That Religion in Which All Men Agree - David G. Hackett

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only was British metaphysical authority an ocean away, but so too was the English Parliament. Thus colonial assemblies and especially local governments shaped political society. As David D. Hall has argued, rather than cohesively united by the absolute authority of the monarchy, religious and political authority in colonial America were “remarkably local and decentralized.” Moreover, unlike England, eighteenth-century America had no “broad distribution of printed matter.” As a result, its “social and political criticism were never fully differentiated from the language and practices of radical Protestantism.”73

      Timothy H. Breen first described this “religious public sphere” as “an intellectual space in which allegedly disinterested writers employing their reason in the name of the people might criticize and shape popular religious assumptions.”74 Beginning with the controversies that came to be known as the First Great Awakening, Americans engaged in public, print debates over religious matters. Frank Lambert has argued that the itinerant evangelist George Whitefield initiated these disputes by demanding that the forum for religious controversy be moved from the private, clerically controlled pulpit to the public arena of print, where literate men and women could make reasoned judgments and arguments.75 Accusations that the upstart evangelicals spoke in uncouth language while employing rhetoric and emotion rather than reason resulted in their making efforts to dispute in the language and reasoned logic of polite society.76 In moving from the private expression of religious convictions to public, printed efforts to persuade readers of the truth of their beliefs, writers on all sides of the issue learned to frame their arguments to appeal to the common sense of their readers. As the Boston antirevivalist John Caldwell warned, “Understand with your own Understanding; see Evidence before ye believe or judge.”77 Moreover, this paralleled ongoing secular debates over bank fraud and related issues, and in both cases, more and more colonial Americans adapted to polite society’s insistence that individuals make informed, well-reasoned decisions in an expanding marketplace of ideas.78

      Whatever the character and significance of the American public sphere, it first appeared among the less than 5 percent of the population that lived in coastal cities.79 By the early eighteenth century, every major port city had at least one coffeehouse or tavern, which served as nexuses for extralocal news and information and, like elegant homes, a site for the new sociability. Within the decorum of this nascent polite society, strangers met, circulated manuscripts and published materials, engaged in and discussed literature and the arts, and entertained alternative visions of social and religious life. Gradually, a small but influential number of colonial elites fashioned a new and experimental realm of social life where they worked to bridge differences through civility and congenial conversation and find common cause in a wide variety of pursuits. Sheer joy, entertainment, and the members’ delight in one another’s company, David S. Shields has argued, were as much the purpose of these societies as any other motive. However, while providing a common ground of private pleasures for a coalescing upper class, they foreshadowed, with their multiple forms of communication and social relations, the emerging public.80 By the 1760s, this congenial realm of elegance and polish gave way to the sober reason and morality of a rapidly expanding public sphere, in which the new print media joined growing numbers of citizens in dialogue over questions surrounding revolutionary social change.

      Freemasonry established its first American lodge, in Philadelphia in 1733, within the social and cultural milieu of polite society. By the 1740s, Philadelphia and the similarly old and large urban centers of Boston and New York had several lodges, while inland seaports founded their first lodges in the following decades (Albany’s, for instance, in the 1760s). Masonic membership was a means of entry into polite society. Lodge meetings were held in the elegant private rooms of upscale taverns, where gentleman habitually gathered for dinners and entertainment. Deliberately expensive fees attracted the “man of merit” while discouraging “those of mean Spirits, and narrow, or Incumber’d Fortunes.”81 Those who were “well known” by the brothers were immediately admitted to candidacy; others were required to wait one month while “proper inquiry” was made into their character and behavior. James Anderson’s Constitutions instructed lodge members to “avoid all slandering and backbiting and talking disrespectfully of a person” and instead to treat one another “with much courtesy.” Individual lodges required members to appear in “decent cloathing” and refrain from obscene language, excessive drink, and indecent behavior. They were to participate in lodge rituals with the utmost “solemnity” and offer the master of the lodge “due reverence.” An escalating series of punishments, beginning with fines and culminating in banishment, met infractions of this gentlemanly code.82 Though Freemasonry was a society with secrets, entry into the fraternity was intended not as a withdrawal into private life but as an opportunity for gentlemen to demonstrate and refine the social manners of the upper class.

      Freemasonry also helped to shape the structure and discourse of the emerging public sphere. In its efforts to harmonize the divisive forces of nationality, religion, and politics, the fraternity helped to create a new social order that brought together leading affluent white men of different ethnic and religious backgrounds. The social philosophy and organization of Freemasonry were part of the “new civility,” which enabled persons of different ranks, callings, origins, and occupations to put aside their differences and engage in congenial communication and common activities. The fraternity’s encouragement of free thought and religious toleration yet requirement of faith, moreover, contributed to the rational religious discourse of the emerging public sphere. Civility involved not only improved taste and manners but also a mutual tolerance and open-mindedness that encouraged individuals to employ reason and evidence to arrive at their religious convictions. At the same time, Masonic Christianity shared with much of the colonial religious world a faith laced with magical and mystical elements of archaic origin. Amid its movement toward Enlightenment forms and ideals, the brotherhood maintained elements of its ancient past.

      FREEMASONRY IN COLONIAL ALBANY

      The early history of the first Masonic lodges in Albany, New York, provides a window onto the emergence of this community-wide organization. Prior to the 1760s, Albany was an overwhelmingly Dutch settlement over whose economic, social, and political life merchant family networks maintained control. Arising in vertical relationship to the town’s horizontal social order were those inhabitants who mediated between the largely homogeneous town and the increasingly heterogenous provincial population.83 Most of the inhabitants traced their origins to the arrival of a large group of Dutch settlers in the 1660s, whose descendants primarily determined the beliefs and practices of the town through the 1760s. Beginning with the English takeover of the Netherlands’ colony as part of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, however, members of the Schuyler and Cuyler families, among others, took the lead in learning the English language and mediating between the town and extralocal commercial and political interests. They and others in the province “who brought with them the French and English languages, soon acquired a sway over their less enlightened fellow settlers.”84

      Although polite society barely took hold in Albany (which had no institutionalized private societies of any description prior to establishment of the Masonic lodge in the 1760s), Anne Grant’s Memoirs of an American Lady traces its emergence.85 Grant’s recollections of her childhood in the Albany of the 1760s portray colonial Dutch Albanians as “children of nature” who, unfortunately, lacked “good breeding.” In conversation, for example, they were “limited in regard to subjects.” Of the “substantial luxuries of the table . . . they knew little.” Dominating the town’s moral framework was the Dutch Reformed church, which stood at its center and counted nearly all of the townspeople as members. Grant observes that public worship was often “mechanical,” though the townspeople never doubted the “great truths of revelation.”86

      Indeed, participation in the beliefs and practices of Reformed Calvinism was the most enduring collective social action of the colonial Dutch community. Estate inventories of Albany’s Dutch householders reveal catechisms written by the town’s ministers, the Bible, and little other reading material. As late as 1771, the town’s persistent old ways included the occasional and rudimentary schooling of children; the lack of newspapers with knowledge of the outside world; and a determination to

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