Jacksonian Volcano: Anti-Secretism and Secretism in 19Th Century American Culture
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Jacksonian Volcano: Anti-Secretism and Secretism in 19th Century American Culture A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History of the College of Arts and Sciences 2012 By Mike Davis M.A., University of Chicago, 2005 B.A., Northern Michigan University, 2004 Committee Chair: Mark Lause, Ph.D a Abstract This work argues that the anti-Masonic movement of the 1820s was the first Northern political movement, a direct ancestor of the anti-slavery movement that would come to dominate Northern politics some thirty years later. Though anti-Masons billed themselves as a national movement, their anti-elite rhetoric, clandestine defense of African-Americans, and embrace of democratic-republican equality drove Southerners to see them as a movement of dangerous fanatics as threatening as the nascent anti-slavery cause. Anti-Masonry was closely affiliated with anti-Catholicism, nativism, and anti-Mormonism, and shared with them a tendency towards xenophobia and anti-secularism. But, I argue, the anti-Masonic movement was at its core driven by democratic unease at the power of unanswerable elites rather than fear of a powerless Other, ultimately putting them closer to the anti-slavery side of the evangelical cultural production of the 19th century. Additionally, this dissertation argues that the anti-Masonic case against Masonry, one grounded in the unknown dangers of secret elites gathering together for their mutual benefit, was not fundamentally misplaced. Masonry in the Jacksonian period had indeed become a heavily ritualized alternative to religion, an exclusive white male body that provided economic security for its members at the cost of insecurity for those ‘outside the tent’ And just as anti-Masonry was fundamentally Northern, Masonry became a fundamentally Southern organization by the outbreak of the Civil War, the kind of middle-class white male solidarity that it endorsed paving the way for pro-slavery Masonic invasions of Cuba, heavy Masonic membership in the states of the old Confederacy, and ultimately the 'triumph' of postwar Masonry came as a result of the larger evangelical Northern cause being abandoned by the voting public in the postwar period. b Anti-Masonry began as a fringe movement among New England Protestants in the 1790s and slipped into obscurity in the 1890s as a fringe movement among Midwestern Protestants. But even here, in the period of anti-Masonry most dismissed by historians, the present work argues there is a root of legitimate cultural criticism in anti-Masonry. The anti-Illuminism of Jedidiah Morse and Timothy Dwight was a plausible response to the internationalist threat of the revolutionary French republic in the late 1790s, albeit one that would ultimately fail thanks to structural problems with mobilizing an electorate against Jeffersonian democracy. At the same time, Jonathan Blanchard’s postbellum anti-Masonry failed because the ‘culture war’ of the antebellum period had largely been brought to an end by the Civil War itself. Though Blanchard pointed to connections between Masonry and the Klan, as well as accurately made connections between Masonic culture and Southern culture, the postbellum Northern public was ready to embrace the kind of white unity rhetoric embedded in Masonry. But even with Blanchard’s defeat and the decline of anti-Masonry into irrelevance, the story was not over. The first 'third party' in American history, the anti-Masonic legacy of Northern populist mobilization in the name of Christianity remains with us today in the American public sphere. c d a Table of Contents Abstract…a Introduction…1 Chapter 1: “Insidious Encroachments of Innovation”: Jedidiah Morse, John Robison, and the Birth of American Anti-Secretism…26 Chapter 2: “This Awful Act of Violence”: The Murder of William Morgan and Jacksonian Anti- Masonry…46 Chapter 3: “Freemasonry is the Source of These Crimes and Dangers”: A Political History of Jacksonian Anti-Masonry…70 Chapter 4: “The Pure Lava of Anti-Masonry”: The First Congregationalist Church of Thetford, Vermont and the Anti-Masonic Struggle, 1829-1833…95 Chapter 5: “The Splendor of the Black Lodges”: Anti-Masonry and Prince Hall Freemasonry…122 Chapter 6: “And Every Lodge a Hotbed of Secession…”: The Connections Between Masonry and Southern Identity in the Culture of 19th Century America…146 Chapter 7: “…And Made Tyranny and Usurpation the Enemies of the Human Race”: Filibustering and Freemasonry in the Antebellum United States…177 Chapter 8: “I Have Said Nothing in Secret”: Jonathan Blanchard and the Twilight of American Anti-Masonry…201 Conclusion…224 Bibliographic Essay…232 Bibliography…240 1 Introduction This work began as a political history of the Anti-Masonic Party, driven by a desire to explore the untold history of America's first third party. But over the years it has developed into a work that is cultural as much as political, an exploration of the anti-Masonic movement as much as the political party that bore the same name. As most of the writing about the anti-Masonic movement has been by political historians of the Jacksonian period, investigating the birth of contemporary democracy, this is understandable. But even on the political side of things, there is much to uncover. The political side of anti-Masonry was ultimately a primarily sectional movement without the ability to break into the political mainstream of 19th century America, but this is not grounds to dismiss it as a subject for worthy historical analysis. But most histories of the anti-Masonic movement have done just that – they tell the story of the failed political party, not the anti-elite political movement that was one of the most important political moments in the antebellum North. It is an old cliché that every new historian of the antebellum United States uses their work to find the causes of the Civil War – I will try and avoid that temptation here. While I will delve into the entanglement between Masonic constructions of history and Southern constructions of history in the 19th century, this is not a work about the Civil War. This is a work about an antebellum culture war, one that in many ways became the first conflict between a North hearkening forward to the politics of a democratic republic that dominated American political life in the 19th century and a South still embedded in an idealized vision of 18th century political culture. The first moment in that antebellum culture war between the evangelical North and the Masonic South came with none other than the anti-Masonic movement of the 19th century. As a society, we tend to diminish third parties and the social movements that drive them, sometimes in our popular understanding of how politics and culture is ‘supposed’ to work, other 2 times even inside the historical academy. This is something that has deep roots in American discourse. We can see it today in how the media writes about people like James MacMillian and other third party leaders, as well as historically in the public discourse about people like Ross Perot and Ralph Nader. This marginalization of those on the margins goes all the way back to the way historians have written about the very first third party in American history – the American Anti-Masonic Party. Though largely dismissed by the historical record, the anti-Masons of 19th century America played a crucial role in shaping the cultural narrative of the United States of the period. Most histories of anti-Masonry begin with the foundation of the contemporary Masonic movement in post-Restoration London, or more commonly with the murder of William Morgan in 1826. As a way of showcasing the untapped depths of the history of American anti-secretism, let us instead begin with its end. On September 13, 1882, a national convention of evangelical Christian pastors met in Batavia, New York to erect a monument to William Morgan, a failed brewer dead fifty-six years who had never been known for his church attendance in life. Jonathan Blanchard, president of Wheaton College, led the crowd in singing hymns that declared “"And let our monument proclaim That Morgan is a martyr's name' Till heart and home from sea to sea, Shout, from the dark lodge bondage free." The delegates of the National Christian Association who spoke at the monument’s dedication sound like the evangelical warriors they were, calling their followers out for one last great crusade of morality. “…We pray that, the colored being freed from slavery, the whites may be emancipated from the evils of secret societies." But despite the hopes of Jonathan Blanchard, his son and successor Charles Blanchard, and the other old evangelicals in their circle, the National Christian Association was the last great political and cultural moment of anti-Masonry in the United States. After Jonathan Blanchard’s Presidential bid in 1884 ended with his endorsement of Samuel Pomeroy, there would never again be an anti- 3 Masonic candidate for the Presidency of the United States. The newspapers of the 1880s were unkind to the National Christian Association and its anti-secretist political movement, deriding their cause and personally attacking Blanchard, despite the “grey hairs” that shielded him from censure. Though anti-Masonry stood at the head of nearly a century of American political and cultural reform by the 1880s, the cause slipped almost completely out of the popular memory upon Blanchard’s death in 1892.1 If anti-Masonry had been largely forgotten by the general public, historians have rarely been much kinder. Only Charles McCarthy in 1902, William Preston Vaughn in 1983, and Paul Goodman in 1988 have written full-length histories of the anti-Masonic movement and its associated political party, this despite the anti-Masonic movement inventing the national nominating convention, mobilizing the newly-empowered voting public through appeals to popular sentiment and mass campaigning, and acting as the driving agent that pulled the evangelical culture of the Second Great Awakening into the political and cultural world of the Jacksonian period.