more than two-thirds of Albany’s prewar Masons were of British descent— including the most prominent Scots-Irish and English merchants, some of the non-Dutch members of the Common Council, and the ministers of the Presbyterian and the Anglican churches—a number of Dutch merchants, aldermen, and church members joined them. For the members of the two Reformed churches, joining the lodge, with its freedom of thought and religious toleration, meant setting aside denominational convictions. At the same time, the inclusion of Presbyterian, Anglican, and Dutch Church members in the fraternity, where only a generation earlier the Dutch had steadfastly resisted the imposition of an Anglican church on their town, was a watershed of interethnic cooperation and a harbinger of postwar interreligious fellowship. Although the more affluent and older Dutch were less willing to join the lodge than their English, Scots-Irish, and Yankee peers, Albany’s Masonic fraternity was the first local society to bridge the community’s ethnic and religious divisions.95
The membership of Albany’s first Masonic lodge suggests Freemasonry’s emergence as part of the town’s expanding public sphere. Richard Cartwright was the master of the first lodge, which met in his tavern, the King’s Arms, one of only two in town. He had been a British soldier stationed in Albany, and after completing his service, he joined its Saint Peter’s Anglican Church and established his tavern. The King’s Arms was a focal point for the postal service, land and lottery sales, the boarding and stabling of visitors, political meetings (including the first meeting of the Sons of Liberty), and monthly gatherings of the Masonic lodge. Entering into this largely British social setting were younger-generation Dutchmen, such as Leonard Gansevoort. Descended from one of the original Dutch families and having married up into the affluent and polite Cuyler family, Gansevoort was a Dutch Church officer and later a member of the local Committee of Correspondence. The brotherhood also welcomed men like the Scots-Irish immigrant Matthew Watson, who came to Albany in the 1760s, worked as a tailor, and became an elder of the Presbyterian church, and the Boston-born merchant John W. Wendell, who became a member of the Common Council and served as a trustee of the Presbyterian church. Despite the Calvinist convictions of their respective Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian churches, men such as Gansevoort, Watson, and Wendell entered Freemasonry in Albany. The democratizing social practices and benevolent social philosophy of the “polite” society nurtured in the Schuyler home had foreshadowed this mixing together of established British soldiers, Scots-Irish and Yankee immigrants, and the rising generation of Dutch town leaders. In 1768, the members of this newly formed brotherhood, some of whom would play key roles in the Revolutionary War, paraded their importance to the community in a Saint John’s Day march from the King’s Arms to Saint Peter’s Church.96
Though Albany Masons could be found on either side of the emerging revolutionary fervor, together they displayed a heightened civic consciousness. Beginning in 1766 with the violent local reaction to the British imposition of a new tax on newsprint and continuing with the formation of the local Sons of Liberty and the later election of a Committee of Correspondence to the Continental Congress, Albany Masons held leadership positions in opposing British rule. Similar to the Masonic constitutions, the constitution of the Sons of Liberty of Albany pledged allegiance to “his most sacred Majesty King George the Third” while reserving the right to democratically elect the group’s officers.97 Prominent Dutch and British Masons, including the young Leonard Gansevoort and the alderman Peter W. Yates, were elected to the Committee of Correspondence. Yates also served as a delegate to the Continental Congress and, after the war, become the town’s most famous anti-Federalist. Members of the local lodges were similarly conspicuous in the leadership of the Albany militia and the town’s Continental Army regiment. Tory sympathizers could also be found among the lodges’ members. They included former British soldiers, whose lives their Masonic brothers on the Albany Commission for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies scrutinized for Loyalist activities, most notably Richard Cartwright, the innkeeper who hosted the first local lodge meetings. He fled to Canada in 1778 after refusing to take a loyalty oath. While the majority of Albany’s Masons supported the American side, most significant here is the active participation of lodge members in debates over the direction of their civil society.98
POLITE CHRISTIANITY
The social history of Albany’s Masons offers one example of Freemasonry’s widespread success in creating common ground across political and religious boundaries among elite white men. By the middle of the eighteenth century, market expansion, population growth, and non-English immigration had intensified political disputes, which the religious divisions that developed following the Great Awakening further exacerbated. Throughout the seaport towns of colonial America, Masonic lodges worked against this factionalism by including in their membership elite men of different backgrounds. One Anglican cleric and Masonic leader said, “When our MASTER CHRIST shall come again to reward his faithful Workmen and Servants; He will not ask whether we were of LUTHER or of CALVIN? Whether we prayed to him in White, Black, or Grey; in Purple or in Rags; in fine Linen, or in Sackcloth; in a Woollen Frock, or peradventure in a Leather Apron. Whatever is considered as most convenient, most in Character, most in Edification, and infringes least on Spiritual Liberty, will be admitted as good in this Café.”99 Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Quakers, Anglicans, Catholics, and even Jews, among others, were admitted to Freemasonry.100 Although not all of the elite joined—both the Quakers of Philadelphia and the Puritans of New England were less evident among the brotherhood—no other late-colonial institution, notably political parties and Christian churches, encouraged so many white male political and religious adversaries to find common ground.
Part of the attraction of Freemasonry to the newly cosmopolitan elite was the fraternity’s embrace of Enlightenment ideals of sociability and benevolence. Its belief in promoting friendship “among men that otherwise might have remained at perpetual distance” suggested that human beings naturally enjoyed one another’s company because of their innate sentiments—perhaps even a sixth sense—of benevolence, what Shaftesbury called a “moral sense.”101 What mattered most, according to John Locke’s widely read Some Thoughts Concerning Education, was “respect and good will to all people.”102
In setting aside religious differences in favor of “that Religion in which all Men agree,” Masonic thought also resembled the latitudinarian movement in the Anglican Church.103 Influential clerics sought to include a wide range of nonconformists in their fellowship by emphasizing rational religion as a basis of agreement and minimizing the importance of revelation. Missionaries whom the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) sent to America were to begin instructing their charges with the principles of reason and natural religion.104 The common colonial Masonic practice of processing into an Anglican church and listening to a sermon prepared for the occasion suggests a substantial overlap in the Masonic and Anglican world views.
The Church of England was the established church in six of the original thirteen colonies and second only to New England Congregationalism in number of churches through much of the eighteenth century. Anglicans were most heavily concentrated in the populous Chesapeake Bay provinces and the Atlantic coastal towns stretching from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Savannah, Georgia. There the church’s welfare was assured not only by the authority of the crown, parliament, and a long tradition but also by the support of those who found in its broad and generous orthodoxy a religious home that allowed for a society with more culture and tradition than the rest of America afforded at the time. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Anglicanism, the pursuit of knowledge, and religious toleration were commonly linked.
Colonial ministers and adherents of the Church of England believed that God habitually conveys his goodness through the proper order of society and the moral behavior of his people. The missionaries of the SPG and the books distributed by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge spread such values of the moderate English Enlightenment as free will, reasonableness, and correct moral behavior to the colonists. These placed Anglicans at odds with Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, and other Calvinist churches, whose teachings were far less optimistic about human ability and the possibilities of individual salvation. Similarly,
