That Religion in Which All Men Agree: Freemasonry in American Culture

4. Anti-Masonry and the Public Sphere, 1826–1850

111 By the 1820s, American Freemasonry had created a space for itself apart from the authority of established churches and civil government and between the social worlds of public and private life. Surveying the American scene in the 1830s, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville contended that in a nation devoid of established hierarchies, the abundance of voluntary organizations contributed to the stability of democracy. “In order that men remain civilized or become so,” Tocqueville remarked, “the art of associating must be developed and perfected among them in the same ratio as equality of conditions increases.”1 Early nineteenth-century Freemasonry was among a bevy of voluntary organizations in civil society that shaped and were shaped by the public-spirited republican virtue of the postrevolutionary era. Seen from the perspective of Anti-Masonry, however, the brotherhood was a secret cabal of politically connected, secularizing, affluent men deeply threatening to the common man and evangelical Christianity . Indeed, in New York’s “burned-over district,” the center of AntiMasonic rage, Masons were overwhelmingly merchants and professionals who controlled a majority of the positions of political leadership and held liberal or no religious affiliations.2 Though similar protests against the fraternity’s hegemony had been mounted as recently as the Illuminati affair of the century’s turn, the new attacks took place in an increasingly democratic public sphere, spurred by a rapidly expanding print culture. In an era that celebrated the common man, hierarchical degree chapter 4 Anti-Masonry and the Public Sphere, 1826–1850 112 | European American Freemasonry ceremonies and aristocratic titles looked woefully out of place. New attacks on the society’s secrecy and blood oaths, purportedly binding the members primarily to one another rather than to republican government , gained traction. Mingled with these were the testimonies of Masonic apostates whose lurid descriptions of surrogate religious ceremonies that blasphemed Jesus were proclaimed with revival fervor. Democratic public meetings and mob actions voiced these charges in local communities, where village elites had previously controlled the social order. Newspapers and pamphlets then carried news of these developments beyond the towns to a growing regional and national audience, mounting popular opinion against the fraternity. The ensuing battle over Freemasonry uncovered larger struggles over Christian identity. Radical Anti-Masons sought to purge the brotherhood from their churches, only to find that American Protestantism widely accepted the fraternity’s liberal themes. Rather than stamping out secularization and reasserting sectarian authority, Anti-Masonry revealed the churches’ widespread complicity in the individualism and other market-oriented values of the new social order. At the same time, the conflict between defenders and critics of Freemasonry opened up divisions in the emerging ideology of domesticity. Though opposition to Freemasonry was well within the bounds of women’s church-related effort to safeguard the home, leading Masonic wives’ support of the order complicated the early gendered protests against it. • • • Freemasonry’s difficulties burst forth in western New York in 1826, when William Morgan, a Mason, threatened to publish Masonic secrets. Though such rituals had been publicly disclosed as early as 1730, Morgan promised to reveal the secrets of the higher York Rite degrees. Before he could do this, he was kidnapped, never to be heard from again. The following year, after repeated failed efforts to discover his fate and bring the perpetrators to justice, the Morgan affair ignited a fire of protest that engulfed the northern states. New Grand Lodges as far west as Illinois and Michigan were damaged and weakened. Masonic activities in the established strongholds of Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania were dramatically reduced. Fear of reprisals led to the cancellation of annual parades and banquets. Individual fraternity members were scorned by their neighbors, denied seats on juries, and refused church membership. New York, Connecticut, and Vermont wrote laws to outlaw the order. Only seventy-five of the five hundred Anti-Masonry and the Public Sphere | 113 lodges active in New York in 1825 continued to function, while the national population of Masons declined dramatically, from a high of one hundred thousand in 1826 to a low of forty thousand in 1835. In the short span of a decade, the northern fraternity had been brought to its knees.3 Anti-Masonry emerged in the context of the early nineteenth-century democratizations of politics and religion that culminated in the Jacksonian era of the common man. Following the revolution, respect for the hierarchical authority of a local elite gave...