A Band of Brothers?

In the summer of 1826 troubling news spread among upstate New York Masons. William Morgan, an apostate Brother, was planning to publish a work that revealed the secret rituals of Freemasonry. Masons, fiercely jealous of their secrets, immediately launched a campaign to prevent publication. Their efforts accelerated rapidly from pressuring Morgan’s publisher to attempting to destroy the printing press to having Morgan arrested on false charges. When these and other efforts to mobilize the legal system failed, Morgan was kidnapped and never seen again, presumably killed. Despite public outrage, few of Morgan’s abductors were punished, and those who were received minor sentences. Masons, it seems, used their power and influence to contain legal prosecutions and convictions. But though they protected individual Brothers, they were unable to save the larger Masonic organization. The kidnapping of William Morgan triggered a widespread debate over the rationality and power of Masonry—a debate that led to the formation of an organized Antimasonic movement and all but destroyed the public power of Freemasonry.

Antimasonry was only the climax of a century long debate over the forms and privileges of Freemasonry. As Steven Bullock’s learned and provocative Revolutionary Brotherhood makes clear, Masons were implicated in some of the most important controversies and conflicts of the Anglo-American age of Enlightenment and Revolution. Indeed, Bullock insists, “Masonry played an important role in shaping the momentous changes that first introduced and then transformed the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in America, helping to create the nineteenth-century culture of democracy, individualism, and sentimentalism” (p. vii). With Bullock as our guide, Revolutionary Brotherhood provides a challenging tour through a wide range of sometimes bewildering rituals, practices, and beliefs central to masculine gentility. Tracing the history of Masonry from its emergence in Augustan England through its colonial transplantation, then to its revolutionary and postrevolutionary expansion, and climaxing with its Jacksonian vulnerability and nadir, Bullock treats the history of Freemasonry as a pathway into changing conceptions of what he terms the American “social order,” those “forms and ideals by which people order their experience” (p. 5). In particular, Revolutionary Brotherhood connects the history of Masonry to the wider evolution of male gentility in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century America. Bullock deploys Masonry as a self-conscious entryway into the social and emotional world of male elites. He does so within a richly dense narrative that provides both quantitative information on Masonic membership and social character, as well as more ethnographic considerations of Masonic ritual and practice.

As Bullock shows, Freemasonry emerged within the polite culture of early-eighteenth-century England. There, situated amid numerous scientific societies and polite gentleman’s clubs on the one hand, and a burgeoning interest in ancient mysteries on the other, Masonry offered a means for polite gentlemen to fuse their interests in rational religion and Newtonian science with emotionally satisfying conversation. Living embodiments of the social philosophy adumbrated by the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Addison, Steele, and their numerous progeny, Speculative Freemasons, Bullock makes clear, were centrally connected to the construction of a genteel, elite culture seeking to forget and transcend the sectarian conflicts of seventeenth-century England. Their cosmopolitanism fused with a morality of balance to provide gentlemen, and aspiring gentlemen, with an arena in which to learn, model, and transmit the refined culture of metropolitan London. The resurrection and elaboration of supposedly ancient Masonic rituals and knowledge provided a tantalizing connection to the secret mysteries of the universe. At once inheriting and denying the Revolutionary confrontations over science and religion, politics and society, early-eighteenth-century Speculative Freemasonry—like numerous other clubs and voluntary associations—helped construct the polite cosmopolitanism that English Augustans liked to see when they looked in the mirror.

The appeal of Freemasonry, however, spread far beyond the British Isles. Masons, of course, had a complex and important role to play in the cultural history of the European continent. But it is to colonial America that...