of Freemasons. To them, good breeding entered into the assessment of proper Christian behavior. By cultivating a “courteous, pitiful, and sympathetic temper,” Adams said, you “shall reflect an honour both on your Christian and Masonic profession.” Failure to act in love toward one’s neighbor, another said, was in “contempt of common sense and good breeding” as well as “defiance of the feelings of humanity and the laws of God.” To behave in an “unworthy” manner, Brockwell declared, “casts a reflection” on “the reputation” of not just the individual but the brotherhood as a whole: “People will be very apt to frame their conceptions of it from the conduct and deportment of those who are its members.”121
For the colonial gentleman, to become a Mason was to share in the values and behavior of America’s emerging elite, including a moderate Anglicanism shaped by the courtly manners of polite society. In this period, as affluent people attempted to discipline themselves and their children in the modes of genteel conduct, they divided themselves from all who refused to embrace the new principles. Especially repugnant were those whom Brockwell termed the “vulgar,” who, with their dirty hands, slovenly clothes, and ungainly speech, appeared crude and debauched, a lower order of life. Following the Great Awakening, Brockwell derided the “convulsions into which the whole country is thrown by a set of Enthusiasts . . . [who] strole about haranguing the admiring Vulgar in extempore nonsense.”122 In contrast to these disruptive revivalists, Masonic gentlemen showed polite consideration of their peers and a caring condescension toward their inferiors.
THE RELIGIOUS PUBLIC SPHERE
One early Masonic encounter with the revivals of what came to be known as the Great Awakening occurred in Charleston, South Carolina.123 On December 27, 1739, that city’s lodge held its annual Saint John’s Day celebration, complete with public processions and an evening of balls and entertainments.124 The following Sunday the itinerant evangelist George Whitefield arrived to conduct several days of preaching. Soon thereafter, he pointedly asked Alexander Garden, the Anglican commissary, if the latter had delivered “his soul by exclaiming against” the pompous “assemblies and balls” held for the entertainment of the town’s upper class. Garden was taken aback by the insubordination of the young Whitefield and admonished him, “Must you come to catechize me?”125 He then tartly told the young preacher that there was “no harm” in these entertainments of polite society, especially when compared with the “Mobb-Preachings, and the Assemblies of his Institution,” where “Men and Women” built “up one another in Conceit of their being righteous” while “damning” the morality of “all others.”126
Over the next several months, in pamphlets and in the pages of the South Carolina Gazette, Charleston Protestants waged a battle over the Great Awakening. Whitefield initiated this debate by challenging Garden to a “public exchange” on the doctrinal validity of the Grand Itinerant’s preaching. As Whitefield put it, “It would be endless to enter into . . . a private debate,” where each would repeatedly offer his own point of view. Rather, the “publick” should be informed of their positions through “the press.” Then they could let the “World judge” who was right.127 As Frank Lambert has argued, Whitefield’s successful challenge resulted in moving the arena of religious disputes from private conversations among ministers to public, print debates among a literate and increasingly translocal readership.128 In these public debates, Garden in turn demanded Whitefield give reasoned rationales rather than a florid, emotional argument “without sufficient evidence or proof to support it.” The young preacher was too accustomed to using a “jingle of words, not serving to instruct, but to intangle and amuse the minds of the weak and unwary populace.”129 As others dismissed Whitefield as a “Zealot” who “composes not Sermons like a Man of Letters,” supporters of the Grand Itinerant came to his defense, arguing that the evangelist’s sermons were “agreeable to the dictates of reason; evidently formed upon scripture; exactly correspondent with the articles of the establishment.”130 Whitefield admitted that in a public debate, his arguments had to be based on reason, even though “what seems a reason to me, may not be deemed so by another.”131 As the debates of the Great Awakening continued through the 1740s, both sides made efforts to frame their arguments in the reasonable, lettered language of polite society. As a result, the religious public sphere that Whitefield helped to create constrained him—and others—by obligating all writers to offer arguments based on reason and objective evidence.
Benjamin Franklin, the printer and Masonic provincial grand master, worked with Whitefield to expand this religious public sphere. Franklin printed more pamphlets for and against the revivals than any other colonial printer, despite the fact that Whitefield’s evangelical revivalism stood at odds with Franklin’s Masonic Christianity.132 An Episcopalian upbringing but little involvement in the Presbyterian church he joined as an adult informed Franklin’s beliefs. His biographers portray him as a moderate Deist, sufficiently religious to propose that a clergymen pray over the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention. “The System of Morals” left to us by Jesus of Nazareth, he told the Yale president Ezra Stiles, was “the best the world ever saw or was likely to see.” Yet Franklin also believed that the Christian moral system had become “corrupted.” Moreover, with regard to Jesus, Franklin had “some Doubts as to his divinity.”133 In contrast to the Philadelphia printer’s lax church attendance and moderate Deism, his Masonic career, which spanned a period of almost sixty years, was extensive. Inducted into Saint John’s Lodge of Philadelphia in 1731, he was elected lodge secretary, junior grand warden, provincial deputy grand master, and grand master of Pennsylvania in his years as a Mason. In 1734, Franklin published the first American edition of James Anderson’s Constitutions. His newspaper frequently included Masonic items. In 1755, Franklin prominently participated in the dedication of Freemason’s Lodge, the first Masonic building in America.134 While serving as an American representative to France in the 1760s, the printer-turned-diplomat became deeply involved in the learned Masonic society known as the Lodge of Nine Sisters.135 This consistent, long-term involvement with the fraternity at least suggests Franklin’s acceptance of Freemasonry’s universal moral teachings. In a 1738 letter to his mother, he defends the fraternity as having “no principles or practices that are inconsistent with religion and good manners.”136 Though Franklin and Whitefield stood apart in their religious perspectives, both believed in settling religious disagreements in a public forum, where thinking men would decide the truth of writers’ rational arguments.137
The men attracted to Freemasonry in the midcentury First Great Awakening encouraged the rational communication of the emerging public sphere. These included the printers who, with Franklin, inaugurated the first newspapers in Charleston and Boston. In 1731, Franklin sent his lodge brother and printing apprentice Thomas Whitehurst from Philadelphia to Charleston with a printing press, which soon published the South Carolina Gazette.138 In that same year the Harvard-educated printer and eventual provincial grand master Jeremy Gridley founded Boston’s Weekly Rehearsal. The past grand master Isaiah Thomas states in his History of Printing (1810) that the Weekly Rehearsal “was carried on at the expense of some gentlemen who formed themselves into a political or literary club and wrote for it. At the head of this club was the late celebrated Jeremy Gridley, who was the real editor of the paper.”139 In the 1730s, the printer and Mason Thomas Fleet began publishing the Boston Gazette, which soon carried Masonic news items. In 1739, it ran a defense of Freemasonry that underscored the fraternity’s vital role in the “Search after Truth” through the communication of knowledge. “By exercising our Tho’ts, and by . . . communicating to our Fellow Creatures we afford them Aid in their Search after Truth. . . . Let every Lover of Reason . . . stir himself up, and put forth all his Powers for setting up such Societies for the investing the Mind with Learning and true Knowledge.”140 In the seven short years after the formal establishment of Freemasonry in colonial America, several hundred men in the new lodges of Philadelphia, Boston, Charleston, and New York joined these first colonial printers. Many were in the forefront of colonial efforts to establish institutions of higher learning. They included the Harvard-educated Massachusetts governor Jonathan
