The Freemasons In America:. H. Paul Jeffers
but there is also a time to fight, and that time has now come.”
While serving as a volunteer during the French and Indian War, Massachusetts-born Israel Putnam became a Mason in a military lodge. Captured by Indians, he was rescued by the French and released in a prisoner exchange. As a farmer in Connecticut, he learned of the Battles of Lexington and Concord while cultivating a field. He abandoned the plow, mounted his horse, and rode to Massachusetts. Put in charge of training volunteers by Joseph Warren, he was at his side when the pioneering American Freemason and Knight Templar was killed. Putnam also has the distinction of being the only major general to serve in the war from start to finish.
The history of blacks in American Masonry began when Prince Hall was initiated into the Irish Constitution Military Lodge along with fifteen other free black men. Little is known of his early life. He was probably born in Barbados, West Indies, on September 12, 1748. He may have arrived in Boston from Africa in 1765 as a slave and was sold to William Hall, who freed him in 1770. During the war, he served in the Continental army and is believed to have fought at Bunker Hill. Initiated into Military Lodge No. 441 with fourteen others, he and the other initiates were granted authority to convene as African Lodge No. 1. Other members were Cyrus Johnson, Bueston Slinger, Prince Rees, John Canton, Peter Freeman, Benjamin Tiler, Duff Ruform, Thomas Santerson, Prince Rayden, Cato Speain, Boston Smith, Peter Best, Forten Howard, and Richard Titley.
At the end of the war, Hall petitioned the Premier Grand Lodge of England for a warrant. It was delivered to Boston on April 29, 1787. A week later (May 6, 1787), African Lodge No. 459 was organized. On June 24, 1791, the African Grand Lodge of North America was organized in Boston with Prince Hall installed as Grand Master. A property owner and registered voter, he campaigned for the establishment of schools for Negro children in Boston, opened one in his own home, and successfully petitioned the state legislature to protect free Negroes from being kidnapped and sold into slavery. He died on December 4, 1807. The next year, as a memorial to him, and by an act of the General Assembly of the Craft, the lodge’s name became Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Massachsetts.
Throughout the world today, there are 44 Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodges, about 5,000 subordinate lodges, and more than 300,000 Prince Hall Masons. For many years, the black churches of America and Prince Hall lodges were the strongest organizations in black communities. Masonic lodge halls were used as locations for church services and teaching blacks how to read and write. Prince Hall Masons used their resources to provide young men and women scholarships for college and to carry out various forms of charity in their local communities.
The American Revolution also saw the first American Indian initiated into Freemasonry. Named Thayendangea, he was the son of the chief of the Mohawks in the 1750s. He was brought up in the household of a prominent British administration official, Sir William Johnson, a Freemason, who gave him the name Joseph Brant. Having fought several battles with Johnson in the French and Indian War, he became Johnson’s personal secretary. By the time of Johnson’s death in 1774, he had become accepted by the British administration. When he went to England in 1775, he was made a Mason in a London lodge. Returning to America to enlist the Mohawks in the fight against the American rebels, he fought under the command of Colonel John Butler in several battles. But when prisoners who were turned over to the Mohawks to be tortured to death made Masonic signs, he released them. After the war, he became a member of St. John’s Lodge of Friendship No. 2 in Canada, of which Butler had become Master, before returning to the Mohawks in Ohio.
Analyzing the influence of Freemasonry on the course of the War for Independence in The Temple and the Lodge, Baigent and Leigh find it both direct and oblique, general and in particular. “In a less direct, less quantifiable fashion,” they write, “it helped to create a general atmosphere, a psychological climate or ambience which helped shape the thinking not only of active brethren such as Franklin and Hancock, but of non-Freemasons as well.” Principles of liberty, equality, brotherhood, tolerance, and “the rights of man,” reasoned Baigent and Leigh, “would not have had the currency they did” without the prevalence of Freemasonry throughout Britain’s American colonies. It imparted its attitudes and values to the newly formed Continental army and may have had something to do with the appointment of Washington as commander in chief. Charles Wilson Peale, the era’s most famous portrait painter and a Freemason, would render likenesses of Revolutionary War Freemasons, including Hancock and Franklin, but his best known of several portraits he did of George Washington is on the front of the dollar bill.
Chapter 4
Brother Washington
BORN IN VIRGINIA ON FEBRUARY 22, 1732, GEORGE WASHINGTON became a Freemason in the lodge at Fredericksburg, Virginia, on August 4, 1753, at age twenty-one. When a lodge was chartered in Alexandria in 1788, he was named Charter Master. As president of the United States, he wrote to a lodge in Rhode Island in 1790, “Being persuaded that a just application of the principles on which the Masonic Fraternity is founded must be a promotive of private virtue and public prosperity, I shall always be happy to advance the interest of the Society and to be considered by them as a deserving brother.”
Although he wrote letters indicating that he was happy to be a Freemason and that he never sought to resign or repudiate his Masonic membership, there is little to no evidence that he attended many Masonic lodge meetings after his initiation in 1753 but he may have attended the dinners. He seems not to have participated in meetings of the lodge of which he was the first Master of what today is called Alexandria-Washington Lodge No. 22. While Master of the lodge, he did not assist in the work of the lodge. In one puzzling letter he denied that he was a Mason.
As commander in chief of the army, he was virtually surrounded by Masons. Half of his generals belonged to the Craft, including France’s Marie-Paul de Lafayette and the Prussian army officer Baron Friedrick von Steuben.
While they battled with regular English troops and mercenaries on land, John Paul Jones, a young seagoing Freemason who was born in Scotland and had embraced the American cause, carried the fight to the high seas by attacking British shipping and raiding English ports. Revered as the father of the U.S. Navy, Jones gave Americans one of their most stirring battle cries: “I have not yet begun to fight.”
While Freemasons are justifiably proud of Masons who served gallantly in the War for Independence, one of its most brilliant and heroic generals proved to be an embarrassment. Early in the war, Benedict Arnold (initiated in Connecticut in 1763) distinguished himself by leading an asault on Quebec, Canada. Wounded in the leg in the bold attack that failed to take the city, he emerged as a hero. During the Battle of Saratoga, he proved to be a brilliant strategist who again exhibited heroics. But the commander, General Horatio Gates, a Mason, relieved him of his command, in part for insubordination and in part because Gates viewed Arnold as a “pompous little fellow.” This insult to Arnold was assuaged following British abandonment of Philadelphia when Washington appointed him to the post of commandant of the city. But by this time he was an embittered figure with open disdain for his fellow officers and deep resentment toward Congress for not promoting him more quickly.
Arnold was also a widower who courted and married Margaret (Peggy) Shippen. Described as “a talented young woman of good family,” at nineteen she was half Arnold’s age and pro-British. Plunging into the social life of America’s largest and most sophisticated city by throwing lavish parties, Arnold was soon deeply in debt. This drew him into dubious financial schemes that caused Congress to investigate his activities, resulting in a recommendation that he be brought before a court-martial. He complained to Washington that having “become a cripple in the service of my country, I little expected to meet ungrateful returns.”
Confronted with personal and financial ruin, facing an uncertain future of promotion, and disgusted with politicians in Congress, Arnold made a fateful and ultimately ruinous decision to wipe out his troubles by offering his services to the British. Writing to their commander, Sir Henry Clinton, a Mason, he promised to deliver to the British the garrison at West Point, with 3,000 defenders, in the belief that the surrender would bring about the collapse of the American cause. To put himself in a position to do so, Arnold persuaded Washington to place the fort under his command. In September 1780, he was ready to act. To assist him in the plot the British chose Major John André,