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behind a military escort and in front of governors, congressmen, and the president of the United States and through a lofty, triumphal arch on which was inscribed “The Arts pay homage to valor.” When the cornerstone was raised, the Massachusetts grand chaplain prayed that “the Grand Architect of the Universe grant a blessing on this foundation stone” and the grand treasurer placed a silver plate engraved with the names of the grand master and local officials beneath the cornerstone, on which the grand master poured corn, wine, and oil while praying to the “bounteous Author of nature . . . [to] grant to us all in needful supply the Corn of nourishment, the Wine of refreshment, and the Oil of joy.” He then “struck the stone thrice with his mallet and the Honours of Masonry were given.” An oration and a concluding procession followed.⁵⁴ The Masonic consecration of American public enterprises adapted older rituals that prepared English lodges for the practice of Freemasonry, to celebrate the new American republic.

      This appropriation was part of a larger effort to create a national popular political culture in the years following the Revolution. Working against the regional, racial, ethnic, class, and gender diversities of postwar America, the civil ceremonies of Freemasonry, like the new Fourth of July parades, speeches, and toasts, were elements of a spontaneous attempt to delineate the borders of a common though contested public world.

      As David Waldstreicher has argued, emerging efforts by various groups, including African Americans and women, to create a common understanding of American society through public events and print culture worked to resolve the many paradoxes of localism and nationalism, plus racial and gender identities, that characterized the early years of the young republic. Though Waldstreicher does not discuss Freemasonry in this context, the central role that it played in postwar public events offers evidence of its contribution to what he calls “the true political culture of the early Republic.” While the white, male, and affluent character of the fraternity’s members obviously worked against the creation of a truly inclusive society, the nationalist rhetoric and practices that the brotherhood encouraged and engaged in contributed to the effort to produce a common social discourse within perpetually negotiated borders.⁵⁵ This was particularly apparent in the fraternity’s appropriation of republicanism.

      REPUBLICAN MASONRY

      Republicanism has always been more an ideal than a description of society. The concept began with Niccolò Machiavelli and other political theorists of the Italian Renaissance and was later developed through Montesquieu’s belief that all governments rest on their subjects. For these social theorists, what makes the law effective in despotic governments is fear; what makes the law effective in a republic is virtue. In the seventeenth-century English Civil Wars, social thinkers employed the term to envision new ways for governments to provide for the well-being of their people. As previously discussed, the Earl of Shaftesbury and other late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English republican thinkers responded to Thomas Hobbes’s vision of a hierarchical society held together by coercion by putting forward the idea of natural benevolence and sociability. They believed that people naturally get along with one another and are concerned for the well-being of others. Such universal benevolence, however, was possible only for gentlemen. Ordinary people would have to submit to more coercive forms of social control. Following the Revolution, Americans took the English theorists’ attempt to justify the rule of the gentry and enlarged it to become a means of holding together the whole of society. Social order and well-being in the new American republic would rely on the virtue of all citizens.

      Revolutionary-era American spokespersons drew deeply on the libertarian thought of English social theorists in their embrace of republicanism as a set of political and social attitudes to guide the new world they believed they were creating. History, they held, revealed an eternal struggle between the forces of liberty and the forces of power. Preserving a republican government meant protecting liberty from the perpetual aggression of power. Without the authoritarian government or hierarchical restraints that supported earlier nations, American republicans believed that the character of the people rather than the force of arms would determine the health of their society. Virtue, including the repudiation of self-interest through the acceptance of moral rules, undergirded the new society. Hence, American republicanism meant maintaining private and public virtue, social solidarity, and vigilance against the corruptions of power.⁵⁶ As the new nation came into its own, moral training in the republican virtues became a particular concern of the Masonic fraternity.

      Because the brotherhood embodied the older Enlightenment ideals of benevolence and sociability and the new American commitments to patriotism and democracy, the call to Freemasonry became indistinguishable from the call to American citizenship. In charging his brethren to act out their Masonic “duties and virtues,” one late eighteenth-century orator put it this way: “We are now blessed with a free, independent and equal government, founded in theory upon principles the most beneficial to society.” Masonic duty therefore required that “every benevolent principle, be cultivated by us . . . in seeking the general good of the whole.”⁵⁷ Similarly, George Washington, responding to an address from the Pennsylvania Grand Lodge praising his nation building, saw the new government as at its best in realizing the ideals of Freemasonry: “To erect upon a solid foundation, the true principles of government, is only to have shared . . . in a labor, the result of which, let us hope, will prove, thro’ all ages, a sanctuary for brothers, and a Lodge for the virtues.”⁵⁸ Not only did Masonic duty now require the fulfillment of the duties of American citizenship, but, conversely, the realization of the “true principles of government” meant the embodiment of Masonic virtues.

      Following the Revolution, Masonic leaders put renewed emphasis on the order’s long-held moral teachings and their new republican meaning. Benevolence and sociability, the hallmarks of the English theorists, were institutionalized. “Our institution asserts . . . the natural equality of mankind,” the grand master and future New York governor De Witt Clinton said in 1793.⁵⁹ “From the beginning of time to the present day,” Brother Benjamin Green echoed to his Marblehead, Massachusetts, lodge in 1797, “the Free Mason’s lodge . . . has ever been considered . . . a nursery of . . . love and good will to mankind.”⁶⁰ By seeking to extend their values to the larger social world, moreover, the brothers came to see their fraternity as a harbinger of a new social order. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Masonic leaders frequently spoke of the fraternity as a “school of virtue” dedicated to the “cultivation and extension of the principles of morality, good will and virtue.”⁶¹ Though the order had always encouraged spreading its values to society at large, it now gave particular emphasis to the claim that the development and practice of Masonic virtues were “precisely the duties” that every “man owes to his brother.”⁶²

      This new Masonic emphasis on moral improvement came at a time when the disestablishment of religion was undercutting the role of churches as moral teachers. Prior to the Revolution, nearly all of the thirteen colonies had either tax support for ministers or religious tests for public office. To a great extent, the Anglican, Presbyterian, and Congregational churches were the established teachers of public morality. Following the separation of church and state, a period of growing pluralism and sectarianism ensued. By 1815, a variety of pan-Protestant moral improvement societies had emerged, anticipating the moral reform movements of later decades. Just after the revolution, however, Freemasonry was the only established institution whose rejection of particular religious and political requirements and embrace of “universal” moral teachings allowed it to reach out to all citizens. As the “sacred asylum” and repository of republican virtue, the order appeared to offer a higher plane, beyond the confusions of postwar religion, that embodied the principles of the new American society.⁶³

      What influence the Masonic “school of virtue” had on the moral tenor of the new society or on Masons themselves is difficult to determine. Though the fraternity heralded the need for moral improvement, this very emphasis suggests the difficulties perceived in attaining it. In contrast to English social theorists who believed that moral benevolence was a natural capacity only of gentlemen, revolutionary Americans staked their new nation’s success on the ability of its entire citizenry to embody private and public virtue. Rather than applaud the success of the people in demonstrating this morality, many Americans emphasized the need for more moral training. “The laws

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