Freemasonry, and two volumes edited by Brent Morris and others that bring together essays by Masonic antiquarians and professional historians.28 With the 2007 inauguration in Edinburgh of the annual International Conference on the History of Freemasonry, this intermingling of Masons and academic scholars has grown.29
Just as Masonic writing has more thoroughly engaged the available sources and broadened in scope, since the late 1970s scholars have shown a growing interest in the American brotherhood’s social and cultural significance. In 1977, Dorothy Ann Lipson published her pioneering study Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut, 1789–1835. In that book, she establishes that the revolutionary-era fraternity provided a sense of corporate identity for an emerging class of men whose entrepreneurial and political activity, mobility, and latitudinarian spirit conflicted with the verities of the old Connecticut “standing order.” Lynn Dumenil’s 1984 Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880–1930 focuses on how the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideology of Masonic writers mirrored the religious and moralistic content of American society’s concerns and values while providing a “sacred asylum” from the immoral, competitive, and commercial world beyond the temple. In 1987, the American religious historian Anthony D. Fels finished his dissertation, “The Square and the Compass: San Francisco’s Freemasons and American Religion, 1870–1900,” which traces the religious parameters of the late nineteenth-century San Francisco brotherhood. Two theory-driven books appeared in 1989. In Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism, the sociologist Mary Ann Clawson uses a neo-Marxist approach to explore the relationship between fraternalism and conceptions of class and gender. She argues that the social and ideological resources of fraternalism provided a basis for unity among men of different social statuses. At the same time, in their efforts to preserve male autonomy, these all-male societies offered an alternative to female domesticity. An interpretive framework informed by gender theory and cultural anthropology guides Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America. In this provocative book, Mark C. Carnes delves into the content of late nineteenth-century fraternal rituals to argue that the growth of these orders can be largely attributed to their providing rites of passage from the domestic world of women to the masculine workplace.30
The book you are reading is most indebted to Steven C. Bullock, for his 1996 Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840, a watershed in historians’ efforts to articulate the impact of Freemasonry on colonial and early nineteenth-century American society and culture. Bullock’s study was the first to trace the contours of American Masonry’s early history. It argues that colonial Freemasonry exemplified the cosmopolitan ideals of provincial elites and was then transformed by the artisanal ideals of liberty, democracy, and public virtue. Employing the methods of quantitative social history and ethnographic cultural history, Bullock sees the fraternity as shaping and being shaped by momentous developments in nineteenth-century America, including democracy, individualism, sentimentalism, and the emergence of public and private spheres. Moreover, the fraternity provided resources for artisans, women, African Americans, and churches to respond creatively to extraordinary social changes. Rather than explain away the motives of Masonic brothers and those opposed to them, Bullock takes their beliefs and activities seriously and through this approach provides the most convincing argument to date for the social and cultural significance of early American Freemasonry.31 Though the early chapters of my book build on many of Bullock’s insights, my interpretation diverges from his in placing American Freemasonry in the context of the religious history of the period.
Recent years have brought the beginnings of an exploration of the influence of Freemasonry beyond the white middle class. The sociologists Theda Skocpol and Jennifer Lynn Oser have statistically documented the origins and development of African American fraternalism.32 Nick Salvatore, Joanna Brooks, Cory D.B. Walker, and Stephen Kantrowitz have argued for the significance of fraternalism in the late nineteenth-century American black community.33 Philip J. Deloria, Joy Porter, and Patrick N. Minges have researched Freemasonry among Native Americans.34 Daniel Soyer has explored the development of Jewish fraternal orders, and Christopher J. Kauffman has written on the Catholic Knights of Columbus.35 These and other studies are bringing into focus the wide-ranging influence of Freemasonry on American culture and society. The efforts of these scholars and others to understand fraternalism have provided valuable pathways in my attempt to incorporate Freemasonry into the narrative of American religious history.
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My telling of the story of American Freemasonry now unfolds in two parts. The first includes five broadly chronological chapters focusing on the European American fraternity. The second part consists of three thematic chapters, on African Americans, Native Americans, and Jews and Catholics. The book ends with an epilogue on developments since 1900.
The first chapter of part 1 begins with the grand arrival of Freemasonry in colonial coastal cities as part of the Anglicization of colonial life. I review the origins and multiple meanings of the society prior to its arrival before considering the influence of Masonic ideals and practices on the colonial elite. Crossing political, ethnic, and religious boundaries, the fraternity’s social ideals and initiatory practices provided the basis for common ground among elite European American men. Moreover, the brotherhood contributed to the rational religious discourse of the nascent public sphere. At the same time, because it drew from Christian and non-Christian sources, the Masonic world view provided resources for the larger religious world that many eighteenth-century Americans inhabited.
The second chapter considers the transformation of the fraternity in the revolutionary period and its impact on the nascent American society. Beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, a growing number of working men, outside the elite, joined a new and more democratic, “ancient” variant of the fraternity and directed it toward an embrace of the republican ideals of the new American society. “Ancient” military lodges more than Protestant chaplains knit together the officers of the Continental Army. Masonic military parades and public rituals, culminating in President George Washington’s laying of the cornerstone of the new nation’s capital with full Masonic trappings, signaled the identification of the fraternity with the new American society. At the same time, enlightenment influences on religious thought expanded the boundaries of Christianity to include Freemasonry, while the fraternity made efforts to become more Christian. Positioned to the left of orthodox Calvinism and its evangelical descendants and to the right of Enlightenment rationalism, a more overtly Christian and republican Freemasonry was seen by many as embodying the values of the new American society.
After the Revolution, the fraternity began to evolve its private, ritual life. The abbreviated initiations of colonial days now became lengthy dramas shrouded in layers of deepening meaning. The new ritual quest for primeval truth was part of a larger Christian Restorationist, Primitivist, and Mormon attraction to ancient wisdom. The third chapter begins with the origins and development of these new degree rites, their relationship to John Locke’s epistemology, and their contribution to a new psychology of the self, which could be reached only through emotional assault. The Masonic use of strong emotions to reach an inner self occurred at the same time that the revivalists of the Second Great Awakening sought to break open the hearts of “sinners.” Moreover, both the new rituals and the new evangelism anticipated the romantic embrace of emotion to reach the depths of one’s identity. Further, at a time when some leading women were attracted to the fraternity’s public embrace of republicanism and Christianity, the lodge was becoming a place of private retreat from the public world, broadly paralleling the development of women’s private, pious, domestic sphere.
At the peak of the fraternity’s influence, in the 1820s, the lodges were brought to their knees by the purported murder of someone who threatened to reveal their secrets, in what became known as the Morgan affair. Within a matter of months, as the fourth chapter recounts, Freemasons were “revealed” to be a political and religious threat to the “common man” and evangelical Christianity. The ensuing Anti-Masonic campaign, spurred by an expanding print culture and a democratizing ethos, laid bare a larger battle over Christian identity.
