came from the instructions and actions of the London Grand Lodge. James Anderson’s The Constitutions of the Free-Masons, modern Freemasonry’s founding rules and principles, printed in America in 1734 by Benjamin Franklin, instructs the brethren to hold the “Annual Communication and Feast, in some convenient place on St. John Baptist’s Day, or else on St. John Evangelist’s Day, . . . in order to choose every year a new Grand Master, Deputy and Wardens.”5 As early as 1721 the London Lodge enacted these instructions through elaborate public processions. Jewels, swords, and other regalia were adopted by the lodge or given to it as gifts by the noble grand masters.6 The origins of these and other eighteenth-century public processions have been traced to late medieval towns where large religious parades involving most of the inhabitants displayed the hierarchical structure of their leadership. After the Reformation, those processions that continued to exist relegated the townspeople to spectators of the urban oligarchy of town leaders parading to church or court. Carried out with a theatrical self-consciousness—complete with ornamented clothing, polished gestures, and the new civic authority symbols of swords and maces—the processions of eighteenth-century England were designed to separate the townspeople from their leaders by exhibiting the power and structure of the new elite. Along with these public displays came similar ritual appearances in church and occasionally a gala ceremonial to stage grand displays of the rulers’ generosity.7 Colonial American Masonic festivals emulated all of these activities, though in somewhat different circumstances.
The appearance of the American Masonic fraternity accompanied the eighteenth-century development of colonial commercial cities. Between 1690 and 1740, the older seaport towns of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York and most of the newer coastal market hubs of Charleston, Savannah, Baltimore, Annapolis, Albany, New Haven, and Portsmouth experienced an expansion of trade that gradually drew them into the Atlantic marketplace. By midcentury, American coastal towns had become comparable to British provincial ports in economic activity.8 Led by a growing demand for colonial exports, linked to an expanding commercial empire, protected and promoted by a strong imperial system, and endowed with an abundance of natural resources, the economy of British colonial America created an affluence capable of supporting an urban social order that was becoming more British. Social differentiation in America was always less developed than in Britain, and the colonies certainly had nothing comparable to the legally privileged English aristocracy. Yet as early as the 1720s in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia and by the 1760s in the newer colonies, a noticeable elite of merchants, lawyers, and government officials began a self-conscious effort to imitate British institutions, values, and culture rather than celebrate their American traits.9
Freemasonry was part of this Anglicization of colonial life.10 Between 1733 and the revolution, the United Grand Lodge of London warranted more than one hundred lodges in the colonies’ seaport towns.11 By 1772 the fraternity’s membership was about five thousand, including several hundred of the coastal cities’ most important men.12 As Steven C. Bullock has demonstrated, nearly all of Boston’s and Philadelphia’s Masons came from the most prestigious and highest-paying occupations. The majority (more than 60 percent) were merchants, responsible for the colonies’ rapid commercial development. Professionals—including lawyers, government officials, physicians, and a few ministers—made up the second-largest group (14.4 percent in Boston and 21.2 percent in Philadelphia). The number of eighteenth-century lawyers and government officials grew in tandem with urban development and the increase of imperial authority. Less than 10 percent of Boston’s and Philadelphia’s Masons were artisans, and most of these worked at high-end crafts, such as clockmaking and silversmithing, which brought them into sustained contact with gentlemen.13
Meeting in genteel taverns apart from the common people, going in groups to the theater, and emulating the stylish new houses, dress, and manners of their British counterparts, Freemasons participated in a “refinement of America” that brought European styles and customs to the upper reaches of eighteenth-century American society. The new social code was signaled in such words as polite, civil, and urbane and manifest in the appearance of large, richly furnished homes with central staircases and many rooms. Along with these elegant houses came balls, tea parties, and formal entertainments where men and women of similar background and breeding met to display the dress, manners, and speech characteristic of the English upper class.14 Masons displayed such genteel behavior in their studied arrivals and exits from church and in the formal, self-conscious displays of their processions. Within these elegant homes and well-appointed taverns, new private societies began to emerge. Variously devoted to literature, the arts, theater, or just good eating and free conversation, “polite” societies helped to create common bonds among the elite. What David S. Shields has described as a nascent public sphere of free conversation among relative equals first emerged in America among these societies in emulation of similar developments in England.15
The social ideals and organization of Freemasonry contributed to this great project of civility that enabled men of varied ranks and callings to set aside their differences and join together in polite conversation and common activities. More than an exclusive club within polite society, however, Freemasonry was the most successful colonial organization in crossing political, ethnic, and religious boundaries among leading affluent white men. By creating no formal membership barriers based on religion or politics, the colonial brotherhood helped buffer the divisive forces that threatened the social order of the new commercial centers. Moreover, in embracing freedom of thought and religious toleration yet requiring faith, the fraternity contributed to the rational religious discourse of the emerging public sphere. At the same time, by continuing to include elements of its pre-Christian past, Freemasonry participated in the broader supernatural world that encompassed colonial religious life. Before looking more closely at colonial American Freemasonry, a review of the origins and multiple meanings of the society prior to its arrival in America is necessary for understanding its beliefs and practices as they were called on, transformed, and created anew in the fraternity’s journey through American culture.
ENGLISH ORIGINS
When Freemasonry first came to America from England, in 1733, it had already taken on the character of a noblemen’s club while retaining to some degree the traditional features of a medieval institution connected to an artisan culture. The modern history of the society begins with the establishment of the premier Grand Lodge of England, in 1717. By this time the membership of Masonic lodges had shifted decisively from “operative” tradesmen skilled in the craft of masonry to “non-operative,” “accepted,” “admitted,” or “speculative” noblemen and gentry.16 Abandoning the regulation of the building trade, the new Masonic fraternity now met in taverns and contributed to articulating the ideas of the English Enlightenment. Members of the Royal Society, created to foster the new sciences, played a key role in organizing the modern fraternity and accounted for more than one-quarter of lodge membership in its first decade.17 At the same time, Freemasonry retained myths of origin and secret rituals of initiation. To understand the fraternity’s multiple meanings, it is necessary to briefly consider its early history.
The craft guild of Freemasonry began in Britain around the time of the Norman Conquest (1066), when kings, nobles, and church leaders embarked on building stone castles and cathedrals.18 As fully qualified craftsmen free to enjoy the rights and privileges of the guild, masons were referred to as freemasons, much as other skilled tradesmen were sometimes called, for example, free carpenters or men granted the rights of citizenship in a town were called freemen.19 Like the members of other guilds, freemasons had a mythical history stressing the antiquity and importance of their craft, held banquets on their fraternity’s patron saint’s day, initiated new members into their fictive brotherhood, and limited entry to the trade to men who had been properly trained in its mysteries, its skills and techniques.
The constitutions and ordinances from London’s fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Mason’s Company describe a hierarchical organization of apprentices and master craftsmen who retained a distinctive clothing (apron and gloves) and religious
