Excluded from European American Masonry, African Americans formed the Prince Hall Masons in the late eighteenth century. The records of this black fraternity have become a site for expanding our knowledge of African American history. Scholars have employed this resource to better understand black class formation, the construction of African American masculinity, and the institutions of black civil society.19 Through a consideration of the origins of African American Masonry and the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in North Carolina, I suggest that this fraternity not only came into existence alongside and complementary to black churches but also, like the churches, provided symbolic, ideological, and organizational resources for African Americans to resist racism and find their way through contested terrain of American civil society.
Native American interactions with Freemasonry similarly date from the late eighteenth century. Older approaches to Native American history have understood Freemasonry, when mentioned at all, as part of a larger, “civilizing” process that emphasized the inevitable assimilation of Native tribes into the values and practices of white society. More recent approaches, in contrast, have stressed Native American resistance to Euro-American hegemony.20 Moving with this more recent historiography, I hold that Native Americans adapted Masonic ideals and practices as part of a larger effort to both preserve Native identity and employ new spiritual resources to confront the challenges of accommodation to American society. At the turn into the twentieth century, moreover, when white, middle-class Masons were drawn to Native American wisdom in their quest for primeval truth, modernizing Indians sought within Freemasonry a means for finding their place in middle-class American society.
Jews and Catholics have an even longer history of membership in the Masonic brotherhood. Jews were admitted shortly after the creation of the modern fraternity’s 1723 constitution, while Catholics formed the original medieval membership of what was then a confraternity of practicing stoneworkers. In the nineteenth century, Jews rose to prominence in the fraternity, while a series of papal attacks warned Catholics away from fraternal involvement. By the late nineteenth century, I argue, the desires of immigrant Jews and Catholics for organizations that responded to their needs both to assimilate into American society and to retain their ethnic and religious identities resulted in the creation of their own fraternal orders based on the Masonic template.
THE PUBLIC SPHERE
Beyond the ways in which Freemasonry has shaped and been shaped by American culture, this study explores its participation in the “public sphere,” the realm of social life where citizens set aside coercive external religious and state authority and individual status distinctions to create collective opinion through rational communication. As conceived and developed by the German theorist Jürgen Habermas, the public sphere allows for its participants to arrive at a consensus based on “the authority of the better argument,” which might then become the public will. In Habermas’s formulation, the public sphere emerged in the late seventeenth century from the struggle against arbitrary state authority. Using England as his case study, he argues that the development of “rational-critical” debate grew out of the movement of people and ideas in London clubs and societies. Mediating between society and the state, private clubs were instrumental in the formation of the public sphere, and their modes of discourse necessary to the creation of public opinion. Through the rapid establishment of print media, especially newspapers, and private societies characterized by literary and critical discourses, this “classical public sphere” spread through eighteenth-century Britain, France, and Holland. It continued, Habermas holds, until the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the power of large corporations, the rise of state interventions, and social fragmentation eroded the independence of public opinion and undermined the legitimacy of its institutions.21
Consistent with Habermas’s conception of the public sphere, Freemasonry was one of a variety of “polite societies” that formed in English and American cities between the 1690s and the 1760s. These voluntary organizations nurtured sociability through amiable conversation, literature, and polite pleasures. In contrast to older notions of hospitality, which reinforced traditional ties of family, ethnicity, church, and local community, the new sociability practiced by these societies promoted friendship and common interests among disparate people in the emerging public spaces of coffeehouses, taverns, and elegant homes. David Shields has persuasively argued that the various colonial American private and polite societies—including Freemasonry—helped to hold the social order together in an era that had moved beyond hereditary aristocracy yet came before the development of the middle class.22
To differing degrees and at different times, the cultural template of Freemasonry gave shape and content to the American public sphere. Emerging in coastal cities in the 1730s, the first American Freemason lodges were participants in a nascent American “polite” society. In a colonial America where, unlike Habermas’s conception of eighteenth-century England, religious discourse predominated, Masons contributed to a rationalization if not a secularization of the emerging public sphere. In the early nineteenth century, the brotherhood created a white male private sphere, apart from its well-regarded public face, that paralleled and at times dueled with a white women’s private sphere fractured by class and religious divisions. In the 1820s, the immediate and widespread emergence of Anti-Masonry witnessed to the rapid expansion of the public sphere through newspapers and other print media. The movement of late nineteenth-century affluent, educated women into the public sphere, moreover, can be viewed through the lens of the emergence of female affiliates, such as the Eastern Star wives of Freemasons. Beyond these and other involvements in the public sphere, this study discusses how African Americans, Native Americans, Jews, and Catholics each created “counterpublic” forms and uses for Freemasonry in a rapidly expanding and diversifying nineteenth-century American society.23
SCHOLARSHIP ON AMERICAN FREEMASONRY
This book comes at a time of growing appreciation for the impact of Freemasonry on major developments in American life. Earlier historians dismissed the fraternity as too obscure or exotic to have substantially influenced the course of events. Some explained away Anti-Masonry as social paranoia.24 Social scientists, in turn, focused on the fraternity’s sociological and economic benefits while taking little interest in Freemasonry’s beliefs and practices.25 Compounding the problem has been the historical writing of Masons themselves, which has been primarily concerned with the origins and meaning of the fraternity’s social and ritual life and less interested in the lodge’s interactions with the surrounding society. Recently, however, Masonic writers have demonstrated a broader understanding of Masonic history, while a new generation of historians has contributed to a growing appreciation of the influence of Freemasonry on American life. This study draws together much of this new scholarship while advancing arguments that offer a more complete picture of the influences of Freemasonry on American culture.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, Masonic antiquarians have produced multivolume chronicles, regional histories, and more narrowly focused monographs. In America, this includes the regional histories and related works of Albert Gallatin Mackey (South Carolina), Edward T. Schultz (Maryland), Charles T. McClenachan (New York), and Julius F. Sachse and Norris S. Barratt (Pennsylvania). Each of these histories, and the more general early twentieth-century overviews provided by Melvin Maynard Johnson and Jacob Hugo Tatsch, makes selective use of what is still a massive amount of undigested individual and Grand Lodge records, sermons, and orations.26 In Great Britain, the landmark work is Robert Freke Gould’s History of Freemasonry, first published in the 1880s and edited by Dudley Wright in 1936. The midcentury British team of Douglas Knoop and G.P. Jones produced the best histories of early modern Masonry, while the University of Saint Andrews historian David Stevenson has written the most authoritative account of the brotherhood’s origins in Scotland.27 Two Masonic research journals, the longstanding Ars Quatuor Coronatorum (founded in 1886) and the more recent Heredom (founded in 1992), have published articles and reprinted primary materials on a wide range of topics. Within the past two decades, a new generation of American Masonic historians has produced a more scholarly literature. The best of these include Wayne
