government meant protecting liberty from the perpetual aggression of power. Without the authoritarian government or hierarchical restraints that supported earlier nations, American republicans believed that the character of the people rather than the force of arms would determine the health of their society. Virtue, including the repudiation of self-interest through the acceptance of moral rules, undergirded the new society. Hence, American republicanism meant maintaining private and public virtue, social solidarity, and vigilance against the corruptions of power.56 As the new nation came into its own, moral training in the republican virtues became a particular concern of the Masonic fraternity.
Because the brotherhood embodied the older Enlightenment ideals of benevolence and sociability and the new American commitments to patriotism and democracy, the call to Freemasonry became indistinguishable from the call to American citizenship. In charging his brethren to act out their Masonic “duties and virtues,” one late eighteenth-century orator put it this way: “We are now blessed with a free, independent and equal government, founded in theory upon principles the most beneficial to society.” Masonic duty therefore required that “every benevolent principle, be cultivated by us . . . in seeking the general good of the whole.”57 Similarly, George Washington, responding to an address from the Pennsylvania Grand Lodge praising his nation building, saw the new government as at its best in realizing the ideals of Freemasonry: “To erect upon a solid foundation, the true principles of government, is only to have shared . . . in a labor, the result of which, let us hope, will prove, thro’ all ages, a sanctuary for brothers, and a Lodge for the virtues.”58 Not only did Masonic duty now require the fulfillment of the duties of American citizenship, but, conversely, the realization of the “true principles of government” meant the embodiment of Masonic virtues.
Following the Revolution, Masonic leaders put renewed emphasis on the order’s long-held moral teachings and their new republican meaning. Benevolence and sociability, the hallmarks of the English theorists, were institutionalized. “Our institution asserts . . . the natural equality of mankind,” the grand master and future New York governor De Witt Clinton said in 1793.59 “From the beginning of time to the present day,” Brother Benjamin Green echoed to his Marblehead, Massachusetts, lodge in 1797, “the Free Mason’s lodge . . . has ever been considered . . . a nursery of . . . love and good will to mankind.”60 By seeking to extend their values to the larger social world, moreover, the brothers came to see their fraternity as a harbinger of a new social order. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Masonic leaders frequently spoke of the fraternity as a “school of virtue” dedicated to the “cultivation and extension of the principles of morality, good will and virtue.”61 Though the order had always encouraged spreading its values to society at large, it now gave particular emphasis to the claim that the development and practice of Masonic virtues were “precisely the duties” that every “man owes to his brother.”62
This new Masonic emphasis on moral improvement came at a time when the disestablishment of religion was undercutting the role of churches as moral teachers. Prior to the Revolution, nearly all of the thirteen colonies had either tax support for ministers or religious tests for public office. To a great extent, the Anglican, Presbyterian, and Congregational churches were the established teachers of public morality. Following the separation of church and state, a period of growing pluralism and sectarianism ensued. By 1815, a variety of pan-Protestant moral improvement societies had emerged, anticipating the moral reform movements of later decades. Just after the revolution, however, Freemasonry was the only established institution whose rejection of particular religious and political requirements and embrace of “universal” moral teachings allowed it to reach out to all citizens. As the “sacred asylum” and repository of republican virtue, the order appeared to offer a higher plane, beyond the confusions of postwar religion, that embodied the principles of the new American society.63
What influence the Masonic “school of virtue” had on the moral tenor of the new society or on Masons themselves is difficult to determine. Though the fraternity heralded the need for moral improvement, this very emphasis suggests the difficulties perceived in attaining it. In contrast to English social theorists who believed that moral benevolence was a natural capacity only of gentlemen, revolutionary Americans staked their new nation’s success on the ability of its entire citizenry to embody private and public virtue. Rather than applaud the success of the people in demonstrating this morality, many Americans emphasized the need for more moral training. “The laws of nature are to be found in the human heart,” Clinton said, yet they are mingled “with those black and hostile passions which harass society.”64 To overcome these “dark passions,” another Masonic spokesperson said, each lodge member “solemnly promised” to watch over his brother and, when needed, “remind him . . . of his failings, and aid his reformation.”65 References to the “failings and offences of our brethren” are sprinkled throughout Masonic orations.66
In addition to supporting republican virtues, postwar Masonic spokespersons revived interest in scientific learning and education. Prior to the society’s migration to America, the cultivation of the arts and sciences was a hallmark of Freemasonry. The English legendary histories trace the institution to Hermes, Euclid, and other originators of these fields. Both the Enlightenment emphasis on order, rationality, and science and the seemingly purer wisdom of the ancient world fascinated the founding members of the English Grand Lodge. Yet neither ancient wisdom nor Newtonian science were of much concern to colonial Masons, whose chief preoccupation was consolidating their elite social class through fraternal love and honor. Following the Revolution, however, American Masonic leaders revived their fraternity’s identification with the learned men of the past and in so doing aligned it with the onward march of civilization. “It is well known,” Clinton stated in 1793, that Freemasonry “was at first composed of scientific and ingenious men, who assembled together to improve the arts and sciences.” Locating these men in long-ago antiquity, when “knowledge . . . was restricted to a chosen few,” he explained that “when the invention of printing had opened the means of instruction to all ranks of people, then the generous cultivators of Masonry communicated with cheerfulness to the world, those secrets of the arts and sciences.”67 This retrieval of an older emphasis on arts and sciences helped to establish the fraternity as central not only to the advance of civilization but to the transmission of knowledge as well. The Masonic movement was “one of the ancient founders of schools,” Brother John H. Sheppard lectured the Grand Lodges of New Hampshire and Maine in 1820. “The liberal arts and sciences” were “taught in Lodges,” whose “brethren imparted instruction to their children and others.”68
Masonic leaders asserted this new interest in learning at a moment when cultural indifference toward education and public schooling was not yet overcome. Against the “apparent indolence of men of learning, and the small benefit the community seems to derive from . . . academical institutions,” Sheppard argued that “such characters and such institutions are infinitely important in the support of a republican government.”69 Acting on this conviction, New York’s Grand Lodge created a free common school for Masonic children in 1810, a time when all other schools were either pay, sectarian, or both. By 1817, with the expansion of public interest in common schooling, the state took over patronage and supervision of the Mason-sponsored Free School.70
As no less than patrons of the arts and sciences and founders of schools, postwar Masonic leaders saw themselves as essential to the success of the American experiment. Yet their efforts to identify the fraternity both with the onward march of civilization and as a “school of virtue” devoted to the improvement of morals appear to have been more successful rhetorically than in practice. There is some evidence that the emphasis on education encouraged some lodges to support outside educational activities. Lectures on learned topics were also occasionally presented in the lodges. Yet apart from the requirement of second degree members to memorize a short overview of the seven liberal arts, there is no evidence of any lodge creating a regular course of study, much less a systematic school of learning, in this period.71 What is certain is that claims about the fraternity’s support of moral and
