FREEMASONRY AND THE NATION
At West Point in June of 1779, a procession of thirty members of American Union Lodge, joined by more than seventy visiting brothers, celebrated the Festival of Saint John the Baptist. Led by a “Band of Music with drums and fifes” and displaying the “Bible, Square and Compass,” the company marched to the “Red House,” where “His Excellency George Washington and his family” and a “number of gentlemen” joined them. Following a sermon, an address to the “Brethren in particular,” and a dinner, toasts were drunk to “Congress” and the “Arts and Sciences,” and a special toast, reported to occur at all Masonic events in the war years, was drunk to slain Masons, on this occasion including the military leaders “Warren, Montgomery, [and] Wooster.” After the celebration, Washington, “attended by the Wardens and Secretary of the Lodge,” returned to his barge while the musicians played “God Save America.” “Three cheers from the shore” accompanied the announcement of his departure, which were “answered by three from the barge, the music beating the ‘Grenadier’s March.’”39 Following this impressive gathering, a new military lodge named after Washington was formed and eventually inducted more than two hundred Continental Army officers.40
Such celebrations underscored the growing identification of Freemasonry with Washington and the new American nation. The general had first taken part in a public Masonic function just six months earlier. Following the departure of the British from Philadelphia in June of 1778, the Philadelphia Grand Lodge organized a great Masonic celebration of this event, to be commemorated on Saint John’s Day, December 28. On that day, nearly three hundred Masons participated in a grand procession, with “his Excellency our illustrious Brother General Washington” taking the grand master’s position of greatest honor.41 The march ended at Christ Church, where the city’s two most prominent Anglican clergymen conducted the religious services. Rev. Dr. William White, later the first bishop of Pennsylvania, gave the prayer, and Rev. Dr. William Smith, now an Ancient Mason, dedicated his sermon to General Washington.42 Afterward a collection was taken for relief of the poor, which raised four hundred pounds—a large amount for the times.
This celebration substantially enhanced the fraternity’s prestige. The regal and orderly public procession of more Masons than had ever been seen together in America signaled the brotherhood’s size and significance. One historian has observed that the number of Masons in Philadelphia in 1778, 571, was larger than the membership of any other voluntary society in the city at that time.43 The large sum that the fraternity collected for the poor supported its image as a charitable organization actively responding to the needs of the city’s destitute. However, it was the order’s association with Washington and the cause of the United States that clearly marked a turning point in its evolution. From this point forward, Washington endorsed the society’s activities through his prominent presence in the members’ public activities and private correspondence. As a Masonic ode commemorating his participation in these ceremonies exulted,
See Washington, he leads the train,
’Tis he commands the grateful strain;
See, every crafted son obeys.
And to the godlike brother homage pays.
Over the next few decades, Masonic sermons, addresses, and orations reverently associated Washington, Masonry, and the ideals of the new nation.44
This convergence was particularly apparent to Masonic observers of Washington’s presidential inauguration in New York City in 1789. For that ceremony, General Jacob Morton, the marshal of the festivities and the master of Saint John’s, the city’s oldest Masonic lodge, brought the Bible from the altar of his lodge. Robert R. Livingston, the chancellor of the state of New York and the grand master of its Grand Lodge, administered the oath. Afterward, Washington “reverently” kissed the Bible, which was later returned to the lodge. A memorial leaf was folded at the page the president had kissed, and in subsequent years the Bible became the lodge’s most sacred memento.45 At least one Masonic historian thought that Washington’s inaugural address—with its acknowledgment of his hopes and fears, his appeal to the divine ruler, and his examination of the requirements of the Constitution—reflected Masonic principles.46
The sanctification of the new nation through Masonic rituals was even more public in President Washington’s participation in the Masonic ceremonial laying of the cornerstone of the nation’s Capitol in 1793. For that formal occasion, the president clothed himself in the apron and insignia of a Mason and processed solemnly with hundreds of brothers through the city in a grand Masonic parade. Arriving at the southeast corner of the Capitol, he laid on the cornerstone a silver plate commemorating his presidency and inscribed, “In the thirteenth year of American independence . . . and in the year of Masonry, 5793.” He then covered the plate with the Masonic symbols of corn, wine, and oil. The corn dedicated the Capitol to the Grand Architect of the Universe and to Masonry, the wine to virtue and science, and the oil to universal charity and benevolence. The “whole congregation” then “joined in reverential prayer, which was succeeded by . . . a volley from the military.”47
Joseph Clark, the grand master of Maryland, articulated the significance of the event in his address at the laying of the Capitol’s cornerstone, comparing it to the “like work” of laying the cornerstone of King Solomon’s Temple. From that ancient ceremony, Clark observed, had come the flowering “of our honourable, and sublime order.” Similarly, he prophesied, after this ceremony, “Architecture, Masonry, Arts, and Commerce will grow with rapidity inconceivable to me.” With Freemasonry as its cornerstone and the incomparable Brother Washington modeling Masonic virtues, Grand Master Clark envisioned the new American nation as embodying the deepest Masonic values.48
The symbols and rituals of Freemasonry, self-consciously used by the leaders of the new American republic, provided visual support for the new government’s legitimacy while encouraging public acceptance of the fraternity as an embodiment of the ideals of the new society. The spread of cornerstone ceremonies in the early years of the young republic affirmed this relationship. Beginning with Washington’s laying of the cornerstone at the Capitol in 1793, government leaders turned to the brotherhood to sanctify public undertakings. The state capitols of Massachusetts and Virginia each received Masonic blessings.49 As the economy expanded, the fraternity anointed bridges and the Erie Canal locks and sanctified public higher education in cornerstone ceremonies at the University of North Carolina and the University of Virginia. In 1818, several thousand spectators turned out for the Massachusetts Grand Lodge’s dedication of Boston’s new Massachusetts General Hospital.50 Such practices extended to the nation’s churches. For example, in 1826, “the cornerstone of the new Episcopal Church, at Carlisle, Penn. [w]as laid . . . with Masonic rites, by Cumberland Star Lodge, No. 197—assisted by Harrisburg, Chambersburg, and Lansingburg Lodges, and many of the fraternity from other places. . . . The Chambersburg paper remarks: ‘Is this not a novelty . . . to find Masons engaged in laying the corner stone of a place of Christian worship, at the request of its pastor and congregation?’—It is: and we see in the fact, an era approaching of more liberal opinions respecting, and kindly disposition towards, that ancient and honorable fraternity.”51 By the 1820s, not only Protestants but also Catholics and Jews were calling on the brotherhood to bless their houses of worship.52 The height of the fraternity’s popularity may have been the Marquis de Lafayette’s tour of the United States in 1824–25, which went through all twenty-four states over thirteen months, accompanied by Masonic processions, dinners, cornerstone layings, and intense media coverage.
Like so much of postwar Masonry, these ceremonies had their origins in England but were given new meaning in the American context. Eighteenth-century English Masons had evolved rituals for the consecration of new lodges. Their ingredients, including grand processions, a royal arch, prayers, engravings, striking a mallet, and corn, oil, and wine, were transported into the new American rites.53 At the Bunker Hill memorial