and touching in our funerals, especially an officer’s; sword and arms inverted, others with their arms folded across their breast stepping slowly to the beat of the muffled drum.”30 These officers’ funerals were often accompanied by Masonic rites, which, at least one historian reports, army chaplains frequently performed.31
While no systematic comparison of chaplains’ names and Masonic membership records has been conducted, anecdotal evidence is suggestive. The Congregational minister and Connecticut Line Brigade chaplain Abraham Baldwin offered a “polite discourse” to a meeting of all military lodge leaders in a New Jersey Presbyterian church.32 The Presbyterian minister Andrew Hunter was both chaplain to the New Jersey Brigade and the worshipful master of its military lodge.33 By the winter of 1782, moreover, the military lodges had become so well established that Washington granted a request from Israel Evans, New York’s Presbyterian Brigade chaplain, to erect a public building outside army headquarters on the banks of the Hudson near Newburg for both divine services and lodge meetings. That spring, the building, known to Masons as the Temple, was the site for both Christian worship and the initiation of officers into the mysteries of Freemasonry.34
In contrast to organized Christianity, the military lodges sought to overcome local differences. Unlike the regional religious biases of New England Congregationalism or Virginia Anglicanism, the lodge’s commitment to “all men” regardless of region or denomination provided a basis for community beyond local boundaries. The fraternity’s emphasis on social distinction based on merit rather than birth similarly worked against local prejudices. Moreover, the lodges provided social space for war-weary officers from all over the colonies to relax and enjoy one another’s company. The fraternity’s commitment to creating a society based on an affection among men that transcended differences suggests an anticipation of the new republican society that the army’s officers were fighting to create.35
The meetings of military lodges were usually held when the army was resting in camp between campaigns. Eleven Connecticut regimental officers in Roxbury, Massachusetts, for example, formed American Union Lodge during the army’s encampment in Boston in the winter of 1776. The lodge subsequently moved with the army through Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. Charged in their warrant from the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts to promote “the utmost Harmony and Brotherly Love” among themselves and to be “very cautious of the Moral Character” of prospective members, the new lodge founders agreed to set about their “masonic work” of proposing, examining, and ritually admitting new recruits in the evening of the first, second, and third Tuesdays of every month and in extra meetings when warranted. The lodge held thirty-one meetings in its first six months. At the Battle of Long Island in August of 1776, however, ten members were either killed or captured, and the lodge was forced to close. It held only one meeting between March 1777 and February 1779, but it admitted thirteen new members and initiated twenty candidates, all commissioned officers, between 1776 and 1779.36 In the winter of 1779, the lodge, led by Worshipful Master General Samuel Parsons, met in the army’s winter quarters, along the banks of the Hudson opposite West Point.37
Beyond individual lodge meetings while the army was in camp, the winter of 1779 saw representatives from all ten military lodges come together to propose a unified American Freemasonry. More than one hundred high-ranking Masonic military officers were present in Morristown, New Jersey, for that meeting, including Generals Washington and Mordecai Gist and Colonels Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Proctor. Their petition, to be presented to several provincial grand masters, requested the creation of a national General Grand Lodge, which would “preside over and govern all other lodges of whatsoever degree or denomination.” By eliminating distinctions between Moderns and Ancients, standardizing practices, and correcting abuses, the new Grand Lodge would encourage “frequent communion and social intercourse” among brethren throughout the country so that Masonic “morality and virtue may be far extended.”38 Though the proposed Grand Lodge never came into existence, the unanimous support for this petition among the military’s leading Masons suggests both Freemasonry’s emerging power to provide a common bond among military leaders and its support for the new American nation. As the war continued, the symbols and rituals of Freemasonry, which united men of diverse backgrounds, also reinforced the patriotic effort to create a public sphere of unity in the emerging American society. Wartime Masonic processions first displayed this development.
FREEMASONRY AND THE NATION
At West Point in June of 1779, a procession of thirty members of American Union Lodge, joined by more than seventy visiting brothers, celebrated the Festival of Saint John the Baptist. Led by a “Band of Music with drums and fifes” and displaying the “Bible, Square and Compass,” the company marched to the “Red House,” where “His Excellency George Washington and his family” and a “number of gentlemen” joined them. Following a sermon, an address to the “Brethren in particular,” and a dinner, toasts were drunk to “Congress” and the “Arts and Sciences,” and a special toast, reported to occur at all Masonic events in the war years, was drunk to slain Masons, on this occasion including the military leaders “Warren, Montgomery, [and] Wooster.” After the celebration, Washington, “attended by the Wardens and Secretary of the Lodge,” returned to his barge while the musicians played “God Save America.” “Three cheers from the shore” accompanied the announcement of his departure, which were “answered by three from the barge, the music beating the ‘Grenadier’s March.’”39 Following this impressive gathering, a new military lodge named after Washington was formed and eventually inducted more than two hundred Continental Army officers.40
Such celebrations underscored the growing identification of Freemasonry with Washington and the new American nation. The general had first taken part in a public Masonic function just six months earlier. Following the departure of the British from Philadelphia in June of 1778, the Philadelphia Grand Lodge organized a great Masonic celebration of this event, to be commemorated on Saint John’s Day, December 28. On that day, nearly three hundred Masons participated in a grand procession, with “his Excellency our illustrious Brother General Washington” taking the grand master’s position of greatest honor.41 The march ended at Christ Church, where the city’s two most prominent Anglican clergymen conducted the religious services. Rev. Dr. William White, later the first bishop of Pennsylvania, gave the prayer, and Rev. Dr. William Smith, now an Ancient Mason, dedicated his sermon to General Washington.42 Afterward a collection was taken for relief of the poor, which raised four hundred pounds—a large amount for the times.
This celebration substantially enhanced the fraternity’s prestige. The regal and orderly public procession of more Masons than had ever been seen together in America signaled the brotherhood’s size and significance. One historian has observed that the number of Masons in Philadelphia in 1778, 571, was larger than the membership of any other voluntary society in the city at that time.43 The large sum that the fraternity collected for the poor supported its image as a charitable organization actively responding to the needs of the city’s destitute. However, it was the order’s association with Washington and the cause of the United States that clearly marked a turning point in its evolution. From this point forward, Washington endorsed the society’s activities through his prominent presence in the members’ public activities and private correspondence. As a Masonic ode commemorating his participation in these ceremonies exulted,
See Washington, he leads the train,
’Tis he commands the grateful strain;
See, every crafted son obeys.
And to the godlike brother homage pays.
Over the next few decades, Masonic sermons, addresses, and orations reverently associated Washington, Masonry, and the ideals of the new nation.44
This convergence was particularly apparent to Masonic observers of Washington’s presidential inauguration in New York City in 1789. For that
