Читать книгу The Freemasons In America: - H. Paul Jeffers - Страница 14

BY THE TIME OF WASHINGTON’S DEATH, LODGES IN THE THIRTEEN states had become adherents of the Scottish Rite. Its earliest recording in America, at Washington’s lodge in Fredericksburg, is dated December 22, 1753. Two years after his funeral, the Mother Supreme Council of the World was formed in Charleston, South Carolina (May 31, 1801). It established a thirty-third degree in the Scottish Rite, described by the Masonic historian C. W. Leadbeater in Freemasonry and Its Ancient Mysteries as “the most important and splendid of All Masonic Obediences.”

After the Revolutionary War, a wave of Americans in search of land and bright opportunities began to move west. Masons took a prominent part in the exploration and settling of the new lands. On September 24, 1805, the Western Star Lodge No. 107 became the first lodge in the Indiana Territory. It held its first meeting in a two-story brick building that would later be rented to the state of Illinois to serve as the first state capitol.

By 1816, several Masonic lodges were operating in the Indiana Territory. They had been granted charters by the Grand Lodges of Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and Indiana. A Masonic Convention on December 9, 1822, was held in the state capitol building at Vandalia. Several lodges in the territory that had been granted charters by the grand lodges of other states decided that since the territory had become a state in 1818, they should form their own grand lodge. Two days later, they proceeded to organize and nominate officers. They were presented to the lodges, approved, and duly elected. A year later, the Grand Lodge of Illinois met in “communication.” From 1805 to 1827, eighteen lodges were formed in Illinois. One of the members recalled:

Brothers that came two to four hours early started the fire to warm up the Lodge Room. This took cutting, splitting, hauling and stacking a lot of wood. Some of our Lodges hold on to the tradition of meeting as close to the full moon as possible. The quaint practice had the practical purpose of giving the Brothers coming home over those rutted and sometimes washed out roads a chance for their horse to see the hazards while they got some much needed sleep, having been up since before dawn to start the chores.

The gold rush fever of the Pikes Peak region of Colorado in 1858 attracted men of all descriptions—fortune-hunters, prospectors, and rovers—who were eager for quick wealth and excitement. A Masonic historian described a flood of

hurriedly-formed wagon trains departing from Missouri river outposts thrown together for 700-mile, month-long journeys, men of every ilk, many of them fleeing from the rigidity of law and order and civilization. But its lure was irresistible to Masons, too. Many members of the craft responded to the sudden challenge of the frontier. And having been forced to associate with adventurers of dubious backgrounds during the tedious overland journey, upon arrival in the new country they quickly sought the company of their brethren.

Within ten days after the founding of the first permanent settlement at the junction of Cherry Creek and the Platte, the first informal assemblage of seven Masons was held in what was to be the territory and then the state of Colorado. Andrew Sagendorf, a member of that pioneering group, told the grand lodge in 1912 that the first meeting of Masonry in Denver was held in W. G. Russell’s cabin on Perry street, near the site of the first bridge, early in November 1858. James Winchester presided, but because he was absent much of the time, Henry Allen generally occupied the Worshipful Master’s station. No stated time or place of meeting was observed, so it was generally once a week and at the most secure and convenient cabin.

J. D. Ramage recalled:

After being accosted by the salutation “Ho, that tent over there,” from a man [Henry Allen], I accompanied Brother Allen to his abode, and there found brothers W. M. Slaughter, Dr. Russell, Andrew Sagendorf, and Oscar Lehow. These brethren together with Brother Allen and myself, made the first seven Masons, according to my knowledge and belief, who ever met in Colorado, having in contemplation the application for a charter, and a seven who stuck together, as Masons should do, through thick and thin.

They agreed to meet every Saturday night and “as our object in locating in Colorado was to get gold (we were supposed to be out prospecting during the week) we decided that any ideas concerning the country we were in which might come to us, news of mines we might discover, or any information which might be beneficial to the brethren, Masonically or financially, would at the next meeting, be given to the Masons there assembled.”

In the deep South, a band of English colonists under the leadership of General James Edward Oglethorpe had arrived on the west bank of the Savannah River on February 12, 1733. This was the birth of the English province of Georgia, the last of the thirteen colonies, and the southwestern frontier of British America. On December 13, 1733, the Grand Lodge of England at its Quarterly Communication in London adopted a resolution to “collect the Charity of this Society towards enabling the Trustees [of Georgia] to send distressed Brethren to Georgia where they may be comfortably provided for.” On February 21, 1734, a lodge was opened in Savannah, but without warrant. Noble Jones, a friend of Oglethorpe’s, was initiated as the first Freemason in Georgia. On December 2, 1735, the lodge was warranted by the Grand Lodge of England and entered on the engraved list as the “Lodge at Savannah in Ye Province of Georgia.”

By 1892, there were fifty grand lodges in the United States, including one in the Indian Territory, which later became the Grand Lodge of Oklahoma It has been said that in every pioneer settlement of the West first came the church, then a school, then a Masonic lodge.

The Masonic scholar Duncan C. Howard, Past Grand Master in Texas, writes, “Masonry is the stuff from which good dreams come.” Asserting that it dreams of a fatherhood of God, brotherhood of men, law and order and good citizenship in state, community, and nation, he continues, “No one seriously believes that Masonry has a monopoly on good citizenship. But the Masonic dream became the American dream as the early Masons in this nation faced the problems of a wild frontier.” With motivation for law and order and motivation for better living in their community, pioneering Masons “became the motivators to establish free schools, free churches and Freemasonry wherever they lived.”

This expansion of Freemasonry across the continent was stimulated by the Louisiana Purchase, negotiated on President Jefferson’s behalf by Masons James Monroe, as secretary of state, and Robert R. Livingston, the New York Grand Master, who’d been on the committee with Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Roger Sherman that drafted the Declaration of Independence. He’d also administered Washington’s oath of office.

Eager to learn everything he could about the region, Jefferson enlisted Meriwether Louis, a boyhood friend and personal secretary, and William Clark, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, to hastily organize “a corps of discovery” to lead the “Northwest Expedition.”

Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1774, Lewis served as a captain in several campaigns against the Indians. He attained Freemasonry’s grand master degree in 1797 in Albemarle County’s Virtue Lodge No. 44. When it went out of existence in 1801, he transferred to the Widow’s Sons Lodge in Charlottesville. Clark was born in Caroline County, Virginia, in 1770. At age twenty-two, he joined the army of General “Mad” Anthony Wayne as a lieutenant. He met Lewis during the 1794 campaign against the Indians and became a Mason with the formation of the St. Louis Lodge by men of the expedition.

With the dimensions and vast riches of this western territory revealed, Americans felt that they had a “manifest destiny” to first subdue it and then absorb it into the United States. Journeying from New York City to the Dakota Territory and becoming a rancher in 1886, an enthusiastic Freemason named Theodore Roosevelt gave voice to this objective. In a letter on June 7, 1897, to his friend John Hay, then America’s ambassador to Great Britain, he wrote, “The young giant of the West stands in a continent and clasps the crest of an ocean in either hand. Our nation, glorious in youth and strength, looks into the future with eager eyes and rejoices as a string man to run a race.” Initiated on January 2, 1901, by the Matinecock Lodge No. 806 in Oyster Bay, New York, he visited the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania as president of the United States on November 5, 1902, for a celebration of the sesquicentennial of George Washington’s Masonic initiation. Of his Masonic membership Roosevelt would say, “I enjoy going to some little lodge where I meet the plain hard-working people on the basis of genuine equality. It is the equality of moral men.”

Freemasonry had reached Roosevelt’s beloved Dakotas in 1862 at Yankton, the territorial capital, in the form of St. John’s Lodge. Seven months later (July 31, 1863) it conducted the territory’s first Masonic funeral. The deceased was Lieutenant Fredrick John Holt Beaver. Born in England and educated at Oxford, he was an Episcopal minister and volunteer soldier attached to the staff of General Henry H. Sibley. He was killed during a skirmish with Sioux Indians.

While the western frontier was being settled, Freemasons with a lust for adventure were heading north. In 1850, Elisha Kent Kane was a surgeon on the ship Advance that had embarked with another ship on a mission to locate an English exploration party that had disappeared during an attempt to reach the North Pole. In 1853, he was in command of Advance when it was trapped in ice. Kane led its crew to safety in Greenland on foot. This feat was honored in Freemasonry in the United States with a lodge for explorers that bears his name.

Also venturing into the frozen north three decades later was one of the most famous and controversial explorers of the nineteenth century: General Adolphus W. Greeley. Born in Massachusetts in 1844, he was a Civil War veteran who between 1876 and 1879 was in charge of stringing more than 2,000 miles of telegraph line in Texas, the Dakotas, and Montana. Placed in command of building a chain of thirteen weather stations in Alaska in 1881, he would be regarded as a pioneer of the U.S. Weather service. When his construction team returned after becoming stranded and thought to be lost after three years, with all but seven having perished, the nation was shocked by a report that the others had been forced into cannibalism to survive. Greeley was also the father of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, and in 1906 he supervised army rescue and relief operations during and after the great earthquake that destroyed most of San Francisco. A member of St. Mark’s Lodge, Newburyport, Massachusetts, and honorary member of Kane Lodge No. 454, called the Explorers Lodge, he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor shortly before his death in 1935.

The most famous Freemason-explorer was Robert E. Peary. A member of the Explorers Lodge, he started his career in exploration in Greenland, followed by Arctic adventures in the 1890s that culminated in him becoming the first man to reach the North Pole in 1909. In the party was Matthew A. Henson. Being a member of the Prince Hall “Celestial Lodge No. 3 of New York,” Henson was Peary’s chief assistant for twenty years. D. D. MacMillan, another member of the North Pole expedition, recalled, “As a carpenter, [Henson] built the sledges. A mechanic, he made alcohol stoves. An expert dog driver, he taught us how to handle our dogs. Highly respected by the Eskimos, he was easily the most popular man on board ship. Strong physically, and above all experienced, he was of more value to our Commander than all the rest of us put together. He went to the Pole with Peary because he was better than the rest of us.”

Richard E. Byrd, the polar explorer, naval officer, and pioneer aviator, was the first man to fly over the North Pole. His Antarctic explorations between 1928 and 1935 resulted in numerous discoveries, including five mountain ranges and islands. Initiated into Freemasonry in 1921 at Federal Lodge No. 1, Washington D.C., he dropped Masonic flags on the North and South Poles. In the Antarctic odyssey of 1933–1935, the majority of the team were Masons (sixty out of eighty-two).

Having completed the work of the Corps of Discovery, Lewis and Clark each served as governor of the territory they’d explored and appointed a secretary, sheriff, and four judges, all of whom were Freemasons. Members of the Craft who also explored the western frontier were Kit Carson and Zebulon Pike.

While Lewis and Clark were off on their expedition, Pike and twenty men left from St. Louis in 1805 at Jefferson’s behest to explore the headwaters of the Mississippi. Pike is best known for the Colorado mountain peak named after him. He was promoted to captain in August 1806, major in May 1808, lieutenant-colonel in 1809, and to full colonel in July 1812. As a military agent in New Orleans (1809–1810), he was deputy quartermaster-general and saw service in the War of 1812 as adjutant and inspector-general in the campaign against York (Toronto), Canada. In an attack on April 27, 1813, he had immediate command of the troops and was killed by a chunk of rock that fell on him when the retreating British garrison set fire to the powder magazine. Although his Masonic membership is questioned by some, Pike is credited by others with a membership in Lodge No. 3 in Philadelphia. His brother, Albert, would be a revolutionary figure in American Freemasonry.

In the years after Jefferson launched Lewis and Clark and Zebulon Pike on their treks into the land west of the Mississippi, lodges were founded west of the Appalachian Mountains in Ohio (1806), Louisiana (1812), Tennessee (1813), Indiana and Mississippi (1818), Missouri (1821), Arkansas (1832), Illinois (1820), Texas (1837), Wisconsin (1843), Iowa and Michigan (1844), Kansas and California (1850), Oregon (1852), Minnesota (1853), Nebraska (1847), Washington (1858), Colorado (1861), Nevada (1865), Idaho (1867), Utah (1872), the Indian Territory and Wyoming (1874), South Dakota (1875), New Mexico (1877), Arizona (1882), North Dakota (1889), and Oklahoma Territory (1892). Between the formation of lodges in Illinois in 1820 and the creation of lodges in the 1840s, Freemasons who had thrived in their expansive country and anticipated even more success and growth found themselves under severe attack and Freemasonry in the United States being nearly driven to extinction.