At Ashby, New Hampshire, on the same festival day, an assembly of Masons and their friends listened to a discourse which by way of concessions to the opponents of Masonry outstripped anything that went before or followed after.[908] The Reverend Seth Payson, that fatuous aspirant to literary fame who elected to be a tardy echo of the speculations of Robison, Barruel, and Morse,[909] informed his auditors that while Masonry in its essential principles and constitution had shown itself to be useful to society, unhappily its name, veil of secrecy, symbols, and associative principles had been seized by a body of men in Europe, in order to mask their hellish purposes of eradicating from the human mind “all belief of a God, of a governing providence, of the immortality of the soul, and a future state,—to extinguish every principle of natural and revealed religion and moral sentiments, and to demolish every government but its own.”[910] In all its horrid appendages, the French Revolution was the result of this conspiracy. This “vine of Sodom” was transplanted to the United States: witness the opposition which in this country developed against those “eminent benefactors to mankind in general,” Drs. Robison, Morse, et al.[911] Without the faithful researches of Morse, in particular, a very much more serious infection of the Masonic body assuredly would have occurred.[912]
Such isolated and generally indefinite utterances, it may be urged, are scarcely to be trusted as offering an accurate reflection of the state of the Masonic mind. They do not, however, stand altogether alone. From various and perhaps more solid sources, the evidence is forthcoming that the year 1799 was a year of deep anxiety and concern on the part of the Masons of New England.
The diary of William Bentley supplies some evidence to this effect.[913] His disgust was great that the clergy continued to agitate concerning the pernicious principles and influence of Weishaupt, and that with equal pertinacity the press kept the affairs of that individual and his minions before the public.[914] The equally candid acknowledgments of other Masons are even more to the point. One spokesman for Rhode Island Masonry made public admission that the fraternity was suffering keenly from “a temporary odium.”[915] Another in Massachusetts uttered the complaint that the industrious zeal of the unprincipled defamer had involved the craft in most serious embarrassment.[916] Some were driven to take refuge in the consolation that the lodges of the Illuminati were bastard organizations, and therefore Freemasonry could not justly be anathematized on their account.[917]
When the skies had cleared, as we have seen they soon did, and Masons began to take stock of the experience through which their institution had passed, their admissions of what the agitation had cost the order were even more significant. One confessed that Masonry had started back affrighted at the hideous spectre of Illuminism, and that the joy that filled the lodges because they were no longer suspected as “hot-beds of sedition” and “nurseries of infidelity” was very great.[918] Another likewise rejoiced in spirit that the dark period of suspicion and calumny through which the order has been passing was now over, and that political agitation against the institution was at an end.[919] Another admitted that after the lapse of a half dozen years it was difficult to plant a new lodge in one of the most cultured of New England’s communities, on account of the influence exerted by the works of Robison and Barruel.[920] Still another confessed that the Illuminati controversy had cost the fraternity dearly in the matter of membership; a serious defection had resulted, representing many desertions.[921]
The various causes that contributed to bring about a collapse of the agitation over Illuminism have elsewhere received attention and for the most part require no special comment in this connection. One of these, however, was of such a nature that it has been reserved for brief exposition at this point.
The death of Washington, while confessedly an event of national significance, and, as such, shared as the common bereavement of all the citizens of the country, nevertheless assumed a very special importance in the eyes of Masons and exerted an immediate and weighty influence upon the fortunes of the order.
One who turns the pages of the black-bordered newspapers of the day, all sharing in the universal lamentation and doing their utmost to set before their readers the last detail regarding the closing hours in the great man’s life and the arrangement and disposition of affairs in connection with his obsequies, is likely to find himself amazed because the Masons found it possible to figure in the circumstances as conspicuously and largely as they did. The Masons were in evidence, in very conspicuous evidence, it must be said, in all that pertained to the funeral rites of the nation’s first chief. Not only was this true of the funeral ceremonies proper; in innumerable places where mourning assemblies gathered to pay respect to the memory of Washington, Masons claimed and were accorded the places of honor in the processions and concourses that marked these outpourings of popular sorrow.
It cannot be doubted that American Freemasons, while sincere in their expressions of sorrow on account of Washington’s death, none the less found a peculiar comfort of soul in being able at such a time to point to the fallen hero as their “brother.” At an hour when the tongue of scandal and the finger of suspicion were still active they esteemed it an opportunity not to be despised to be able to stand before the country and proudly say, “Washington was of us.”
That this is not idle fancy the following utterances will help to make clear. At Middletown, Connecticut, a few days after Washington’s death, a Masonic oration was pronounced in connection with the observance of the festival of St. John the Evangelist.[922] The orator, who recognized the season as one of unremitting calumny of Freemasonry,[923] sought refuge from the strife of tongues for himself and his brethren by urging the following sentiment: