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Afterword Official records make no mention of the part which Masonry played in the history of the war, but it crops out here and there in personal reminiscences. If all the deeds of kindness done on the field of battle, in the hospitals, and prison camps, and in fact anywhere that soldiers were found could be recorded they would fill hundreds of volumes and reveal some of the most pathetic stories imaginable, touching both Blue and Gray. —Clay W. Holmes, The Elmira Prison Camp: A History of the Military Prison at Elmira, N.Y., July 6, 1864, to July 10, 1865 Before he became a Freemason, Benjamin Franklin famously quipped of the fraternity: “Their Grand Secret is, That they have no Secret at all, and when once a man is entered, he finds himself obligated, se defendo, to carry on the Jest with as solemn a Face as the rest.”1 Although Franklin later repudiated those words by joining the Order, eventually rising to the position of Grand Master of Pennsylvania, he was not alone in characterizing the supposedly trivial character of the Masonic fraternity. Another titan of American social and political thought, John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States and a vociferous Anti-Mason, likewise labeled Masonry as not only meaningless but dishonest as well. The secrets, to the keeping of which the Entered Apprentice is sworn, are indefinite. In genuine Masonry, when revealed to him, he finds them frivolous. . . . So must it be with every reflecting, intelligent man; nor is it conceivable that any such Entered Apprentice, on leaving the lodge after his admission, should fail to have observed, with pain and mortification, the contrast between the awful solemnity of the oath which he has taken, and the extreme insignificance of the 160 / Afterword secrets revealed to him. It is to meet this unavoidable impression, that the institution is graduated. The lure of curiosity is still held out, and its attractive power is sinewed, by the very disappointment which the apprentice has experienced. He takes the degrees of Fellow Craft and Master Mason, and still finds disappointment—still finds himself bound by tremendous oaths to keep trifling and frivolous secrets. The practice of the institution is deceptive and fraudulent . It holds out to him a promise of which it never performs. Its promise is light—its performance is darkness.2 Yet the influence of Freemasonry in the American Civil War belies both Franklin’s satire and Adams’s poison pen. The examples in this volume make the case that Masonry was by no means a light and trifling boys’ club; the organization transformed itself sua sponte from social club to a transcendent force on the battlefield. Equally remarkably, it achieved this prominence based on individual actions totally lacking in centralized organization . It is not easily discovered, however, why Freemasons so religiously adhered to their fraternal allegiances in situations where they could have easily ignored them and looked the other way, with no one but themselves the wiser. Although precise reasons why individual Masons reacted the way they did during battle is impossible to determine, one can assign general motivations to these accounts by recalling the importance of both the Masonic oath and the prescribed modes of recognition among Masons, as well as the psychological strength of Masonry’s tribal bonds. The Oaths Blue Lodge Masons are bound by three oaths, invariably—during the Civil War—taken on a Bible, each more intricate than the preceding and each requiring more of the Mason in terms of obligation to his fellows. By these oaths, the Mason bound himself to, inter alia, relieve distressed worthy brothers, and their widows and orphans. The nature of the semiliterate society of the nineteenth century made oaths far more prevalent and Afterword / 161 more weighty than today, and they served a wider purpose. In antebellum America, oaths served the function that written contracts fulfill today, and were used in many transactions of middle- and lower-class life.3 When used in a social context and requiring an ongoing duty, whether of military service or of obligations and duty toward fellow Masons, they would have constituted a magnetic tug on the consciences of those who swore them. To be sure, some oaths were broken, but the evidence indicates that they were not disregarded lightly. A study that examined the mutiny of the Bengal Europeans in India in 1859 concluded that soldiers in India—contemporaries of Union and Confederate troops—viewed oaths as very...

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