not only improved taste and manners but also a mutual tolerance and open-mindedness that encouraged individuals to employ reason and evidence to arrive at their religious convictions. At the same time, Masonic Christianity shared with much of the colonial religious world a faith laced with magical and mystical elements of archaic origin. Amid its movement toward Enlightenment forms and ideals, the brotherhood maintained elements of its ancient past.
FREEMASONRY IN COLONIAL ALBANY
The early history of the first Masonic lodges in Albany, New York, provides a window onto the emergence of this community-wide organization. Prior to the 1760s, Albany was an overwhelmingly Dutch settlement over whose economic, social, and political life merchant family networks maintained control. Arising in vertical relationship to the town’s horizontal social order were those inhabitants who mediated between the largely homogeneous town and the increasingly heterogenous provincial population.83 Most of the inhabitants traced their origins to the arrival of a large group of Dutch settlers in the 1660s, whose descendants primarily determined the beliefs and practices of the town through the 1760s. Beginning with the English takeover of the Netherlands’ colony as part of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, however, members of the Schuyler and Cuyler families, among others, took the lead in learning the English language and mediating between the town and extralocal commercial and political interests. They and others in the province “who brought with them the French and English languages, soon acquired a sway over their less enlightened fellow settlers.”84
Although polite society barely took hold in Albany (which had no institutionalized private societies of any description prior to establishment of the Masonic lodge in the 1760s), Anne Grant’s Memoirs of an American Lady traces its emergence.85 Grant’s recollections of her childhood in the Albany of the 1760s portray colonial Dutch Albanians as “children of nature” who, unfortunately, lacked “good breeding.” In conversation, for example, they were “limited in regard to subjects.” Of the “substantial luxuries of the table . . . they knew little.” Dominating the town’s moral framework was the Dutch Reformed church, which stood at its center and counted nearly all of the townspeople as members. Grant observes that public worship was often “mechanical,” though the townspeople never doubted the “great truths of revelation.”86
Indeed, participation in the beliefs and practices of Reformed Calvinism was the most enduring collective social action of the colonial Dutch community. Estate inventories of Albany’s Dutch householders reveal catechisms written by the town’s ministers, the Bible, and little other reading material. As late as 1771, the town’s persistent old ways included the occasional and rudimentary schooling of children; the lack of newspapers with knowledge of the outside world; and a determination to keep out of town those who might undermine its way of life.87 Though certainly not “elegant and polished,” Grant concluded, the Albany Dutch “were at least easy and independent.”88
Providing the leaven of polite society in Albany were the Schuylers and several other interrelated “inhabitants of the upper settlement,” who once a year went to New York City. There, “at a very early period a better style of manners and polish prevailed . . . than in any of the neighboring provinces.” This “pleasing and intelligent society” was most in evidence around the British governor, where “a kind of a little court kept.” Grant favorably describes Sir Henry Moore as a “show governor” whose “gay, good natured, and well bred, affable and courteous” demeanor seemed primarily intended “to keep the governed in good humor.” The government house was the scene of frequent “festivities and weekly concerts.” Within this circle, Grant describes the Schuylers and other leading Albany families as “conscientious exiles,” allied through intermarriage and upbringing to the “primitive” Albany settlers yet committed to the “liberality of mind and manners which so distinguished them from the less enlightened inhabitants of their native city.” Grant praises Catalina Schuyler, the matron of the Albany Schuyler home, for the “singular merit” of being able to move between “this comparatively refined society” and “the homely good sense and primitive manners of her fellow citizens at Albany, free from fastidiousness and disgust.”89
The locus for polite society in Albany and the site of an emerging public sphere was the Schuyler home, called the Flatts, which was a few miles outside town. The house was “an academy for the best morals and manners.” In 1709, Philip Schuyler, Catalina’s husband, had returned from London with a small library of newspapers and books that were apparently read throughout the extended family. Catalina was said to begin and end each day with Scripture and spend no less than several hours in “light reading, essays, biography, poetry, etc.” Under the supervision of Catalina and Philip, the family hosted meetings with provincial leaders, strategy sessions with British army officers, and assemblies where peace treaties or alliances were worked out with various nations. In these endeavors, Grant recalled, the Schuylers pointedly mixed “serious and important counsels with convivial cheerfulness, and domestic ease and familiarity.” Dinner parties regularly included the family, close friends, visitors “of worth or talent,” military guests, and “friendless travelers.” The talk around the table was “always rational, generally instructive, and often cheerful.” Frequently a “new set of guests” arrived in the afternoon for tea. Catalina and Philip also presided over a “Lyceum” at their home, where “questions in religion and morality, too weighty for table talk, were leisurely and coolly discussed; and plans of policy and various utility arranged.” The larger purpose of social life at the Flatts, Grant acutely observed, was to employ “the rays of intellect . . . to unite the jarring elements of which the community was composed, and to suggest to those who had power without experience, the means of mingling in due proportions its various materials for the public utility.”90
Despite the incubation of polite society in the Schuyler home, as late as the 1740s, Albany remained a place where, according to the visitor and Master Mason Alexander Hamilton, “there was no variety of choise, either of company or conversation.”91 Large-scale change began in 1754 with the arrival of refugees from the French and Indian Wars, who almost doubled the town’s population, from eighteen hundred to three thousand. The arrival of as many as fourteen hundred officers and soldiers, all of whom were quartered in Albany homes, followed in 1757.92 Among these troops were officers who were “younger, and more gay,” and, Grant tells us, encouraged the formation of “a sect . . . among the younger people, who seemed resolved to assume a lighter style of dress and manners, and to borrow their taste in those respects from their friends.” This rustling of polite society among his younger church members “alarmed and aggrieved” Theodorus Frelinghuysen Jr., the town’s Dutch minister. The eldest son of the Dutch minister who had helped begin the Great Awakening in New Jersey, Frelinghuysen focused his wrath on the manners and entertainments of the young British officers, who “were themselves a lie” and therefore deeply threatened the “truth” of Dutch life. In keeping with his Reformed Calvinist convictions, Frelinghuysen declared that those who, in the name of politeness, gave themselves over to the vainglory of fashionable display, the levity of wit, the consumption of luxurious goods, and the idleness of dancing and gaming faced the terrors of divine judgment.93 The Common Council efforts to get rid of these invasive people, through unequal taxation and selective enforcement of laws, aided the minister’s crusade.94
Nevertheless, a 1760s wave of Scots-Irish and English immigrants and subsequent economic growth transformed the community from an isolated trading post into a bustling commercial center. These developments provoked new economic tensions between wealthy “gentlemen” and landless poor; social and religious divisions among the town’s three ethnic churches (Presbyterian, Anglican, and Dutch Reformed); and political divisions between the newcomers and the largely Dutch Common Council. Albany’s two colonial lodges were the first cultural institutions outside the churches to appear in the community. What became Union Lodge in 1765 was originally a British military lodge, which had arrived with the troops quartered in the city over the winter of 1757–58. Masters Lodge was founded in 1768. The new fraternity attracted leaders from throughout the community, though it drew heavily from
