For many brothers, the order’s old ideals of tolerance and benevolence provided a vision for the new American society. At the same time, new emphases on republican values, morality, education, and Christianity became hallmarks of a once again transformed fraternity.
CHAPTER 2
Revolutionary Masonry
Republican and Christian, 1757–1825
Historians of religion point to republicanism and democratization as central developments in American religious life in the revolutionary era. Beginning in the 1760s, a new republican ideology that incorporated both Christian and Enlightenment ideas into its hegemonic framework expanded Christian ideas of liberty and community to encompass not only the church but the nation as well. Though American Protestantism was not constitutionally connected to the legal structure of the state, it did come to align itself with the new American nation. At the same time, a host of evangelical populists led a religious revolt against the learned clergy, decorous congregations, and centralized authority of the dominant Anglican, Presbyterian, and Congregational churches, which resulted, by 1850, in the numerical triumph of Baptists and Methodists. The revivals that erupted in the 1790s were part of a tumultuous democratic revolution in American religion, coincident with a broader revolt against elite domination throughout the culture. Although the Protestantism that emerged from the Revolution was closely identified with the new American nation and its democratic spirit, so too—and perhaps even more so—was a more overtly Christian and republican Freemasonry.1
In the middle of the eighteenth century, changes in Freemasonry were closely related to transformations in American society. Beginning in the 1750s, a large number of mechanics, lesser merchants, and military men proposed a new form of Freemasonry, which they termed Ancient. These ambitious and politically active men transformed the fraternity. Embracing the ideals of virtue and merit, the brotherhood now proclaimed itself to be in the vanguard of new efforts to build a republican society. By the 1790s, as their order expanded rapidly throughout the interior, Masons described it as embodying the republican values of morality, education, and Christianity.
A growing convergence of Christianity and Freemasonry around Enlightenment ideals marked the first quarter of the nineteenth century. In the Revolutionary War, military lodges were more effective than Christian churches in building ties among Continental Army officers. Avoiding the extremes of both sectarianism and nonbiblical rationalism, following the war Freemasonry attracted ministers and other members of liberal-leaning denominations, leading to a high incidence of Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Unitarians among its leaders. At the same time, Bible readings and Christian prayers and rituals entered more overtly into lodge meetings. In contrast to the colonial period, when civic ritual had centered on the monarchy and the church, with Christian ministers blessing public institutions, in the postwar era, following the revolutionary shift to republican ideals and symbols, Masons were increasingly called on to solemnize public enterprises, even going so far as to lay the cornerstone at the foundations of Christian churches.
As Alexis de Tocqueville has stated, intermediary institutions between the authority of the state and the will of the people stabilized the emerging American republic, by working to create and shape public culture.2 Freemasonry was one of these organizations, which emerged from eighteenth-century polite societies that transformed following the revolution into institutions that played a significant role in shaping public opinion. Many of the leading advocates of American independence were attracted to the Masonic brotherhood, whose efforts to bring together men from different regions and backgrounds in an increasingly republican and Christian framework they saw as a harbinger of the new American society.3 Masonic symbols and ceremonies thus came to be employed in public rituals, closely identifying the fraternity with the new American nation. Though soon to be contested by gender, class, and racial criticism, Freemasonry encouraged nationalist rhetoric and practices that contributed to the larger effort to create a common social discourse. At the same time, orthodox Calvinists warned of a Masonic infiltration of government and church that threatened to undermine the full and free participation of all Americans in civil society. Yet until the fraternity’s unraveling, following the Morgan affair of 1826, Freemasons weathered these criticisms through their close association with brothers such as George Washington and their prominent participation in the civic ceremonies of the young republic.
FROM MODERNS TO ANCIENTS
On the evening of June 24, 1737, Benjamin Walker, a sugar baker, peeked into a tavern window to see what was transpiring at a meeting of the Boston Masonic Lodge. Earlier that day the lodge had taken to the streets for its annual Saint John’s Day procession. Walker noted in his journal, “Great Numbers of people of all sexes and sizes [assembled] to see them walk thro the streets.”4 Men such as him, who stood below the rank of gentleman, could not go behind the honorable society’s closed doors. By the end of the century, however, urban craftsmen and country gentlemen whose broadening aspirations attracted them to the status and sophistication of Freemasonry would dominate this society that had previously brought together the most prominent men in America’s seaport towns.
The catalyst for this transformation was a dispute over proper ritual procedures between two factions in British Freemasonry. In the 1740s, the novelty and fashionable appeal of English Freemasonry had begun to fade. The number of lodges declined. Satires and mock processions lowered the dignity of and public respect for the fraternity. Ineffective and indifferent leaders, apathetic members, and exhaustion from rapid expansion all figured in what one London Mason termed the order’s “low repute.”5 In the midst of this weakness, the London Grand Lodge denied membership to several journeymen Irish Masons living in London because they could not demonstrate knowledge of ritual changes made by that body to keep out imposters. Infuriated by this rebuke, in 1751 a group spearheaded by this Irish faction and led by Laurence Dermott, a journeyman painter who had been the master of a Dublin lodge in 1746, met to organize a rival Grand Lodge.
Calling themselves Ancients, after their desire to restore the original degree rituals, the insurgents named the existing London Grand Lodge members Moderns for tampering with the fraternity’s essential ceremonies. Dermott then effectively exaggerated the matter to give the impression that the Moderns had so far departed from the sacred and unchanging rites and customs as to be illegal and unauthorized.6 His new book of constitutions, the Ahiman Rezon (Help to a Brother), while otherwise closely following James Anderson’s Constitutions, chided the Moderns for their ritual innovations, neglect of the Saint John’s Day feasts, perfunctory ceremonies, and irregular times of meeting. In contrast, the Ahiman Rezon emphasized stricter ritual observances and tighter administrative practices.7 By all accounts, Dermott was a forceful character and able administrator who gained prestige for the new fraternity by receiving official recognition from the Grand Lodges of Ireland and Scotland. Serving as grand secretary of the new lodge for thirty-five years, he eventually cajoled, bullied, and molded the Ancients into an equal to the premier Grand Lodge. One measure of his success was the acceptance by the London Grand Lodge of its new name—in its own minutes.8
Though the immediate occasion for the indictment of the Moderns lay in a dispute over rituals, social differences underlay the rise of Ancient Freemasonry. Dermott later described the original members as “Men of some Education and an honest Character but in low Circumstances.” The 1751 membership rolls indicate that most were “mechanics,” journeymen painters, shoemakers, and tailors, of a similar character to those who had earlier established the lodges for Masonic craftsmen. One of the new Grand Lodge’s first acts of business was to provide support from its charity fund for members in debtors’ prison. In his Ahiman Rezon, the Ancients’ grand secretary expanded the pool of eligible Masonic candidates beyond the affluent elite by stipulating only that members of the Ancient fraternity be freeborn men, “upright in body and limbs,” free of debt, and “endowed with an estate, office, trade, occupation or some visible way of acquiring an honest and reputable livelihood.”9 He then took steps to democratize the organization by requiring the election rather than the appointment
