The Freemasons In America:. H. Paul Jeffers
West Point. Before Arnold married Shippen, André had been her suitor.
Serving with the Fifty-fourth Foot as adjutant general to General Clinton, André was also in charge of British spy operations. The plot involved coded letters and invisible ink. To make it easier for the British to take over, Arnold scattered his troops to weaken West Point’s defenses. Following a meeting with Arnold on September 21, 1780, André set out for his own lines in civilian clothes and carrying identification papers in the name of “John Anderson.” He was stopped by three suspicious Americans, taken to headquarters, searched, and exposed as a spy. Learning this, Arnold hastened to New York and the safety of his British allies.
When the British expressed a desire to gain André’s release, Washington sent Aaron Ogden, a prominent political leader (and Mason), to inform General Clinton that he would release André only in exchange for Arnold. Clinton refused and André was hanged on October 2, 1780. He accommodated his executioner by placing the noose around his neck and tying his own handkerchief as a blindfold. His body was eventually disinterred and buried with much pomp as a hero in Westminster Abbey.
Chapter 5
Cornerstones of Government
RECALLING THE SIGNING OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, Freemason William Ellery wrote, “I was determined to see how they all looked as they signed what might be their death warrant. I eyed each closely as he affixed his name to the document. Undaunted resolution was displayed in every countenance.”
Sixteen of the fifty-six signers (28 percent) of the Declaration of Independence were either Masons or probable ones. The known are Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, Joseph Hewes, William Hooper, Robert Treat Payne, Richard Stockton, George Walton, William Whipple, and Ellery. Those for whom there is evidence of Masonic membership or affiliations were Elbridge Gerry, Lyman Hall, Thomas Nelson Jr., John Penn, George Read, Roger Sherman, and Thomas Jefferson.
While the Declaration was being discussed in June 1776, Congress took time out to appoint a committee to prepare plans for treaties “of commerce and amity” with other countries. When it issued a report in September, Congress presented the task to three “commissioners.” It named Silas Deane, who was already in Europe, Jefferson, and Franklin.
As an envoy to France, Franklin formed affiliations with the country’s Masonic lodges. In 1777, he was elected a member of the Lodge des Neuf Souers (Lodge of the Nine Sisters, or Nine Muses) of Paris, and in 1778 he assisted in Voltaire’s initiation into the lodge. In 1782, he became a member of Lodge de Saint Jean de Jerusalem. In the following year, he was elected venerable d’honneur of that body. The same year, he was made an honorary member of Lodge des bons Amis (Good Friends), Rouen. These and other distinctions were honored in a sermon at St. Paul’s Church, Philadelphia. On St. John’s Day in December 1786, he was referred to as “an illustrious Brother whose distinguished merit among Masons entitles him to their highest veneration.” One scholar of Franklin’s contributions to Masonry writes that no catalog of his offices, services, dates, names, and places could adequately convey his importance and “facets of a many-sided jewel which best reflect the influence Freemasonry had upon him.”
Franklin wrote, “Freemasonry has tenets peculiar to itself. They serve as testimonials of character and qualifications, which are only conferred after our course of instruction and examination. These are of no small value; they speak a universal language, and act as a passport to the attentions and support of the initiated in all parts of the world. They cannot be lost as long as memory retains its power.” He also observed, “Masonic labor is purely a labor of love. He who seeks to draw Masonic wages in gold and silver will be disappointed. The wages of a Mason are earned and paid in their dealings with one another; sympathy that begets sympathy, kindness begets kindness, helpfulness begets helpfulness, and these are the wages of a Mason.”
During the convention in Philadelphia that produced the U.S. Constitution, Franklin used language that Freemasons interpret as evidence of his Masonry:
The longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings, that “except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.” I firmly believe this; and I also believe, that, without His concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of [the Tower of] Babel.
A Masonic Franklin biographer writes: “It is not for us to say what he would have been had there been no Freemasonry in his life; it is for us only to revere the Franklin who was among the very greatest of any other nation, in all times; for us to congratulate ourselves and be thankful for our country, that this wise philosopher, this leader of men and of nations, had taken to his heart the immutable and eternal principles of the Ancient Craft.”
On November 15, 1777, representatives of the former colonies voted to adopt thirteen Articles of Confederation and sent them to the states for ratification. Because of Maryland’s refusal to agree until states claiming western lands ceded them to the new nation, approval did not occur until March 1, 1781. With independence secured by the surrender of the British force under General Charles Cornwallis to General George Washington at Yorktown, Virginia, on August 19, 1782, Americans had won their independence, but as the Masonic historian H. C. Clausen notes in Masons Who Helped Shaped Our Nation, “Though free, we were not yet united. The loose Article of Confederation did not provide a strong national government, common currency or consistent judicial system. Men of vision realized that another step must be taken if the weak Confederation of American States was to become a strong, unified nation.”
In the calling for a convention to devise a new structure of governance, and during the debate that resulted in the formation of the U.S. Constitution, Freemasons played a significant role. When a Constitutional Convention opened on May 25, 1787, in Philadelphia, with eighty-one-year-old Benjamin Franklin as a delegate and George Washington the unanimous choice of fifty-five representatives as presiding officer, Freemasonry was not only the single remaining pre-Revolution fraternal entity but also the sole organization operating nationally. More than two and a half centuries later, in the paper “Masonic Education and Service for the Grand Lodge of Texas,” the Masonic scholar James Davis Carter observes, “The role of Freemasonry and individual Masons prior to and through the American Revolution was that of the destruction of the traditional social and political order based on an authoritarian philosophy and characterized by inequality and privilege.”
With the victorious end of the American Revolution, Carter notes, “philosophy had, for the first time in history, an opportunity to play a constructive role in the erection of a political and social order. The experience of Masonic organizations before the Modern Age had taught Masons that liberty for the individual has never been handed down by the government—that liberty is gained through the limitation of the powers of government, not the increase of them.”
Carter continues:
Masons had also discovered that freedoms are learned—the individual has freedom of thought only as he learns to move within the limits established by a rational intelligence; he has freedom to form opinions only after he has learned to distinguish the true from the false; he has social freedom only after he has learned to live according to accepted standards of social intercourse; he has political freedom to the extent to which the law protects his political rights; and he has freedom to extend his liberties only when he has learned to fulfill obligations and conditions of those liberties. Masons have long recognized that the “discovery of the power to aim at ideal ends freely chosen by his own will and intelligence is the supreme achievement of man, and in that, more than any other in any other single fact, lies hope of the future.”
This traditional Masonic analysis of the Constitution continues:
Included in [the first ten] amendments were principles advocated by Masons, including religious toleration, freedom of speech, a speedy trial according to law before equals when accused of law violation, no imposition of excessive punishment, reservation of all powers not delegated in the Constitution. A comparison of the principles of government universally adopted by Masons, with those contained