Freemasons were central to the war effort. They accounted for 69 of the 241 men (29 percent) who either signed the Articles of Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, or the Constitution or served as generals in the Continental Army or as General Washington’s aides or military secretaries. Such luminaries as Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and John Hancock were Freemasons. Forty-two percent of the generals commissioned by the Continental Congress and led by Washington were or became Masons.20 These men were often actively involved in ten military lodges whose membership drew overwhelmingly from the ranks of commissioned officers. Like the British military lodges, these gatherings of American soldiers provided identity and mutual support. Unlike the ineffective and parochial Christian chaplains, the Continental Army’s military lodges provided common beliefs and rituals that reinforced the validity of the emerging American society. By the war’s end, the largest of these lodges counted several hundred officers among its members.21
MILITARY LODGES
Military lodges were more effective than Christian ministers in building ties among Continental Army officers. The Christian chaplaincy in the Revolutionary War began with a disorganized system of volunteer preachers. Gradually, the Continental Congress extended its influence to include chaplaincies, which it slowly developed into an organized system.22 In practice, however, chaplains were few in number and transient in service. In January of 1776, only one-third of the army’s regiments had chaplains.23 Among the 117 ministers who worked as chaplains, only one remained in service throughout the war, while the majority did not stay more than ten months.24 Though some chaplains served as regular soldiers, the great majority sheltered themselves in private homes or with staff officers. During marches they were ordered to stay at the rear of the vanguard.25
Few, transient, and set apart, the chaplains were additionally frustrated in their work by the soldiers’ pervasive drunkenness, profanity, and widespread lack of interest in religious services. On July 4, 1775, the day after Washington took command, he reminded the army that the Articles of War forbade “profane cursing, swearing and drunkenness” and imposed on all officers and men when not on duty “punctual attendance on Divine Service to implore the blessing of heaven upon the means used for our safety and defence.” In spite of this, he found it necessary throughout the war to reiterate the obligation of men and officers to attend divine services. But an apparent indifference on the part of the chaplains encouraged soldiers’ apathy. On February 15, 1783, Washington issued lengthy general orders against relaxed discipline and expressed particular astonishment at the behavior of chaplains, who had “frequently been almost all absent at the same time.”26
Organized Christianity also suffered from denominational antagonisms. Almost one-half (48 of 115) of the chaplains with known denominational affiliations were Congregational ministers from New England, some of whom protested Rhode Island’s appointment of the Unitarian minister John Murray because of his ultraliberal and heterodox views.27 Virginia frontiersmen, in turn, deplored the predominance of Anglican clergymen (nine of ten) in their state’s delegation and the absence of ministers from their dissident Baptist faith.28 In June of 1777, Washington addressed Congress at length on this knotty subject. Fearing the outbreak of religious disputes if men were compelled “to a mode of Worship which they do not profess,” he concluded that it would be best if each regiment had a voice in choosing a chaplain of its own “religious sentiments.”29
At the same time that an ineffective structure, persisting indifference, and localism impeded the work of organized religion, officers were attracted to the new nationalistic fervor particularly evident in the sanctity of the military funeral. As the Connecticut Congregational chaplain Ammi Robbins put it, “There is something more than ordinarily solemn and touching in our funerals, especially an officer’s; sword and arms inverted, others with their arms folded across their breast stepping slowly to the beat of the muffled drum.”30 These officers’ funerals were often accompanied by Masonic rites, which, at least one historian reports, army chaplains frequently performed.31
While no systematic comparison of chaplains’ names and Masonic membership records has been conducted, anecdotal evidence is suggestive. The Congregational minister and Connecticut Line Brigade chaplain Abraham Baldwin offered a “polite discourse” to a meeting of all military lodge leaders in a New Jersey Presbyterian church.32 The Presbyterian minister Andrew Hunter was both chaplain to the New Jersey Brigade and the worshipful master of its military lodge.33 By the winter of 1782, moreover, the military lodges had become so well established that Washington granted a request from Israel Evans, New York’s Presbyterian Brigade chaplain, to erect a public building outside army headquarters on the banks of the Hudson near Newburg for both divine services and lodge meetings. That spring, the building, known to Masons as the Temple, was the site for both Christian worship and the initiation of officers into the mysteries of Freemasonry.34
In contrast to organized Christianity, the military lodges sought to overcome local differences. Unlike the regional religious biases of New England Congregationalism or Virginia Anglicanism, the lodge’s commitment to “all men” regardless of region or denomination provided a basis for community beyond local boundaries. The fraternity’s emphasis on social distinction based on merit rather than birth similarly worked against local prejudices. Moreover, the lodges provided social space for war-weary officers from all over the colonies to relax and enjoy one another’s company. The fraternity’s commitment to creating a society based on an affection among men that transcended differences suggests an anticipation of the new republican society that the army’s officers were fighting to create.35
The meetings of military lodges were usually held when the army was resting in camp between campaigns. Eleven Connecticut regimental officers in Roxbury, Massachusetts, for example, formed American Union Lodge during the army’s encampment in Boston in the winter of 1776. The lodge subsequently moved with the army through Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. Charged in their warrant from the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts to promote “the utmost Harmony and Brotherly Love” among themselves and to be “very cautious of the Moral Character” of prospective members, the new lodge founders agreed to set about their “masonic work” of proposing, examining, and ritually admitting new recruits in the evening of the first, second, and third Tuesdays of every month and in extra meetings when warranted. The lodge held thirty-one meetings in its first six months. At the Battle of Long Island in August of 1776, however, ten members were either killed or captured, and the lodge was forced to close. It held only one meeting between March 1777 and February 1779, but it admitted thirteen new members and initiated twenty candidates, all commissioned officers, between 1776 and 1779.36 In the winter of 1779, the lodge, led by Worshipful Master General Samuel Parsons, met in the army’s winter quarters, along the banks of the Hudson opposite West Point.37
Beyond individual lodge meetings while the army was in camp, the winter of 1779 saw representatives from all ten military lodges come together to propose a unified American Freemasonry. More than one hundred high-ranking Masonic military officers were present in Morristown, New Jersey, for that meeting, including Generals Washington and Mordecai Gist and Colonels Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Proctor. Their petition, to be presented to several provincial grand masters, requested the creation of a national General Grand Lodge, which would “preside over and govern all other lodges of whatsoever degree or denomination.” By eliminating distinctions between Moderns and Ancients, standardizing practices, and correcting abuses, the new Grand Lodge would encourage “frequent communion and social intercourse” among brethren throughout the country so that Masonic “morality and virtue may be far extended.”38 Though the proposed Grand Lodge never came into existence, the unanimous support for this petition among the military’s