oldest Masonic lodge, brought the Bible from the altar of his lodge. Robert R. Livingston, the chancellor of the state of New York and the grand master of its Grand Lodge, administered the oath. Afterward, Washington “reverently” kissed the Bible, which was later returned to the lodge. A memorial leaf was folded at the page the president had kissed, and in subsequent years the Bible became the lodge’s most sacred memento.45 At least one Masonic historian thought that Washington’s inaugural address—with its acknowledgment of his hopes and fears, his appeal to the divine ruler, and his examination of the requirements of the Constitution—reflected Masonic principles.46
The sanctification of the new nation through Masonic rituals was even more public in President Washington’s participation in the Masonic ceremonial laying of the cornerstone of the nation’s Capitol in 1793. For that formal occasion, the president clothed himself in the apron and insignia of a Mason and processed solemnly with hundreds of brothers through the city in a grand Masonic parade. Arriving at the southeast corner of the Capitol, he laid on the cornerstone a silver plate commemorating his presidency and inscribed, “In the thirteenth year of American independence . . . and in the year of Masonry, 5793.” He then covered the plate with the Masonic symbols of corn, wine, and oil. The corn dedicated the Capitol to the Grand Architect of the Universe and to Masonry, the wine to virtue and science, and the oil to universal charity and benevolence. The “whole congregation” then “joined in reverential prayer, which was succeeded by . . . a volley from the military.”47
Joseph Clark, the grand master of Maryland, articulated the significance of the event in his address at the laying of the Capitol’s cornerstone, comparing it to the “like work” of laying the cornerstone of King Solomon’s Temple. From that ancient ceremony, Clark observed, had come the flowering “of our honourable, and sublime order.” Similarly, he prophesied, after this ceremony, “Architecture, Masonry, Arts, and Commerce will grow with rapidity inconceivable to me.” With Freemasonry as its cornerstone and the incomparable Brother Washington modeling Masonic virtues, Grand Master Clark envisioned the new American nation as embodying the deepest Masonic values.48
The symbols and rituals of Freemasonry, self-consciously used by the leaders of the new American republic, provided visual support for the new government’s legitimacy while encouraging public acceptance of the fraternity as an embodiment of the ideals of the new society. The spread of cornerstone ceremonies in the early years of the young republic affirmed this relationship. Beginning with Washington’s laying of the cornerstone at the Capitol in 1793, government leaders turned to the brotherhood to sanctify public undertakings. The state capitols of Massachusetts and Virginia each received Masonic blessings.49 As the economy expanded, the fraternity anointed bridges and the Erie Canal locks and sanctified public higher education in cornerstone ceremonies at the University of North Carolina and the University of Virginia. In 1818, several thousand spectators turned out for the Massachusetts Grand Lodge’s dedication of Boston’s new Massachusetts General Hospital.50 Such practices extended to the nation’s churches. For example, in 1826, “the cornerstone of the new Episcopal Church, at Carlisle, Penn. [w]as laid . . . with Masonic rites, by Cumberland Star Lodge, No. 197—assisted by Harrisburg, Chambersburg, and Lansingburg Lodges, and many of the fraternity from other places. . . . The Chambersburg paper remarks: ‘Is this not a novelty . . . to find Masons engaged in laying the corner stone of a place of Christian worship, at the request of its pastor and congregation?’—It is: and we see in the fact, an era approaching of more liberal opinions respecting, and kindly disposition towards, that ancient and honorable fraternity.”51 By the 1820s, not only Protestants but also Catholics and Jews were calling on the brotherhood to bless their houses of worship.52 The height of the fraternity’s popularity may have been the Marquis de Lafayette’s tour of the United States in 1824–25, which went through all twenty-four states over thirteen months, accompanied by Masonic processions, dinners, cornerstone layings, and intense media coverage.
Like so much of postwar Masonry, these ceremonies had their origins in England but were given new meaning in the American context. Eighteenth-century English Masons had evolved rituals for the consecration of new lodges. Their ingredients, including grand processions, a royal arch, prayers, engravings, striking a mallet, and corn, oil, and wine, were transported into the new American rites.53 At the Bunker Hill memorial consecration, for example, hundreds of New England’s brethren, clothed in full regalia, marched behind a military escort and in front of governors, congressmen, and the president of the United States and through a lofty, triumphal arch on which was inscribed “The Arts pay homage to valor.” When the cornerstone was raised, the Massachusetts grand chaplain prayed that “the Grand Architect of the Universe grant a blessing on this foundation stone” and the grand treasurer placed a silver plate engraved with the names of the grand master and local officials beneath the cornerstone, on which the grand master poured corn, wine, and oil while praying to the “bounteous Author of nature . . . [to] grant to us all in needful supply the Corn of nourishment, the Wine of refreshment, and the Oil of joy.” He then “struck the stone thrice with his mallet and the Honours of Masonry were given.” An oration and a concluding procession followed.54 The Masonic consecration of American public enterprises adapted older rituals that prepared English lodges for the practice of Freemasonry, to celebrate the new American republic.
This appropriation was part of a larger effort to create a national popular political culture in the years following the Revolution. Working against the regional, racial, ethnic, class, and gender diversities of postwar America, the civil ceremonies of Freemasonry, like the new Fourth of July parades, speeches, and toasts, were elements of a spontaneous attempt to delineate the borders of a common though contested public world.
As David Waldstreicher has argued, emerging efforts by various groups, including African Americans and women, to create a common understanding of American society through public events and print culture worked to resolve the many paradoxes of localism and nationalism, plus racial and gender identities, that characterized the early years of the young republic. Though Waldstreicher does not discuss Freemasonry in this context, the central role that it played in postwar public events offers evidence of its contribution to what he calls “the true political culture of the early Republic.” While the white, male, and affluent character of the fraternity’s members obviously worked against the creation of a truly inclusive society, the nationalist rhetoric and practices that the brotherhood encouraged and engaged in contributed to the effort to produce a common social discourse within perpetually negotiated borders.55 This was particularly apparent in the fraternity’s appropriation of republicanism.
REPUBLICAN MASONRY
Republicanism has always been more an ideal than a description of society. The concept began with Niccolò Machiavelli and other political theorists of the Italian Renaissance and was later developed through Montesquieu’s belief that all governments rest on their subjects. For these social theorists, what makes the law effective in despotic governments is fear; what makes the law effective in a republic is virtue. In the seventeenth-century English Civil Wars, social thinkers employed the term to envision new ways for governments to provide for the well-being of their people. As previously discussed, the Earl of Shaftesbury and other late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English republican thinkers responded to Thomas Hobbes’s vision of a hierarchical society held together by coercion by putting forward the idea of natural benevolence and sociability. They believed that people naturally get along with one another and are concerned for the well-being of others. Such universal benevolence, however, was possible only for gentlemen. Ordinary people would have to submit to more coercive forms of social control. Following the Revolution, Americans took the English theorists’ attempt to justify the rule of the gentry and enlarged it to become a means of holding together the whole of society. Social order and well-being in the new American republic would rely on the virtue of all citizens.
Revolutionary-era American spokespersons drew deeply on the libertarian thought of English social theorists in their embrace of republicanism as a set of political and social attitudes to guide the new world they believed
