LITMIR.BIZ

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which harass society.”⁶⁴ To overcome these “dark passions,” another Masonic spokesperson said, each lodge member “solemnly promised” to watch over his brother and, when needed, “remind him . . . of his failings, and aid his reformation.”⁶⁵ References to the “failings and offences of our brethren” are sprinkled throughout Masonic orations.⁶⁶

      In addition to supporting republican virtues, postwar Masonic spokespersons revived interest in scientific learning and education. Prior to the society’s migration to America, the cultivation of the arts and sciences was a hallmark of Freemasonry. The English legendary histories trace the institution to Hermes, Euclid, and other originators of these fields. Both the Enlightenment emphasis on order, rationality, and science and the seemingly purer wisdom of the ancient world fascinated the founding members of the English Grand Lodge. Yet neither ancient wisdom nor Newtonian science were of much concern to colonial Masons, whose chief preoccupation was consolidating their elite social class through fraternal love and honor. Following the Revolution, however, American Masonic leaders revived their fraternity’s identification with the learned men of the past and in so doing aligned it with the onward march of civilization. “It is well known,” Clinton stated in 1793, that Freemasonry “was at first composed of scientific and ingenious men, who assembled together to improve the arts and sciences.” Locating these men in long-ago antiquity, when “knowledge . . . was restricted to a chosen few,” he explained that “when the invention of printing had opened the means of instruction to all ranks of people, then the generous cultivators of Masonry communicated with cheerfulness to the world, those secrets of the arts and sciences.”⁶⁷ This retrieval of an older emphasis on arts and sciences helped to establish the fraternity as central not only to the advance of civilization but to the transmission of knowledge as well. The Masonic movement was “one of the ancient founders of schools,” Brother John H. Sheppard lectured the Grand Lodges of New Hampshire and Maine in 1820. “The liberal arts and sciences” were “taught in Lodges,” whose “brethren imparted instruction to their children and others.”⁶⁸

      Masonic leaders asserted this new interest in learning at a moment when cultural indifference toward education and public schooling was not yet overcome. Against the “apparent indolence of men of learning, and the small benefit the community seems to derive from . . . academical institutions,” Sheppard argued that “such characters and such institutions are infinitely important in the support of a republican government.”⁶⁹ Acting on this conviction, New York’s Grand Lodge created a free common school for Masonic children in 1810, a time when all other schools were either pay, sectarian, or both. By 1817, with the expansion of public interest in common schooling, the state took over patronage and supervision of the Mason-sponsored Free School.⁷⁰

      As no less than patrons of the arts and sciences and founders of schools, postwar Masonic leaders saw themselves as essential to the success of the American experiment. Yet their efforts to identify the fraternity both with the onward march of civilization and as a “school of virtue” devoted to the improvement of morals appear to have been more successful rhetorically than in practice. There is some evidence that the emphasis on education encouraged some lodges to support outside educational activities. Lectures on learned topics were also occasionally presented in the lodges. Yet apart from the requirement of second degree members to memorize a short overview of the seven liberal arts, there is no evidence of any lodge creating a regular course of study, much less a systematic school of learning, in this period.⁷¹ What is certain is that claims about the fraternity’s support of moral and mental improvement pervaded the order’s private and public meetings. And however realized in practice, postwar Masonry’s celebration of republican morality, science, and education did separate the fraternity and its members from the narrow localisms of family, church, and region and link them to the larger, cosmopolitan world of the American republic. As believers in the fraternity as the “primordial” source of learning and education, Masonic leaders saw earlier than many the need for “mental improvement” in support of republican institutions.⁷²

      The Masonic expression of these republican ideals at a time of national expansion contributed to the dramatic increase in the number of American men who entered the fraternity. Between 1800 and 1820, the American population nearly doubled, from 5.3 to 9.6 million, and spread rapidly to the west.⁷³ By 1821, nine new states contained a quarter of the American population. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the American Masonic fraternity grew more than threefold, from an estimated twenty-five thousand members, primarily in the urban East, to an estimated eighty thousand nationally. This represented an increase from about 3 percent of the adult white male population in 1800 to about 5 percent of the 1820 number (the percentage of Masons among those with the leisure to attend the fraternity’s gatherings and the resources to pay its initiation fees was even larger).⁷⁴ In 1824, Freemasonry was described as “powerful” in every state of the union. Its members identified as “men of rank, wealth, office and talent . . . effective men, united together . . . in the legislative hall, on the bench, [and] in every gathering of men of business.”⁷⁵

      During this Masonic heyday, the fraternity’s civic role replaced that of Christian churches in the colonial period. Prior to the Revolution, Congregational, Presbyterian, and especially Anglican clergyman were called on to bless the public enterprises of the monarchy’s subjects. The revolutionary overthrow of hierarchical society, the separation of church and state, and the rise of republican ideology punctured the sacred canopy of the Christian Church. Into this void stepped a newly democratic, patriotic, benevolent, and republican Freemasonry, which willingly offered its symbols and rituals as a means for rebuilding society’s foundations.

      CHRISTIAN REPUBLICAN MASONRY

      In the revolutionary era, American Protestantism incorporated republican and Enlightenment ideas into an expanding framework that closely identified the church with the nation. Between 1763 and 1789, the meanings of Christian “liberty” and “righteous community” came to embrace not only the church but the nation as well. Though the church was never tied to the constitutional structure of the state, American Protestantism and republicanism became closely interwoven.⁷⁶ Similarities between their principles, moreover, led to the pervasive assumption that republicanism not only expressed Christian ideals but should be defended with Christian fervor. This was particularly true of Calvinist Christians and their evangelical heirs, yet it was also so for the early proponents of liberal Protestantism, whose distinctive ethos was then emerging from the influence of Enlightenment thought on Calvinist Christianity. Though orthodox and liberal Protestants would soon be at loggerheads, all came together in the first quarter of the nineteenth century in the belief that the success of the American republic depended on the moral education of its people.

      In these early years of the American nation, Enlightenment influences similarly expanded the boundaries of Christianity to include Freemasonry. As we have seen, prior to the revolution, colonial Masons had an ambiguous relationship with the Christian religion. Their 1723 constitution instructed Masons to leave “their particular Opinions to themselves” and instead to adopt only “that Religion in which all men agree.”⁷⁷ Some defended the order as inherently Christian, others believed that it transcended Christianity, and a few were fascinated with ancient, esoteric wisdom, but most appear to have seen the fraternity as representing universal moral principles rather than particular religious claims. While these multiple views continued into the early national period, Freemasonry was increasingly seen as working to realize the temporal ends of Christianity. This had to do with changes in both American Protestantism and the fraternity.

      In the revolutionary period, Enlightenment thinking led to the development of a Protestant liberalism that, while not denying the reality of supernatural forces, brought the power of reason to bear on religious judgments. The indigenous religious liberalism of Unitarianism, for example, had its intellectual and social origins in a small group of Congregationalist clergy in the Boston area who took offense at the “enthusiastic” religion that George Whitefield was spreading in the 1730s and 1740s.⁷⁸ Such men as Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew were uncomfortable with a Calvinist frame of reference shaped by the belief that human beings are essentially sinful and can attain salvation only through an act of grace. In contrast, American liberal Protestantism

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