Ancients’ more humble rank encouraged their expansion abroad, often through regiments in the British Army interested in forming military lodges that were issued traveling warrants. These bodies provided Masonic fellowship for lower ranks of soldiers, who could not, like their superiors, mingle in polite society. In its first decades of existence, the Ancient Grand Lodge sent more than one hundred military lodges to the British colonies, particularly North America, where it warranted forty-nine traveling lodges during the French and Indian War.10 These military lodges admitted local civilians, each group of whom, when the regiment moved on, applied to the Ancients for a warrant for a stationary lodge.
The first Ancient lodge established in America, however, grew out of a lodge originally chartered by the Moderns in Philadelphia in 1757. The majority of the original petitioners to Philadelphia’s Lodge No. 4 appear to have been British immigrants, including soldiers then stationed in Philadelphia, who were Ancient Masons, a fact of which the Moderns were initially unaware. Once formed, the new lodge accepted other Ancient British Masons and adopted the Ancient manner in admitting new members. By August of 1757, the Pennsylvania Grand Lodge had received reports of these irregularities and responded by sending investigators. Lodge No. 4 did not receive these interlopers fraternally, remarking in its minutes that the visitors “behaved as spies in an enemy camp.” Summoned before the Grand Lodge committee, the officers of No. 4 willingly “plead[ed] Guilty” to being Ancients. As a result, the warrant of No. 4 was recalled less than six months after it had been issued. “Determined never to forsake the good old way,” the insurgent members were soon granted a warrant from the London Ancients, in 1758, becoming Ancient Lodge No. 1. Tensions continued between the two groups when one Modern, Solomon Bush, a prominent Jewish Freemason who was going to London on other business, refused to carry the Ancient lodge’s payment of its fees to the Ancient Grand Lodge.11 Following the establishment of their Lodge No. 1, Philadelphia’s Ancients created a Grand Lodge in 1761 and grew rapidly. In contrast to the four lodges warranted by the local Moderns between 1730 and 1758, Philadelphia’s Ancients warranted more than fifty between 1761 and 1785. Lodges working under the Moderns rapidly declined, ceasing to exist altogether about 1793, when their hall was sold and the proceeds donated to the city as a fund “to furnish the poor with wood.”12
In 1774, the London Ancients issued a decree that any lodge in the world with a warrant from the Moderns should be deemed unworthy of association with the “Ancient Community” and its official sanction from the London Grand Lodge of Ancients canceled.13 This was in keeping with Dermott’s dictate in the Ahiman Rezon that “ancient Masonry contains everything valuable amongst the moderns, as well as many other things that cannot be revealed without additional ceremonies.”14 This claim seems to have been generally accepted, in some instances even by Moderns. In 1778, the Episcopal clergyman William Smith, having served for many years as the grand secretary and grand chaplain of the Pennsylvania Moderns, submitted himself to be “healed” in an Ancient ceremony. By 1785, as many as nineteen hundred men had been initiated into lodges warranted by Philadelphia’s Ancient fraternity.15 By 1800, the national Ancient fraternity encompassed all eleven American Grand Lodges, whose five hundred subordinate lodges included an estimated twenty-five thousand members. Together these men constituted about 3 percent of the adult white male population and a substantially higher percentage of those with property and the means to pay the fraternity’s fees.16 In addition, these numbers do not include the late eighteenth-century expansion of the fraternity into the African American community through the creation of Prince Hall Masonic lodges (see chapter 6).
The triumph of the Ancient fraternity was part of a large transformation of American society that challenged old social divisions between the elite and common people. In the second half of the eighteenth century, a movement of increasingly sophisticated and politically aware urban artisans emerged and became vigorously involved in efforts surrounding the coming war.17 At the same time, rising leaders of country towns and villages were developing political and economic standing and a growing cosmopolitanism.18 Masonic membership was particularly attractive to each of these groups because it provided them with social prestige and a means for creating community with the elite. Masons could be found on both the American and the British sides of the Revolution, but the growing prestige of the Ancient brothers and the involvement of American officers in local and military lodges led to the close identification of the order with the American cause.19
Freemasons were central to the war effort. They accounted for 69 of the 241 men (29 percent) who either signed the Articles of Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, or the Constitution or served as generals in the Continental Army or as General Washington’s aides or military secretaries. Such luminaries as Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and John Hancock were Freemasons. Forty-two percent of the generals commissioned by the Continental Congress and led by Washington were or became Masons.20 These men were often actively involved in ten military lodges whose membership drew overwhelmingly from the ranks of commissioned officers. Like the British military lodges, these gatherings of American soldiers provided identity and mutual support. Unlike the ineffective and parochial Christian chaplains, the Continental Army’s military lodges provided common beliefs and rituals that reinforced the validity of the emerging American society. By the war’s end, the largest of these lodges counted several hundred officers among its members.21
MILITARY LODGES
Military lodges were more effective than Christian ministers in building ties among Continental Army officers. The Christian chaplaincy in the Revolutionary War began with a disorganized system of volunteer preachers. Gradually, the Continental Congress extended its influence to include chaplaincies, which it slowly developed into an organized system.22 In practice, however, chaplains were few in number and transient in service. In January of 1776, only one-third of the army’s regiments had chaplains.23 Among the 117 ministers who worked as chaplains, only one remained in service throughout the war, while the majority did not stay more than ten months.24 Though some chaplains served as regular soldiers, the great majority sheltered themselves in private homes or with staff officers. During marches they were ordered to stay at the rear of the vanguard.25
Few, transient, and set apart, the chaplains were additionally frustrated in their work by the soldiers’ pervasive drunkenness, profanity, and widespread lack of interest in religious services. On July 4, 1775, the day after Washington took command, he reminded the army that the Articles of War forbade “profane cursing, swearing and drunkenness” and imposed on all officers and men when not on duty “punctual attendance on Divine Service to implore the blessing of heaven upon the means used for our safety and defence.” In spite of this, he found it necessary throughout the war to reiterate the obligation of men and officers to attend divine services. But an apparent indifference on the part of the chaplains encouraged soldiers’ apathy. On February 15, 1783, Washington issued lengthy general orders against relaxed discipline and expressed particular astonishment at the behavior of chaplains, who had “frequently been almost all absent at the same time.”26
Organized Christianity also suffered from denominational antagonisms. Almost one-half (48 of 115) of the chaplains with known denominational affiliations were Congregational ministers from New England, some of whom protested Rhode Island’s appointment of the Unitarian minister John Murray because of his ultraliberal and heterodox views.27 Virginia frontiersmen, in turn, deplored the predominance of Anglican clergymen (nine of ten) in their state’s delegation and the absence of ministers from their dissident Baptist faith.28 In June of 1777, Washington addressed Congress at length on this knotty subject. Fearing the outbreak of religious disputes if men were compelled “to a mode of Worship which they do not profess,” he concluded that it would be best if each regiment had a voice in choosing a chaplain of its own “religious sentiments.”29
At the same time that an ineffective structure, persisting indifference, and localism impeded the work of organized religion, officers were attracted to the new nationalistic fervor particularly evident in
