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That Religion in Which All Men Agree
Freemasonry in American Culture
By David G. Hackett UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2014 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95762-6
CHAPTER 1
Colonial Freemasonry and Polite Society, 1733–1776
At sunrise on the morning of December 27, 1738, the "firing of guns from several ships in the harbor" to announce the festival of Saint John the Evangelist awakened the people of Charleston, South Carolina. At ten o'clock, the city's Masons, clothed in jewels, aprons, white gloves, and stockings and preceded by a small band, paraded through the streets to the site of their Grand Lodge meeting, at the home of James Graeme, the soon-to-be chief justice of the province and their provincial grand master. At eleven o'clock, the brotherhood processed to the Anglican church, where they sat in their separate section of pews and listened to their brother the Reverend Mr. Durand praise the fraternity's values of mutual love and benevolence. "In the same order" they then marched on to the house of Thomas Shepherd, a leading attorney, for "a very eloquent speech on the usefulness of societies" and an "elegant" dinner. This was followed by an invitation to a brother's ship, where several toasts were given, "saluted by the discharge of 39 guns." The evening concluded "with a ball and entertainment for the ladies."
In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, reports of grand parades of gentlemen Masons began to appear in the newspapers of colonial coastal cities. In New York, the order of procession was carefully described:
First walked the Sword Bearer, carrying a drawn sword; then four Stewards with White Maces, followed by the Treasurer and Secretary, who bore each a crimson damask cushion, on which lay a gilt Bible, and the Book of Constitution; after these came the Grand Warden and Wardens; then came the Grand Master himself, bearing a truncheon and other badges of his office, followed by the rest of the Brotherhood, according to their respective ranks—Masters, Fellows Crafts, and 'Prentices, to about the number of fifty.... We hear they afterward conferred a generous donation of fifteen pounds from the public stock of the Society to be expended in clothing the poor children belonging to our charity school; and made a handsome private contribution for the relief of indigent prisoners.
In Philadelphia, the officers and members of the Grand Lodge procession included the governor, the mayor, a chief justice, a college provost, the secretary of the Provincial Assembly, other leading men of Pennsylvania, and Deputy Grand Master Benjamin Franklin. For colonial spectators, these "very grand show[s]" carried out with "grandeur and decorum" announced the elite social standing of Freemasons.
The immediate impetus for these conspicuous displays 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." 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. 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. 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. 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.
Freemasonry was part of this Anglicization of colonial life. Between 1733 and the revolution, the United Grand Lodge of London warranted more than one hundred lodges in the colonies' seaport towns. By 1772 the fraternity's membership was about five thousand, including several hundred of the coastal cities' most important men. 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.
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. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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 practice. Persons admitted to the fellowship were "to be clad in one clothing ... convenient to their powers and degrees" and were to wear it every year when attending Mass on the Feast of the Four Crowned Martyrs, after which they were to have dinner or "honest" recreation. This feast day honored the martyrdom of four Roman stoneworkers killed by Diocletian for refusing to abandon Christianity. Other masonic guilds were known to celebrate the feast day of Saint John the Evangelist or Saint John the Baptist. All versions of the company's constitutions, moreover, contained a provision demanding secrecy, such as the following: "You shall keep secret the obscure and intricate parts of the science, not disclosing them to any but such as study and use the same." These were trade or technical secrets intended to enforce membership requirements against the growing number of competitors in a time of building expansion.
Although nearly all early modern trades asserted high standing and great antiquity, the fact that masons created the vast stone cathedrals, arguably the most awe-inspiring human works in the Middle Ages, distinguished their claims from those of other medieval craftsmen. Unlike workers whose tools and products tied them to a local market, the masons involved in such large-scale projects were drawn from a relatively wide region. Assembling this regional labor force on a local work site necessitated the drawing up of detailed rules that would help to create shared values and standards of behavior both on and off the job. Among other things, these codes of conduct stipulated how masons should treat one another. For example, their requirements included not taking work from others or underpaying fellow masons, choosing only suitable persons to be apprentices, and respecting confidences and trade secrets.
In the available manuscript constitutions, these charges follow an elaborate legendary history of the guild that traces the origin of masonry to geometry—the source of all knowledge. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, this mythical prehistory was intended to be read out or recited at meetings, especially when entrants were admitted to the craft. The manuscripts open with brief invocations or prayers addressed to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The narrator then characteristically launches into the subject by presenting the "worthy Craft of Masonry" as rooted in "Geometrye," which is the foundation of "the seven Liberall Sciences." The origins of geometry are then traced to the children of Lamech, mentioned in Genesis. The founder of geometry was Jabel, Lamech's son who, fearing God's punishment, inscribed his discovery on stone pillars that could survive fire or flood. After the Great Flood, Hemarynes (Hermes), a great-grandson of Noah, discovered the pillars and from them retaught the sciences to humanity. Next, Abraham and his wife Sarah went to Egypt and taught the seven sciences to the Egyptians, including Euclid. Euclid then instructed King David during the latter's sojourn in Egypt. On his return to the Holy Land, David gave these charges to the masons who began building the Jerusalem Temple, whose construction continued under his son Solomon. Solomon sent for workers from other countries, whom he charged to spread the craft to France and England (later rites of initiation took place in an allegorical Solomon's Temple). Eventually, it was said, the English king Edwin compiled both this prehistory and the guild's codes of conduct, and his books became the constitutions themselves.
In the seventeenth century, Scottish masons working from these constitutions created catechisms for their rituals of identification and initiation, which collectively became known as the Mason Word. Although it was customary for craft guilds to maintain constitutions detailing their rules and legendary histories, masons not only had extensive codes of conduct and an elaborate legendary history but also, unlike other guilds, evolved an extensive ritual life. Again, this may have been due to the prominence of the craft and the need to guard trade secrets among a regional labor force. The early Scottish catechisms dealt with the admission of candidates to the two grades of mason known as Entered Apprentice and Fellow Craft. These rites probably existed prior to that time and may have been created out of earlier practices of the craft. Though fragmentary and diverse in their contents, the surviving catechisms usually include questions and answers to ascertain the identity of another craftsman, culminating in the recognition of a secret or words, and rites of initiation that instructed the two grades of masons in the secrets of the Word.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from That Religion in Which All Men Agree by David G. Hackett. Copyright © 2014 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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