients’ grand secretary expanded the pool of eligible Masonic candidates beyond the affluent elite by stipulating only that members of the Ancient fraternity be freeborn men, “upright in body and limbs,” free of debt, and “endowed with an estate, office, trade, occupation or some visible way of acquiring an honest and reputable livelihood.”⁹ He then took steps to democratize the organization by requiring the election rather than the appointment of all Grand Lodge officers.

The Ancients’ more humble rank encouraged their expansion abroad, often through regiments in the British Army interested in forming military lodges that were issued traveling warrants. These bodies provided Masonic fellowship for lower ranks of soldiers, who could not, like their superiors, mingle in polite society. In its first decades of existence, the Ancient Grand Lodge sent more than one hundred military lodges to the British colonies, particularly North America, where it warranted forty-nine traveling lodges during the French and Indian War.¹⁰ These military lodges admitted local civilians, each group of whom, when the regiment moved on, applied to the Ancients for a warrant for a stationary lodge.

The first Ancient lodge established in America, however, grew out of a lodge originally chartered by the Moderns in Philadelphia in 1757. The majority of the original petitioners to Philadelphia’s Lodge No. 4 appear to have been British immigrants, including soldiers then stationed in Philadelphia, who were Ancient Masons, a fact of which the Moderns were initially unaware. Once formed, the new lodge accepted other Ancient British Masons and adopted the Ancient manner in admitting new members. By August of 1757, the Pennsylvania Grand Lodge had received reports of these irregularities and responded by sending investigators. Lodge No. 4 did not receive these interlopers fraternally, remarking in its minutes that the visitors “behaved as spies in an enemy camp.” Summoned before the Grand Lodge committee, the officers of No. 4 willingly “plead[ed] Guilty” to being Ancients. As a result, the warrant of No. 4 was recalled less than six months after it had been issued. “Determined never to forsake the good old way,” the insurgent members were soon granted a warrant from the London Ancients, in 1758, becoming Ancient Lodge No. 1. Tensions continued between the two groups when one Modern, Solomon Bush, a prominent Jewish Freemason who was going to London on other business, refused to carry the Ancient lodge’s payment of its fees to the Ancient Grand Lodge.¹¹ Following the establishment of their Lodge No. 1, Philadelphia’s Ancients created a Grand Lodge in 1761 and grew rapidly. In contrast to the four lodges warranted by the local Moderns between 1730 and 1758, Philadelphia’s Ancients warranted more than fifty between 1761 and 1785. Lodges working under the Moderns rapidly declined, ceasing to exist altogether about 1793, when their hall was sold and the proceeds donated to the city as a fund “to furnish the poor with wood.”¹²

In 1774, the London Ancients issued a decree that any lodge in the world with a warrant from the Moderns should be deemed unworthy of association with the “Ancient Community” and its official sanction from the London Grand Lodge of Ancients canceled.¹³ This was in keeping with Dermott’s dictate in the Ahiman Rezon that “ancient Masonry contains everything valuable amongst the moderns, as well as many other things that cannot be revealed without additional ceremonies.”¹⁴ This claim seems to have been generally accepted, in some instances even by Moderns. In 1778, the Episcopal clergyman William Smith, having served for many years as the grand secretary and grand chaplain of the Pennsylvania Moderns, submitted himself to be “healed” in an Ancient ceremony. By 1785, as many as nineteen hundred men had been initiated into lodges warranted by Philadelphia’s Ancient fraternity.¹⁵ By 1800, the national Ancient fraternity encompassed all eleven American Grand Lodges, whose five hundred subordinate lodges included an estimated twenty-five thousand members. Together these men constituted about 3 percent of the adult white male population and a substantially higher percentage of those with property and the means to pay the fraternity’s fees.¹⁶ In addition, these numbers do not include the late eighteenth-century expansion of the fraternity into the African American community through the creation of Prince Hall Masonic lodges (see chapter 6).

The triumph of the Ancient fraternity was part of a large transformation of American society that challenged old social divisions between the elite and common people. In the second half of the eighteenth century, a movement of increasingly sophisticated and politically aware urban artisans emerged and became vigorously involved in efforts surrounding the coming war.¹⁷ At the same time, rising leaders of country towns and villages were developing political and economic standing and a growing cosmopolitanism.¹⁸ Masonic membership was particularly attractive to each of these groups because it provided them with social prestige and a means for creating community with the elite. Masons could be found on both the American and the British sides of the Revolution, but the growing prestige of the Ancient brothers and the involvement of American officers in local and military lodges led to the close identification of the order with the American cause.¹⁹

Freemasons were central to the war effort. They accounted for 69 of the 241 men (29 percent) who either signed the Articles of Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, or the Constitution or served as generals in the Continental Army or as General Washington’s aides or military secretaries. Such luminaries as Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and John Hancock were Freemasons. Forty-two percent of the generals commissioned by the Continental Congress and led by Washington were or became Masons.²⁰ These men were often actively involved in ten military lodges whose membership drew overwhelmingly from the ranks of commissioned officers. Like the British military lodges, these gatherings of American soldiers provided identity and mutual support. Unlike the ineffective and parochial Christian chaplains, the Continental Army’s military lodges provided common beliefs and rituals that reinforced the validity of the emerging American society. By the war’s end, the largest of these lodges counted several hundred officers among its members.²¹

MILITARY LODGES

Military lodges were more effective than Christian ministers in building ties among Continental Army officers. The Christian chaplaincy in the Revolutionary War began with a disorganized system of volunteer preachers. Gradually, the Continental Congress extended its influence to include chaplaincies, which it slowly developed into an organized system.²² In practice, however, chaplains were few in number and transient in service. In January of 1776, only one-third of the army’s regiments had chaplains.²³ Among the 117 ministers who worked as chaplains, only one remained in service throughout the war, while the majority did not stay more than ten months.²⁴ Though some chaplains served as regular soldiers, the great majority sheltered themselves in private homes or with staff officers. During marches they were ordered to stay at the rear of the vanguard.²⁵

Few, transient, and set apart, the chaplains were additionally frustrated in their work by the soldiers’ pervasive drunkenness, profanity, and widespread lack of interest in religious services. On July 4, 1775, the day after Washington took command, he reminded the army that the Articles of War forbade “profane cursing, swearing and drunkenness” and imposed on all officers and men when not on duty “punctual attendance on Divine Service to implore the blessing of heaven upon the means used for our safety and defence.” In spite of this, he found it necessary throughout the war to reiterate the obligation of men and officers to attend divine services. But an apparent indifference on the part of the chaplains encouraged soldiers’ apathy. On February 15, 1783, Washington issued lengthy general orders against relaxed discipline and expressed particular astonishment at the behavior of chaplains, who had “frequently been almost all absent at the same time.”²⁶

Organized Christianity also suffered from denominational antagonisms. Almost one-half (48 of 115) of the chaplains with known denominational affiliations were Congregational ministers from New England, some of whom protested Rhode Island’s appointment of the Unitarian minister John Murray because of his ultraliberal and heterodox views.²⁷ Virginia frontiersmen, in turn, deplored the predominance of Anglican clergymen (nine of ten) in their state’s delegation and the absence of ministers from their dissident Baptist faith.²⁸ In June of 1777, Washington addressed Congress at length on this knotty subject. Fearing the outbreak of religious disputes if men were compelled “to a mode of Worship which they do not profess,” he concluded that it would be best if each regiment had a voice in choosing a chaplain of its own “religious sentiments.”²⁹

At the same time that an ineffective structure, persisting indifference, and localism impeded the work of organized religion, officers were attracted to the new nationalistic fervor particularly evident in the sanctity of the military funeral. As the Connecticut Congregational chaplain Ammi Robbins put it, “There is something more than ordinarily solemn and touching in our funerals, especially an officer’s; sword and arms inverted, others with their arms folded across their breast stepping slowly to the beat of the muffled drum.”³⁰ These officers’ funerals were often accompanied by Masonic rites, which, at least one historian reports, army chaplains frequently performed.³¹

While no systematic comparison of chaplains’ names and Masonic membership records has been conducted, anecdotal evidence is suggestive. The Congregational minister and Connecticut Line Brigade chaplain Abraham Baldwin offered a “polite discourse” to a meeting of all military lodge leaders in a New Jersey Presbyterian church.³² The Presbyterian minister Andrew Hunter was both chaplain to the New Jersey Brigade and the worshipful master of its military lodge.³³ By the winter of 1782, moreover, the military lodges had become so well established that Washington granted a request from Israel Evans, New York’s Presbyterian Brigade chaplain, to erect a public building outside army headquarters on the banks of the Hudson near Newburg for both divine services and lodge meetings. That spring, the building, known to Masons as the Temple, was the site for both Christian worship and the initiation of officers into the mysteries of Freemasonry.³⁴

In contrast to organized Christianity, the military lodges sought to overcome local differences. Unlike the regional religious biases of New England Congregationalism or Virginia Anglicanism, the lodge’s commitment to “all men” regardless of region or denomination provided a basis for community beyond local boundaries. The fraternity’s emphasis on social distinction based on merit rather than birth similarly worked against local prejudices. Moreover, the lodges provided social space for war-weary officers from all over the colonies to relax and enjoy one another’s company. The fraternity’s commitment to creating a society based on an affection among men that transcended differences suggests an anticipation of the new republican society that the army’s officers were fighting to create.³⁵

The meetings of military lodges were usually held when the army was resting in camp between campaigns. Eleven Connecticut regimental officers in Roxbury, Massachusetts, for example, formed American Union Lodge during the army’s encampment in Boston in the winter of 1776. The lodge subsequently moved with the army through Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. Charged in their warrant from the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts to promote “the utmost Harmony and Brotherly Love” among themselves and to be “very cautious of the Moral Character” of prospective members, the new lodge founders agreed to set about their “masonic work” of proposing, examining, and ritually admitting new recruits in the evening of the first, second, and third Tuesdays of every month and in extra meetings when warranted. The lodge held thirty-one meetings in its first six months. At the Battle of Long Island in August of 1776, however, ten members were either killed or captured, and the lodge was forced to close. It held only one meeting between March 1777 and February 1779, but it admitted thirteen new members and initiated twenty candidates, all commissioned officers, between 1776 and 1779.³⁶ In the winter of 1779, the lodge, led by Worshipful Master General Samuel Parsons, met in the army’s winter quarters, along the banks of the Hudson opposite West Point.³⁷

Beyond individual lodge meetings while the army was in camp, the winter of 1779 saw representatives from all ten military lodges come together to propose a unified American Freemasonry. More than one hundred high-ranking Masonic military officers were present in Morristown, New Jersey, for that meeting, including Generals Washington and Mordecai Gist and Colonels Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Proctor. Their petition, to be presented to several provincial grand masters, requested the creation of a national General Grand Lodge, which would “preside over and govern all other lodges of whatsoever degree or denomination.” By eliminating distinctions between Moderns and Ancients, standardizing practices, and correcting abuses, the new Grand Lodge would encourage “frequent communion and social intercourse” among brethren throughout the country so that Masonic “morality and virtue may be far extended.”³⁸ Though the proposed Grand Lodge never came into existence, the unanimous support for this petition among the military’s leading Masons suggests both Freemasonry’s emerging power to provide a common bond among military leaders and its support for the new American nation. As the war continued, the symbols and rituals of Freemasonry, which united men of diverse backgrounds, also reinforced the patriotic effort to create a public sphere of unity in the emerging American society. Wartime Masonic processions first displayed this development.

FREEMASONRY AND THE NATION

At West Point in June of 1779, a procession of thirty members of American Union Lodge, joined by more than seventy visiting brothers, celebrated the Festival of Saint John the Baptist. Led by a “Band of Music with drums and fifes” and displaying the “Bible, Square and Compass,” the company marched to the “Red House,” where “His Excellency George Washington and his family” and a “number of gentlemen” joined them. Following a sermon, an address to the “Brethren in particular,” and a dinner, toasts were drunk to “Congress” and the “Arts and Sciences,” and a special toast, reported to occur at all Masonic events in the war years, was drunk to slain Masons, on this occasion including the military leaders “Warren, Montgomery, [and] Wooster.” After the celebration, Washington, “attended by the Wardens and Secretary of the Lodge,” returned to his barge while the musicians played “God Save America.” “Three cheers from the shore” accompanied the announcement of his departure, which were “answered by three from the barge, the music beating the ‘Grenadier’s March.’”³⁹ Following this impressive gathering, a new military lodge named after Washington was formed and eventually inducted more than two hundred Continental Army officers.⁴⁰

Such celebrations underscored the growing identification of Freemasonry with Washington and the new American nation. The general had first taken part in a public Masonic function just six months earlier. Following the departure of the British from Philadelphia in June of 1778, the Philadelphia Grand Lodge organized a great Masonic celebration of this event, to be commemorated on Saint John’s Day, December 28. On that day, nearly three hundred Masons participated in a grand procession, with “his Excellency our illustrious Brother General Washington” taking the grand master’s position of greatest honor.⁴¹ The march ended at Christ Church, where the city’s two most prominent Anglican clergymen conducted the religious services. Rev. Dr. William White, later the first bishop of Pennsylvania, gave the prayer, and Rev. Dr. William Smith, now an Ancient Mason, dedicated his sermon to General Washington.⁴² Afterward a collection was taken for relief of the poor, which raised four hundred pounds—a large amount for the times.

This celebration substantially enhanced the fraternity’s prestige. The regal and orderly public procession of more Masons than had ever been seen together in America signaled the brotherhood’s size and significance. One historian has observed that the number of Masons in Philadelphia in 1778, 571, was larger than the membership of any other voluntary society in the city at that time.⁴³ The large sum that the fraternity collected for the poor supported its image as a charitable organization actively responding to the needs of the city’s destitute. However, it was the order’s association with Washington and the cause of the United States that clearly marked a turning point in its evolution. From this point forward, Washington endorsed the society’s activities through his prominent presence in the members’ public activities and private correspondence. As a Masonic ode commemorating his participation in these ceremonies exulted,

See Washington, he leads the train,

’Tis he commands the grateful strain;

See, every crafted son obeys.

And to the godlike brother homage pays.

Over the next few decades, Masonic sermons, addresses, and orations reverently associated Washington, Masonry, and the ideals of the new nation.⁴⁴

This convergence was particularly apparent to Masonic observers of Washington’s presidential inauguration in New York City in 1789. For that ceremony, General Jacob Morton, the marshal of the festivities and the master of Saint John’s, the city’s oldest Masonic lodge, brought the Bible from the altar of his lodge. Robert R. Livingston, the chancellor of the state of New York and the grand master of its Grand Lodge, administered the oath. Afterward, Washington “reverently” kissed the Bible, which was later returned to the lodge. A memorial leaf was folded at the page the president had kissed, and in subsequent years the Bible became the lodge’s most sacred memento.⁴⁵ At least one Masonic historian thought that Washington’s inaugural address—with its acknowledgment of his hopes and fears, his appeal to the divine ruler, and his examination of the requirements of the Constitution—reflected Masonic principles.⁴⁶

The sanctification of the new nation through Masonic rituals was even more public in President Washington’s participation in the Masonic ceremonial laying of the cornerstone of the nation’s Capitol in 1793. For that formal occasion, the president clothed himself in the apron and insignia of a Mason and processed solemnly with hundreds of brothers through the city in a grand Masonic parade. Arriving at the southeast corner of the Capitol, he laid on the cornerstone a silver plate commemorating his presidency and inscribed, “In the thirteenth year of American independence . . . and in the year of Masonry, 5793.” He then covered the plate with the Masonic symbols of corn, wine, and oil. The corn dedicated the Capitol to the Grand Architect of the Universe and to Masonry, the wine to virtue and science, and the oil to universal charity and benevolence. The “whole congregation” then “joined in reverential prayer, which was succeeded by . . . a volley from the military.”⁴⁷

Joseph Clark, the grand master of Maryland, articulated the significance of the event in his address at the laying of the Capitol’s cornerstone, comparing it to the “like work” of laying the cornerstone of King Solomon’s Temple. From that ancient ceremony, Clark observed, had come the flowering “of our honourable, and sublime order.” Similarly, he prophesied, after this ceremony, “Architecture, Masonry, Arts, and Commerce will grow with rapidity inconceivable to me.” With Freemasonry as its cornerstone and the incomparable Brother Washington modeling Masonic virtues, Grand Master Clark envisioned the new American nation as embodying the deepest Masonic values.⁴⁸

The symbols and rituals of Freemasonry, self-consciously used by the leaders of the new American republic, provided visual support for the new government’s legitimacy while encouraging public acceptance of the fraternity as an embodiment of the ideals of the new society. The spread of cornerstone ceremonies in the early years of the young republic affirmed this relationship. Beginning with Washington’s laying of the cornerstone at the Capitol in 1793, government leaders turned to the brotherhood to sanctify public undertakings. The state capitols of Massachusetts and Virginia each received Masonic blessings.⁴⁹ As the economy expanded, the fraternity anointed bridges and the Erie Canal locks and sanctified public higher education in cornerstone ceremonies at the University of North Carolina and the University of Virginia. In 1818, several thousand spectators turned out for the Massachusetts Grand Lodge’s dedication of Boston’s new Massachusetts General Hospital.⁵⁰ Such practices extended to the nation’s churches. For example, in 1826, “the cornerstone of the new Episcopal Church, at Carlisle, Penn. [w]as laid . . . with Masonic rites, by Cumberland Star Lodge, No. 197—assisted by Harrisburg, Chambersburg, and Lansingburg Lodges, and many of the fraternity from other places. . . . The Chambersburg paper remarks: ‘Is this not a novelty . . . to find Masons engaged in laying the corner stone of a place of Christian worship, at the request of its pastor and congregation?’—It is: and we see in the fact, an era approaching of more liberal opinions respecting, and kindly disposition towards, that ancient and honorable fraternity.”⁵¹ By the 1820s, not only Protestants but also Catholics and Jews were calling on the brotherhood to bless their houses of worship.⁵² The height of the fraternity’s popularity may have been the Marquis de Lafayette’s tour of the United States in 1824–25, which went through all twenty-four states over thirteen months, accompanied by Masonic processions, dinners, cornerstone layings, and intense media coverage.

Like so much of postwar Masonry, these ceremonies had their origins in England but were given new meaning in the American context. Eighteenth-century English Masons had evolved rituals for the consecration of new lodges. Their ingredients, including grand processions, a royal arch, prayers, engravings, striking a mallet, and corn, oil, and wine, were transported into the new American rites.⁵³ At the Bunker Hill memorial consecration, for example, hundreds of New England’s brethren, clothed in full regalia, marched behind a military escort and in front of governors, congressmen, and the president of the United States and through a lofty, triumphal arch on which was inscribed “The Arts pay homage to valor.” When the cornerstone was raised, the Massachusetts grand chaplain prayed that “the Grand Architect of the Universe grant a blessing on this foundation stone” and the grand treasurer placed a silver plate engraved with the names of the grand master and local officials beneath the cornerstone, on which the grand master poured corn, wine, and oil while praying to the “bounteous Author of nature . . . [to] grant to us all in needful supply the Corn of nourishment, the Wine of refreshment, and the Oil of joy.” He then “struck the stone thrice with his mallet and the Honours of Masonry were given.” An oration and a concluding procession followed.⁵⁴ The Masonic consecration of American public enterprises adapted older rituals that prepared English lodges for the practice of Freemasonry, to celebrate the new American republic.

This appropriation was part of a larger effort to create a national popular political culture in the years following the Revolution. Working against the regional, racial, ethnic, class, and gender diversities of postwar America, the civil ceremonies of Freemasonry, like the new Fourth of July parades, speeches, and toasts, were elements of a spontaneous attempt to delineate the borders of a common though contested public world.

As David Waldstreicher has argued, emerging efforts by various groups, including African Americans and women, to create a common understanding of American society through public events and print culture worked to resolve the many paradoxes of localism and nationalism, plus racial and gender identities, that characterized the early years of the young republic. Though Waldstreicher does not discuss Freemasonry in this context, the central role that it played in postwar public events offers evidence of its contribution to what he calls “the true political culture of the early Republic.” While the white, male, and affluent character of the fraternity’s members obviously worked against the creation of a truly inclusive society, the nationalist rhetoric and practices that the brotherhood encouraged and engaged in contributed to the effort to produce a common social discourse within perpetually negotiated borders.⁵⁵ This was particularly apparent in the fraternity’s appropriation of republicanism.

REPUBLICAN MASONRY

Republicanism has always been more an ideal than a description of society. The concept began with Niccolò Machiavelli and other political theorists of the Italian Renaissance and was later developed through Montesquieu’s belief that all governments rest on their subjects. For these social theorists, what makes the law effective in despotic governments is fear; what makes the law effective in a republic is virtue. In the seventeenth-century English Civil Wars, social thinkers employed the term to envision new ways for governments to provide for the well-being of their people. As previously discussed, the Earl of Shaftesbury and other late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English republican thinkers responded to Thomas Hobbes’s vision of a hierarchical society held together by coercion by putting forward the idea of natural benevolence and sociability. They believed that people naturally get along with one another and are concerned for the well-being of others. Such universal benevolence, however, was possible only for gentlemen. Ordinary people would have to submit to more coercive forms of social control. Following the Revolution, Americans took the English theorists’ attempt to justify the rule of the gentry and enlarged it to become a means of holding together the whole of society. Social order and well-being in the new American republic would rely on the virtue of all citizens.

Revolutionary-era American spokespersons drew deeply on the libertarian thought of English social theorists in their embrace of republicanism as a set of political and social attitudes to guide the new world they believed they were creating. History, they held, revealed an eternal struggle between the forces of liberty and the forces of power. Preserving a republican government meant protecting liberty from the perpetual aggression of power. Without the authoritarian government or hierarchical restraints that supported earlier nations, American republicans believed that the character of the people rather than the force of arms would determine the health of their society. Virtue, including the repudiation of self-interest through the acceptance of moral rules, undergirded the new society. Hence, American republicanism meant maintaining private and public virtue, social solidarity, and vigilance against the corruptions of power.⁵⁶ As the new nation came into its own, moral training in the republican virtues became a particular concern of the Masonic fraternity.

Because the brotherhood embodied the older Enlightenment ideals of benevolence and sociability and the new American commitments to patriotism and democracy, the call to Freemasonry became indistinguishable from the call to American citizenship. In charging his brethren to act out their Masonic “duties and virtues,” one late eighteenth-century orator put it this way: “We are now blessed with a free, independent and equal government, founded in theory upon principles the most beneficial to society.” Masonic duty therefore required that “every benevolent principle, be cultivated by us . . . in seeking the general good of the whole.”⁵⁷ Similarly, George Washington, responding to an address from the Pennsylvania Grand Lodge praising his nation building, saw the new government as at its best in realizing the ideals of Freemasonry: “To erect upon a solid foundation, the true principles of government, is only to have shared . . . in a labor, the result of which, let us hope, will prove, thro’ all ages, a sanctuary for brothers, and a Lodge for the virtues.”⁵⁸ Not only did Masonic duty now require the fulfillment of the duties of American citizenship, but, conversely, the realization of the “true principles of government” meant the embodiment of Masonic virtues.

Following the Revolution, Masonic leaders put renewed emphasis on the order’s long-held moral teachings and their new republican meaning. Benevolence and sociability, the hallmarks of the English theorists, were institutionalized. “Our institution asserts . . . the natural equality of mankind,” the grand master and future New York governor De Witt Clinton said in 1793.⁵⁹ “From the beginning of time to the present day,” Brother Benjamin Green echoed to his Marblehead, Massachusetts, lodge in 1797, “the Free Mason’s lodge . . . has ever been considered . . . a nursery of . . . love and good will to mankind.”⁶⁰ By seeking to extend their values to the larger social world, moreover, the brothers came to see their fraternity as a harbinger of a new social order. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Masonic leaders frequently spoke of the fraternity as a “school of virtue” dedicated to the “cultivation and extension of the principles of morality, good will and virtue.”⁶¹ Though the order had always encouraged spreading its values to society at large, it now gave particular emphasis to the claim that the development and practice of Masonic virtues were “precisely the duties” that every “man owes to his brother.”⁶²

This new Masonic emphasis on moral improvement came at a time when the disestablishment of religion was undercutting the role of churches as moral teachers. Prior to the Revolution, nearly all of the thirteen colonies had either tax support for ministers or religious tests for public office. To a great extent, the Anglican, Presbyterian, and Congregational churches were the established teachers of public morality. Following the separation of church and state, a period of growing pluralism and sectarianism ensued. By 1815, a variety of pan-Protestant moral improvement societies had emerged, anticipating the moral reform movements of later decades. Just after the revolution, however, Freemasonry was the only established institution whose rejection of particular religious and political requirements and embrace of “universal” moral teachings allowed it to reach out to all citizens. As the “sacred asylum” and repository of republican virtue, the order appeared to offer a higher plane, beyond the confusions of postwar religion, that embodied the principles of the new American society.⁶³

What influence the Masonic “school of virtue” had on the moral tenor of the new society or on Masons themselves is difficult to determine. Though the fraternity heralded the need for moral improvement, this very emphasis suggests the difficulties perceived in attaining it. In contrast to English social theorists who believed that moral benevolence was a natural capacity only of gentlemen, revolutionary Americans staked their new nation’s success on the ability of its entire citizenry to embody private and public virtue. Rather than applaud the success of the people in demonstrating this morality, many Americans emphasized the need for more moral training. “The laws of nature are to be found in the human heart,” Clinton said, yet they are mingled “with those black and hostile passions which harass society.”⁶⁴ To overcome these “dark passions,” another Masonic spokesperson said, each lodge member “solemnly promised” to watch over his brother and, when needed, “remind him . . . of his failings, and aid his reformation.”⁶⁵ References to the “failings and offences of our brethren” are sprinkled throughout Masonic orations.⁶⁶

In addition to supporting republican virtues, postwar Masonic spokespersons revived interest in scientific learning and education. Prior to the society’s migration to America, the cultivation of the arts and sciences was a hallmark of Freemasonry. The English legendary histories trace the institution to Hermes, Euclid, and other originators of these fields. Both the Enlightenment emphasis on order, rationality, and science and the seemingly purer wisdom of the ancient world fascinated the founding members of the English Grand Lodge. Yet neither ancient wisdom nor Newtonian science were of much concern to colonial Masons, whose chief preoccupation was consolidating their elite social class through fraternal love and honor. Following the Revolution, however, American Masonic leaders revived their fraternity’s identification with the learned men of the past and in so doing aligned it with the onward march of civilization. “It is well known,” Clinton stated in 1793, that Freemasonry “was at first composed of scientific and ingenious men, who assembled together to improve the arts and sciences.” Locating these men in long-ago antiquity, when “knowledge . . . was restricted to a chosen few,” he explained that “when the invention of printing had opened the means of instruction to all ranks of people, then the generous cultivators of Masonry communicated with cheerfulness to the world, those secrets of the arts and sciences.”⁶⁷ This retrieval of an older emphasis on arts and sciences helped to establish the fraternity as central not only to the advance of civilization but to the transmission of knowledge as well. The Masonic movement was “one of the ancient founders of schools,” Brother John H. Sheppard lectured the Grand Lodges of New Hampshire and Maine in 1820. “The liberal arts and sciences” were “taught in Lodges,” whose “brethren imparted instruction to their children and others.”⁶⁸

Masonic leaders asserted this new interest in learning at a moment when cultural indifference toward education and public schooling was not yet overcome. Against the “apparent indolence of men of learning, and the small benefit the community seems to derive from . . . academical institutions,” Sheppard argued that “such characters and such institutions are infinitely important in the support of a republican government.”⁶⁹ Acting on this conviction, New York’s Grand Lodge created a free common school for Masonic children in 1810, a time when all other schools were either pay, sectarian, or both. By 1817, with the expansion of public interest in common schooling, the state took over patronage and supervision of the Mason-sponsored Free School.⁷⁰

As no less than patrons of the arts and sciences and founders of schools, postwar Masonic leaders saw themselves as essential to the success of the American experiment. Yet their efforts to identify the fraternity both with the onward march of civilization and as a “school of virtue” devoted to the improvement of morals appear to have been more successful rhetorically than in practice. There is some evidence that the emphasis on education encouraged some lodges to support outside educational activities. Lectures on learned topics were also occasionally presented in the lodges. Yet apart from the requirement of second degree members to memorize a short overview of the seven liberal arts, there is no evidence of any lodge creating a regular course of study, much less a systematic school of learning, in this period.⁷¹ What is certain is that claims about the fraternity’s support of moral and mental improvement pervaded the order’s private and public meetings. And however realized in practice, postwar Masonry’s celebration of republican morality, science, and education did separate the fraternity and its members from the narrow localisms of family, church, and region and link them to the larger, cosmopolitan world of the American republic. As believers in the fraternity as the “primordial” source of learning and education, Masonic leaders saw earlier than many the need for “mental improvement” in support of republican institutions.⁷²

The Masonic expression of these republican ideals at a time of national expansion contributed to the dramatic increase in the number of American men who entered the fraternity. Between 1800 and 1820, the American population nearly doubled, from 5.3 to 9.6 million, and spread rapidly to the west.⁷³ By 1821, nine new states contained a quarter of the American population. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the American Masonic fraternity grew more than threefold, from an estimated twenty-five thousand members, primarily in the urban East, to an estimated eighty thousand nationally. This represented an increase from about 3 percent of the adult white male population in 1800 to about 5 percent of the 1820 number (the percentage of Masons among those with the leisure to attend the fraternity’s gatherings and the resources to pay its initiation fees was even larger).⁷⁴ In 1824, Freemasonry was described as “powerful” in every state of the union. Its members identified as “men of rank, wealth, office and talent . . . effective men, united together . . . in the legislative hall, on the bench, [and] in every gathering of men of business.”⁷⁵

During this Masonic heyday, the fraternity’s civic role replaced that of Christian churches in the colonial period. Prior to the Revolution, Congregational, Presbyterian, and especially Anglican clergyman were called on to bless the public enterprises of the monarchy’s subjects. The revolutionary overthrow of hierarchical society, the separation of church and state, and the rise of republican ideology punctured the sacred canopy of the Christian Church. Into this void stepped a newly democratic, patriotic, benevolent, and republican Freemasonry, which willingly offered its symbols and rituals as a means for rebuilding society’s foundations.

CHRISTIAN REPUBLICAN MASONRY

In the revolutionary era, American Protestantism incorporated republican and Enlightenment ideas into an expanding framework that closely identified the church with the nation. Between 1763 and 1789, the meanings of Christian “liberty” and “righteous community” came to embrace not only the church but the nation as well. Though the church was never tied to the constitutional structure of the state, American Protestantism and republicanism became closely interwoven.⁷⁶ Similarities between their principles, moreover, led to the pervasive assumption that republicanism not only expressed Christian ideals but should be defended with Christian fervor. This was particularly true of Calvinist Christians and their evangelical heirs, yet it was also so for the early proponents of liberal Protestantism, whose distinctive ethos was then emerging from the influence of Enlightenment thought on Calvinist Christianity. Though orthodox and liberal Protestants would soon be at loggerheads, all came together in the first quarter of the nineteenth century in the belief that the success of the American republic depended on the moral education of its people.

In these early years of the American nation, Enlightenment influences similarly expanded the boundaries of Christianity to include Freemasonry. As we have seen, prior to the revolution, colonial Masons had an ambiguous relationship with the Christian religion. Their 1723 constitution instructed Masons to leave “their particular Opinions to themselves” and instead to adopt only “that Religion in which all men agree.”⁷⁷ Some defended the order as inherently Christian, others believed that it transcended Christianity, and a few were fascinated with ancient, esoteric wisdom, but most appear to have seen the fraternity as representing universal moral principles rather than particular religious claims. While these multiple views continued into the early national period, Freemasonry was increasingly seen as working to realize the temporal ends of Christianity. This had to do with changes in both American Protestantism and the fraternity.

In the revolutionary period, Enlightenment thinking led to the development of a Protestant liberalism that, while not denying the reality of supernatural forces, brought the power of reason to bear on religious judgments. The indigenous religious liberalism of Unitarianism, for example, had its intellectual and social origins in a small group of Congregationalist clergy in the Boston area who took offense at the “enthusiastic” religion that George Whitefield was spreading in the 1730s and 1740s.⁷⁸ Such men as Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew were uncomfortable with a Calvinist frame of reference shaped by the belief that human beings are essentially sinful and can attain salvation only through an act of grace. In contrast, American liberal Protestantism asserted the human capacity to create a just and benevolent world. “Reasonable” Christianity provided the religious foundation for Enlightenment beliefs about humanity’s ability to construct, improve, and abide by the rules of a safer and more caring environment.

The emergence of liberal Protestantism expanded the boundaries of Christianity to include the ideology of colonial Freemasonry. The latitudinarian movement in the Church of England, in particular, employed Newtonian science to stake out an understanding of religion between the extremes of Catholicism and atheism or religious indifference. Reason and science rather than faith and revelation lay at the foundation of latitudinarian belief and practice. This Anglican view was widely adopted by colonial American Masons, including clergy.

In the early nineteenth century, Protestant ministers and other members of a variety of denominations joined Freemasonry, with the great majority of its new leaders coming from the Unitarian, Episcopalian, and Congregational Churches. The brotherhood met this attraction with efforts to link itself more overtly with Christian faith. Standing to the left of sectarian Calvinists and their evangelical heirs yet to the right of Enlightenment rationalists, Christian Freemasonry appeared to respond to a widely shared desire to reimagine the character of American society as it emerged from the revolution.

The Unitarians James Thompson and William Bentley were characteristic of the Protestant ministers who joined the fraternity following the war. When he was ordained in 1804, the Harvard-educated Thompson stood, “like many of the New England clergy, on that indistinct and wavering line between Calvinism and Unitarianism, sometimes called moderate Calvinism.” In that same year, the Barre, Massachusetts, native was present when the appointment of a liberal to the Hollis Professorship of Divinity marked the end of orthodoxy at his college. “Following discussions attendant on the inauguration of Dr. Ware as Hollis Professor,” Thompson was said to have become “completely emancipated from Calvinistic . . . theology.” He joined his local lodge shortly thereafter and later served as the grand chaplain of the Massachusetts Grand Lodge.⁷⁹ Bentley had a similar story. In his youth in prewar Salem, Massachusetts, and at Harvard during the war, he was described as a “decided and earnest Calvinist.” Following his ordination and permanent settlement in Salem’s Second Congregational Church in 1783, he “renounced Calvinism” and soon became an “avowed Unitarian.” Two years afterward, Bentley joined his local lodge, later serving as state grand chaplain.⁸⁰

The twenty-four ministers who served as Massachusetts Grand Lodge chaplains between 1797 and 1825 followed similar courses. Twenty were raised in the strict-to-moderate Calvinism of the Congregational Church and later helped form its liberal wing (five) and the liberal Unitarian (twelve) and Universalist (three) Churches. The majority of these grand chaplains, including two of the four Episcopalians, attended Harvard College. Nearly all were ordained within a few years of finishing college and joined their local lodge around the same time.⁸¹

These clergymen were benevolent and educated, concerned more with the moral and mental improvement of society than with the dogmatic sectarianism of Calvinist churches. Believing in the universal benevolence of God and universal salvation, these liberal ministers avoided theological controversies and supported the formation of interdenominational societies to advance social morality and education. These were men such as the Unitarian John Pipon, whose sermons were always “sound” but “never doctrinal” and who avoided “the topics of dispute which divided the religious community” while offering to all a “general benevolence” which “lost none of its strength by diffusion.”⁸² Or the Concord Unitarian Ezra Ripley, whom one congregant, the Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, described as “adopting heartily, though in its mildest forms, the creed and catechism of the fathers” and who worked ardently for the temperance cause.⁸³ Some went so far as the Reverend Joseph Richardson, who declared “all religious creeds or formulas [to be] of human device” and thereby “unfit to be regarded as substitutes for the Christian life.”⁸⁴ Well-educated themselves, they sat on school committees, helped form the American Education Society, and joined the Massachusetts Historical Society. With the ministers and other members of other denominations, they helped create local and national Bible societies, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and numerous benevolent and charitable institutions intended to serve the community as a whole.

For these leading liberal ministers, their local Masonic brotherhood complemented and supported the larger purposes of Christianity. There they found men like themselves, from their community, from their church, who were similarly interested in mental and moral improvement. The brothers, in turn, often placed these clergymen in positions of authority. In addition to serving as grand chaplains of the Massachusetts Grand Lodge, several were deputy district grand masters; the Universalist Paul Dean became the grand master of the Massachusetts Grand Lodge, while Thompson had a lodge named after him.⁸⁵

In their Masonic discourses, these ministers repeatedly placed the temporal work of the lodge within the greater spiritual purpose of Christianity. The Congregational minister Ezekiel L. Bascom argued that while Freemasonry was committed to improving social morality, it, like other “religious and moral societies,” “rises or falls” to the degree that “piety to God” is “the reigning principle of our hearts.”⁸⁶ The necessity of personal and social “regeneration for the enjoyment of the blessing of holy union,” the Congregational minister and brother Clark Brown concluded, “render[ed] Masonry important, as well as Christianity necessary.”⁸⁷ For these Christian Masonic clergymen, the lodge was, in an often-repeated phrase, “the handmaid” of Christianity, working toward its temporal ends while not usurping Christianity’s larger spiritual objective. As Bentley bluntly declared in an address to his local Salem lodge, “the object of Christianity and Masonry never can be the same.” Christianity’s aim is “the advancement of personal virtue always above the state of society in common life. It proposes its highest rewards in a future existence, and directs all its associations to this end.” In contrast, “our institution provides immediately for the friendship of life and manners through the world.”⁸⁸

Although the majority of early nineteenth-century Masonic clergy appear to have been Unitarian, Episcopal, or Congregational, the fraternity had some evangelical Baptist and Methodist leaders. The Baptist revivalist Joshua Bradley, known for his Accounts of Religious Revivals in Many Parts of the United States from 1815 to 1816, was also the author of Some of the Beauties of Freemasonry.⁸⁹ The Methodist Solomon Sias was the publisher of his denomination’s newspaper Zion’s Herald in the 1820s and the prelate of an advanced degree, the Encampment of Knights Templar. In 1820, he brought his evangelical convictions into the lodge, reminding his fellow Masons that “the rude and sinful state of man . . . is early impressed on the mason’s mind; and the necessity of change of heart and life” is “clearly pointed out.”⁹⁰ Men such as Bradley and Sias believed in human depravity and the need for an experience of conversion yet were also, like their Baptist brother John Gano, “of a liberal mind, and esteemed pious men of every denomination.”⁹¹

Baptist missionaries and itinerant Methodists, tied to a system that relocated them every few years, may have joined the ubiquitous fraternity to help them accommodate to their constant movement. The Masonic membership of the fiery populist “Crazy” Lorenzo Dow, perhaps the most well-known and well-traveled Methodist itinerant, is further evidence of the attraction of the brotherhood to evangelical preachers. Unkempt in appearance, rough in manner, and guided by inner lights and vision, Dow had a passionate preaching style, often accompanied by hysterics and falling on the ground, that would seem the antithesis of the studied decorum of the gentleman Mason. Yet in 1830 he was introduced to a Maryland lodge meeting as a “visiting Brother.” Addressing the lodge, “Brother Dow” exhorted his fellows “to show that Masons can be good men as well as good Christians.”⁹²