The Freemasons In America:. H. Paul Jeffers
forces, skilled in the use of small and large firearms, to protect America’s ships at sea.” They demonstrated their skills with forays in the Bahamas that captured military supplies. In the winter of 1776–1777, they aided General George Washington’s small force in stealthily crossing the Delaware River from Pennsylvania in a surprise Christmas Eve 1777 attack on Hessian mercenaries at Trenton and later fought in the Battle of Princeton.
In 1743, Franklin held “fraternal communion” with his brethren in the First (St. John’s) Lodge of Boston. Six years later, he was named Provincial Grand Master, an appointment that lasted one year. In 1755, he was present for the Quarterly Communication of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts and prominent in the anniversary and dedication of the Freemason’s Lodge in Philadelphia, the first Masonic building in America. Two years later, he went to London in the interest of Pennsylvania. Staying five years, he befriended leading intellectuals in England and Scotland, including the political and economic theorist Adam Smith, and contacted many English Freemasons. After returning to Philadelphia for two years, he was back in Britain in 1764. As a negotiator on behalf of the thirteen colonies concerning increasing tensions between them and King George III’s government on the issue of taxation, he remained in London ten years. On January 29, 1774, he was summoned before the king’s privy council, denounced as a thief and man without honor, and called to answer for an event that had occurred in Boston Harbor six weeks earlier.
On the night of December 16, 1773, a small group of men disguised as Mohawk Indians boarded the British East India Company’s merchant ship Dartmouth to protest a tax on tea by dumping its cargo of 342 tea chests, valued at 10,000 pounds, into the harbor. Enshrined in U.S. history as the “Boston Tea Party,” this milestone on the road to the Revolution is proudly claimed by Freemasonry as the work of members of St. Andrew’s Lodge. The morning after the raid, St. Andrew’s Lodge member and Knight Templar Paul Revere mounted his horse to carry the news to New York. On the night of April 18, 1775, he would be in the saddle again to sound the alarm to “every Middlesex village and farm” that British troops were marching from Boston to seize caches of weapons at Concord. When the smoke of Battles at Lexington and Concord cleared and British soldiers were back in Boston, the stage was set for Freemasonry to claim its first American hero in the person of St. Andrew’s Grand Master.
Chapter 3
Fraternity of Arms
BORN IN ROXBURY, MASSACHUSETTS, IN 1740, JOSEPH WAREN BECAME a Mason in St. Andrew’s Lodge on September 10, 1761. He received the second degree on September 2, 1761. On November 28, 1765, he became a Master Mason. Described as “somewhat impetuous in his nature, but brave to a fault,” he spoke to a sizeable crowd at Boston’s Old South Church on the anniversary of the Boston Massacre (March 3, 1770) with the knowledge that English army officers ususally attended such gatherings to heckle the speaker. Describing that day, a masonic biographer of Warren writes:
It required a cool head and steady nerves, and Grand Master Joseph Warren had both. The crowd at the church was immense; the aisles, the pulpit stairs, and the pulpit itself was filled with officers and soldiers of the garrison, always there to imitidate the speaker. Warren was equal to the task but entered the church through a pulpit window in the rear, knowing he might have been barred from entering through the front. In the midst of his most impassioned speech, an English officer seated on the pulpit stairs and in full view of Warren, held several pistol bullets in his open hand. The act was significant; while the moment was one of peril and required the exercise of both courage and prudence, to falter and allow a single nerve or muscle to tremble would have meant failure—even ruin to Warren and others. Everyone present knew the intent of the officer but Warren having caught the act of the officer and without the least discomposure or pause in his discourse, simply approached the officer and dropped a white handkerchief into the offier’s hand! The act was so cleverly and courteously performed that the officer was compelled to acknowledge it by letting the orator to continue in peace.
Elected major general by the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts on June 14, 1775, with no military education or experience, Warren was placed in command of the rebel force on Breed’s Hill (later called Bunker Hill) as the “Red Coats” crossed the bay from Boston to lift a siege of the city that had been established after Lexington and Concord. Despite protests by Generals Artemis Ward and Israel Putnam, Warren shouldered a musket behind barricades on the hill.
The shooting on June 17, 1775, lasted less than an hour, with the Americans running out of ammunition. Warren was shot in the back of the head and killed. His body was thrown in a ditch by a British officer and buried with several other bodies. Discovered months later, Warren’s body was identified by Paul Revere by a false tooth that he had made for American Freemasonry’s first knight templar “martyr” in the cause of independence.
It was at Bunker Hill that William Davis, the original American templar, invented what was known as “the barrel defense.” It consisted of barrels packed with stones and earth that were rolled down the hill at the British attackers. The richest Bostonian of his day while still in his twenties, with interests in shipping and real estate, Davis was enrolled in an “independent company” of Bostonians in a regiment under Major General John Hancock. He was born in 1737. After his father’s death, he was adopted by an uncle, a wealthy Boston merchant whose business he entered after graduating from Harvard in 1754. Admitted to Merchants Lodge No. 277 in Quebec on January 26, 1762, he affiliated with Boston’s St. Andrew’s Lodge on October 14, 1762. He was a leader in the struggle against British taxation. In 1768, he refused to allow royal inspectors aboard his ship, the Liberty. This brought about the seizure of the vessel, followed by a riot in Boston. Defiance of the British won him great popularity, and in 1769 he was elected to the Massachusetts General Court. Six years later he was chosen to be a delegate to the second Continental Congress and served as its president from 1775 to 1776. It was in this role that he became the first signer of the Declaration of Independence. He wrote his name large and with a flourish, explaining that he did this so King George III would be able to read it without putting on his spectacles.
Another wealthy Massachusetts businessman and Freemason who enthusiastically joined the fight for independence was John Glover. Born in 1732 in Marblehead, Massachusetts, he made his fortune in fishing and merchandising and was commissioned to lead the Marblehead regiment after the Battle of Lexington. His men were trained for naval operations and took part in an evacuation by boat of Washington’s force from Long Island to Manhattan. They later ferried Washington and his troops across the Delaware for the Christmas Eve surprise attack on Trenton, then carried 750 captured Hessians to Pennsylvania.
New Hampshire–born Freemason John Stark had served as a lieutenant under Jeffrey Amherst in the French and Indian War. A colonel at Bunker Hill, he later helped fortify New York after the retreat from Long Island, participated in an expedition to Canada, and took part in the Battles of Morristown and Short Hills, New Jersey. When he died in 1822, he was the last surviving general of the Revolution.
William Whipple was born in Maine but became a New Hampshire merchant. Serving as a brigadier general in the New Hampshire militia, he took the surrender of British general John Burgoyne at the Battle of Saratoga. Another businessman, Mordecai Gist of Maryland, organized the Baltimore Independent Company Militia and was engaged in several battles. He attended a convention of military lodges in Morristown, New Jersey, in 1780, at which a resolution to create an American grand lodge with George Washington as the Supreme Grand Master failed to pass. It was the closest American Freemasonry came to establishing a national Grand Lodge.
General Hugh Mercer was born in Scotland, received a medical education, and joined the British army as a surgeon’s mate. Immigrating to America, he set up a practice in Pensylvania and learned about Freemasonry and battle tactics while fighting in the French and Indian War. During the war, he met George Washington, who persuaded him to move to Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he was admitted to Masonic Lodge No. 4. A brigadier general, he was killed at the Battle of Princeton after his horse was shot out from under him.
Another Freemason, friend of George Washington, and son of the founder of the Lutheran Church in America, John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania became a Lutheran pastor in New Jersey. He famously said in a sermon before he became a colonel, “There is