Читать книгу The Freemasons In America: - H. Paul Jeffers - Страница 11

BORN IN ROXBURY, MASSACHUSETTS, IN 1740, JOSEPH WAREN BECAME a Mason in St. Andrew’s Lodge on September 10, 1761. He received the second degree on September 2, 1761. On November 28, 1765, he became a Master Mason. Described as “somewhat impetuous in his nature, but brave to a fault,” he spoke to a sizeable crowd at Boston’s Old South Church on the anniversary of the Boston Massacre (March 3, 1770) with the knowledge that English army officers ususally attended such gatherings to heckle the speaker. Describing that day, a masonic biographer of Warren writes:

It required a cool head and steady nerves, and Grand Master Joseph Warren had both. The crowd at the church was immense; the aisles, the pulpit stairs, and the pulpit itself was filled with officers and soldiers of the garrison, always there to imitidate the speaker. Warren was equal to the task but entered the church through a pulpit window in the rear, knowing he might have been barred from entering through the front. In the midst of his most impassioned speech, an English officer seated on the pulpit stairs and in full view of Warren, held several pistol bullets in his open hand. The act was significant; while the moment was one of peril and required the exercise of both courage and prudence, to falter and allow a single nerve or muscle to tremble would have meant failure—even ruin to Warren and others. Everyone present knew the intent of the officer but Warren having caught the act of the officer and without the least discomposure or pause in his discourse, simply approached the officer and dropped a white handkerchief into the offier’s hand! The act was so cleverly and courteously performed that the officer was compelled to acknowledge it by letting the orator to continue in peace.

Elected major general by the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts on June 14, 1775, with no military education or experience, Warren was placed in command of the rebel force on Breed’s Hill (later called Bunker Hill) as the “Red Coats” crossed the bay from Boston to lift a siege of the city that had been established after Lexington and Concord. Despite protests by Generals Artemis Ward and Israel Putnam, Warren shouldered a musket behind barricades on the hill.

The shooting on June 17, 1775, lasted less than an hour, with the Americans running out of ammunition. Warren was shot in the back of the head and killed. His body was thrown in a ditch by a British officer and buried with several other bodies. Discovered months later, Warren’s body was identified by Paul Revere by a false tooth that he had made for American Freemasonry’s first knight templar “martyr” in the cause of independence.

It was at Bunker Hill that William Davis, the original American templar, invented what was known as “the barrel defense.” It consisted of barrels packed with stones and earth that were rolled down the hill at the British attackers. The richest Bostonian of his day while still in his twenties, with interests in shipping and real estate, Davis was enrolled in an “independent company” of Bostonians in a regiment under Major General John Hancock. He was born in 1737. After his father’s death, he was adopted by an uncle, a wealthy Boston merchant whose business he entered after graduating from Harvard in 1754. Admitted to Merchants Lodge No. 277 in Quebec on January 26, 1762, he affiliated with Boston’s St. Andrew’s Lodge on October 14, 1762. He was a leader in the struggle against British taxation. In 1768, he refused to allow royal inspectors aboard his ship, the Liberty. This brought about the seizure of the vessel, followed by a riot in Boston. Defiance of the British won him great popularity, and in 1769 he was elected to the Massachusetts General Court. Six years later he was chosen to be a delegate to the second Continental Congress and served as its president from 1775 to 1776. It was in this role that he became the first signer of the Declaration of Independence. He wrote his name large and with a flourish, explaining that he did this so King George III would be able to read it without putting on his spectacles.

Another wealthy Massachusetts businessman and Freemason who enthusiastically joined the fight for independence was John Glover. Born in 1732 in Marblehead, Massachusetts, he made his fortune in fishing and merchandising and was commissioned to lead the Marblehead regiment after the Battle of Lexington. His men were trained for naval operations and took part in an evacuation by boat of Washington’s force from Long Island to Manhattan. They later ferried Washington and his troops across the Delaware for the Christmas Eve surprise attack on Trenton, then carried 750 captured Hessians to Pennsylvania.

New Hampshire–born Freemason John Stark had served as a lieutenant under Jeffrey Amherst in the French and Indian War. A colonel at Bunker Hill, he later helped fortify New York after the retreat from Long Island, participated in an expedition to Canada, and took part in the Battles of Morristown and Short Hills, New Jersey. When he died in 1822, he was the last surviving general of the Revolution.

William Whipple was born in Maine but became a New Hampshire merchant. Serving as a brigadier general in the New Hampshire militia, he took the surrender of British general John Burgoyne at the Battle of Saratoga. Another businessman, Mordecai Gist of Maryland, organized the Baltimore Independent Company Militia and was engaged in several battles. He attended a convention of military lodges in Morristown, New Jersey, in 1780, at which a resolution to create an American grand lodge with George Washington as the Supreme Grand Master failed to pass. It was the closest American Freemasonry came to establishing a national Grand Lodge.

General Hugh Mercer was born in Scotland, received a medical education, and joined the British army as a surgeon’s mate. Immigrating to America, he set up a practice in Pensylvania and learned about Freemasonry and battle tactics while fighting in the French and Indian War. During the war, he met George Washington, who persuaded him to move to Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he was admitted to Masonic Lodge No. 4. A brigadier general, he was killed at the Battle of Princeton after his horse was shot out from under him.

Another Freemason, friend of George Washington, and son of the founder of the Lutheran Church in America, John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania became a Lutheran pastor in New Jersey. He famously said in a sermon before he became a colonel, “There is a time for all things—a time to preach and a time to pray; but there is also a time to fight, and that time has now come.”

While serving as a volunteer during the French and Indian War, Massachusetts-born Israel Putnam became a Mason in a military lodge. Captured by Indians, he was rescued by the French and released in a prisoner exchange. As a farmer in Connecticut, he learned of the Battles of Lexington and Concord while cultivating a field. He abandoned the plow, mounted his horse, and rode to Massachusetts. Put in charge of training volunteers by Joseph Warren, he was at his side when the pioneering American Freemason and Knight Templar was killed. Putnam also has the distinction of being the only major general to serve in the war from start to finish.

The history of blacks in American Masonry began when Prince Hall was initiated into the Irish Constitution Military Lodge along with fifteen other free black men. Little is known of his early life. He was probably born in Barbados, West Indies, on September 12, 1748. He may have arrived in Boston from Africa in 1765 as a slave and was sold to William Hall, who freed him in 1770. During the war, he served in the Continental army and is believed to have fought at Bunker Hill. Initiated into Military Lodge No. 441 with fourteen others, he and the other initiates were granted authority to convene as African Lodge No. 1. Other members were Cyrus Johnson, Bueston Slinger, Prince Rees, John Canton, Peter Freeman, Benjamin Tiler, Duff Ruform, Thomas Santerson, Prince Rayden, Cato Speain, Boston Smith, Peter Best, Forten Howard, and Richard Titley.

At the end of the war, Hall petitioned the Premier Grand Lodge of England for a warrant. It was delivered to Boston on April 29, 1787. A week later (May 6, 1787), African Lodge No. 459 was organized. On June 24, 1791, the African Grand Lodge of North America was organized in Boston with Prince Hall installed as Grand Master. A property owner and registered voter, he campaigned for the establishment of schools for Negro children in Boston, opened one in his own home, and successfully petitioned the state legislature to protect free Negroes from being kidnapped and sold into slavery. He died on December 4, 1807. The next year, as a memorial to him, and by an act of the General Assembly of the Craft, the lodge’s name became Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Massachsetts.

Throughout the world today, there are 44 Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodges, about 5,000 subordinate lodges, and more than 300,000 Prince Hall Masons. For many years, the black churches of America and Prince Hall lodges were the strongest organizations in black communities. Masonic lodge halls were used as locations for church services and teaching blacks how to read and write. Prince Hall Masons used their resources to provide young men and women scholarships for college and to carry out various forms of charity in their local communities.

The American Revolution also saw the first American Indian initiated into Freemasonry. Named Thayendangea, he was the son of the chief of the Mohawks in the 1750s. He was brought up in the household of a prominent British administration official, Sir William Johnson, a Freemason, who gave him the name Joseph Brant. Having fought several battles with Johnson in the French and Indian War, he became Johnson’s personal secretary. By the time of Johnson’s death in 1774, he had become accepted by the British administration. When he went to England in 1775, he was made a Mason in a London lodge. Returning to America to enlist the Mohawks in the fight against the American rebels, he fought under the command of Colonel John Butler in several battles. But when prisoners who were turned over to the Mohawks to be tortured to death made Masonic signs, he released them. After the war, he became a member of St. John’s Lodge of Friendship No. 2 in Canada, of which Butler had become Master, before returning to the Mohawks in Ohio.

Analyzing the influence of Freemasonry on the course of the War for Independence in The Temple and the Lodge, Baigent and Leigh find it both direct and oblique, general and in particular. “In a less direct, less quantifiable fashion,” they write, “it helped to create a general atmosphere, a psychological climate or ambience which helped shape the thinking not only of active brethren such as Franklin and Hancock, but of non-Freemasons as well.” Principles of liberty, equality, brotherhood, tolerance, and “the rights of man,” reasoned Baigent and Leigh, “would not have had the currency they did” without the prevalence of Freemasonry throughout Britain’s American colonies. It imparted its attitudes and values to the newly formed Continental army and may have had something to do with the appointment of Washington as commander in chief. Charles Wilson Peale, the era’s most famous portrait painter and a Freemason, would render likenesses of Revolutionary War Freemasons, including Hancock and Franklin, but his best known of several portraits he did of George Washington is on the front of the dollar bill.