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That Religion in Which All Men Agree. David G. Hackett
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isbn 9780520957626
Автор произведения David G. Hackett
Издательство Ingram
FROM MODERNS TO ANCIENTS
On the evening of June 24, 1737, Benjamin Walker, a sugar baker, peeked into a tavern window to see what was transpiring at a meeting of the Boston Masonic Lodge. Earlier that day the lodge had taken to the streets for its annual Saint John’s Day procession. Walker noted in his journal, “Great Numbers of people of all sexes and sizes [assembled] to see them walk thro the streets.”4 Men such as him, who stood below the rank of gentleman, could not go behind the honorable society’s closed doors. By the end of the century, however, urban craftsmen and country gentlemen whose broadening aspirations attracted them to the status and sophistication of Freemasonry would dominate this society that had previously brought together the most prominent men in America’s seaport towns.
The catalyst for this transformation was a dispute over proper ritual procedures between two factions in British Freemasonry. In the 1740s, the novelty and fashionable appeal of English Freemasonry had begun to fade. The number of lodges declined. Satires and mock processions lowered the dignity of and public respect for the fraternity. Ineffective and indifferent leaders, apathetic members, and exhaustion from rapid expansion all figured in what one London Mason termed the order’s “low repute.”5 In the midst of this weakness, the London Grand Lodge denied membership to several journeymen Irish Masons living in London because they could not demonstrate knowledge of ritual changes made by that body to keep out imposters. Infuriated by this rebuke, in 1751 a group spearheaded by this Irish faction and led by Laurence Dermott, a journeyman painter who had been the master of a Dublin lodge in 1746, met to organize a rival Grand Lodge.
Calling themselves Ancients, after their desire to restore the original degree rituals, the insurgents named the existing London Grand Lodge members Moderns for tampering with the fraternity’s essential ceremonies. Dermott then effectively exaggerated the matter to give the impression that the Moderns had so far departed from the sacred and unchanging rites and customs as to be illegal and unauthorized.6 His new book of constitutions, the Ahiman Rezon (Help to a Brother), while otherwise closely following James Anderson’s Constitutions, chided the Moderns for their ritual innovations, neglect of the Saint John’s Day feasts, perfunctory ceremonies, and irregular times of meeting. In contrast, the Ahiman Rezon emphasized stricter ritual observances and tighter administrative practices.7 By all accounts, Dermott was a forceful character and able administrator who gained prestige for the new fraternity by receiving official recognition from the Grand Lodges of Ireland and Scotland. Serving as grand secretary of the new lodge for thirty-five years, he eventually cajoled, bullied, and molded the Ancients into an equal to the premier Grand Lodge. One measure of his success was the acceptance by the London Grand Lodge of its new name—in its own minutes.8
Though the immediate occasion for the indictment of the Moderns lay in a dispute over rituals, social differences underlay the rise of Ancient Freemasonry. Dermott later described the original members as “Men of some Education and an honest Character but in low Circumstances.” The 1751 membership rolls indicate that most were “mechanics,” journeymen painters, shoemakers, and tailors, of a similar character to those who had earlier established the lodges for Masonic craftsmen. One of the new Grand Lodge’s first acts of business was to provide support from its charity fund for members in debtors’ prison. In his Ahiman Rezon, the Ancients’ grand secretary expanded the pool of eligible Masonic candidates beyond the affluent elite by stipulating only that members of the Ancient fraternity be freeborn men, “upright in body and limbs,” free of debt, and “endowed with an estate, office, trade, occupation or some visible way of acquiring an honest and reputable livelihood.”9 He then took steps to democratize the organization by requiring the election rather than the appointment of all Grand Lodge officers.
The Ancients’ more humble rank encouraged their expansion abroad, often through regiments in the British Army interested in forming military lodges that were issued traveling warrants. These bodies provided Masonic fellowship for lower ranks of soldiers, who could not, like their superiors, mingle in polite society. In its first decades of existence, the Ancient Grand Lodge sent more than one hundred military lodges to the British colonies, particularly North America, where it warranted forty-nine traveling lodges during the French and Indian War.10 These military lodges admitted local civilians, each group of whom, when the regiment moved on, applied to the Ancients for a warrant for a stationary lodge.
The first Ancient lodge established in America, however, grew out of a lodge originally chartered by the Moderns in Philadelphia in 1757. The majority of the original petitioners to Philadelphia’s Lodge No. 4 appear to have been British immigrants, including soldiers then stationed in Philadelphia, who were Ancient Masons, a fact of which the Moderns were initially unaware. Once formed, the new lodge accepted other Ancient British Masons and adopted the Ancient manner in admitting new members. By August of 1757, the Pennsylvania Grand Lodge had received reports of these irregularities and responded by sending investigators. Lodge No. 4 did not receive these interlopers fraternally, remarking in its minutes that the visitors “behaved as spies in an enemy camp.” Summoned before the Grand Lodge committee, the officers of No. 4 willingly “plead[ed] Guilty” to being Ancients. As a result, the warrant of No. 4 was recalled less than six months after it had been issued. “Determined never to forsake the good old way,” the insurgent members were soon granted a warrant from the London Ancients, in 1758, becoming Ancient Lodge No. 1. Tensions continued between the two groups when one Modern, Solomon Bush, a prominent Jewish Freemason who was going to London on other business, refused to carry the Ancient lodge’s payment of its fees to the Ancient Grand Lodge.11 Following the establishment of their Lodge No. 1, Philadelphia’s Ancients created a Grand Lodge in 1761 and grew rapidly. In contrast to the four lodges warranted by the local Moderns between 1730 and 1758, Philadelphia’s Ancients warranted more than fifty between 1761 and 1785. Lodges working under the Moderns rapidly declined, ceasing to exist altogether about 1793, when their hall was sold and the proceeds donated to the city as a fund “to furnish the poor with wood.”12
In 1774, the London Ancients issued a decree that any lodge in the world with a warrant from the Moderns should be deemed unworthy of association with the “Ancient Community” and its official sanction from the London Grand Lodge of Ancients canceled.13 This was in keeping with Dermott’s dictate in the Ahiman Rezon that “ancient Masonry contains everything valuable amongst the moderns, as well as many other things that cannot be revealed without additional ceremonies.”14 This claim seems to have been generally accepted, in some instances even by Moderns. In 1778, the Episcopal clergyman William Smith, having served for many years as the grand secretary and grand chaplain of the Pennsylvania Moderns, submitted himself to be “healed” in an Ancient ceremony. By 1785, as many as nineteen hundred men had been initiated into lodges warranted by Philadelphia’s Ancient fraternity.15 By 1800, the national Ancient fraternity encompassed all eleven American Grand Lodges, whose five hundred subordinate lodges included an estimated twenty-five thousand members. Together these men constituted about 3 percent of the adult white male population and a substantially higher percentage of those with property and the means to pay the fraternity’s fees.16 In addition, these numbers do not include the late eighteenth-century expansion of the fraternity into the African American community through the creation of Prince Hall Masonic lodges (see chapter 6).
The triumph of the Ancient fraternity was part of a large transformation of American society that challenged old social divisions between the elite and common people. In the second half of the eighteenth century, a movement of increasingly sophisticated and politically aware urban artisans emerged and became vigorously involved in efforts surrounding