Freemasonry, America's oldest and most important voluntary society, experienced enormous change during the generation after the Revolution. The fraternity entered a period of unprecedented growth in prestige and popularity, but a powerful new movement opposing it in the 1820s led to a dramatic decline in membership.
An international fraternity of men using secret rituals and meetings open only to members to promote morality, charity, and fellowship, the modern order of Free and Accepted Masons developed out of British craft organizations. Details of this transition remain obscure, but the years surrounding the 1717 formation of a grand lodge in London were crucial. By the end of the 1720s, Masonry had assumed much of its distinctive form: a series of local lodges supervised by grand lodges; a secret ritual system made up of three levels known as degrees, augmented by a less well-defined series of further, "higher," degrees; metaphorical use of building tools to represent moral truths; and an ideal of brotherhood encompassing men of differing political, religious, national, and ethnic affiliations. This new "speculative" Masonry (so-called to distinguish it from "operative" builders) spread rapidly to the European continent and America. Lodges met in Philadelphia by 1730 and Boston by 1733. But the colonial fraternity remained small. Before the 1760s, it included only a couple of dozen lodges in coastal cities, made up primarily of well-to-do elites seeking to assert status as enlightened gentlemen.
The Revolutionary years brought major challenges. The break with England, the source of Masonic legitimacy, forced a reorganization that placed final Masonic authority in the hands of state grand lodges rather than in Britain or the national grand lodge some brothers favored. Issues of loyalty also caused problems. Barred by rule from discussing politics and religion, the fraternity took no official stand on the conflict itself, but individual brothers had to make choices. Many remained loyal to the king. Many others, however, became leaders in the Revolutionary cause, including Masonic officers Benjamin Franklin, Paul Revere, and George Washington. The proportion of Masons at the Continental Congress that approved the Declaration of Independence and at the Constitutional Convention was far higher than their proportion in the general public. Of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration, nine (perhaps twelve) were Masons (at least 16.1 percent); twelve (perhaps fifteen) of the fifty-five members of the Constitutional Convention were Freemasons (at least 21.8 percent). The fraternity proved even more popular in the Continental Army. Ten military lodges, generally limited to officers, met in its camps. About 42 percent of the army's generals were or later became Masons.
These connections with the Revolution helped spur a generation of Masonic expansion. By 1806 New York alone had more than a hundred lodges; twenty years later, it had five times that many. A Masonic meeting in 1822 estimated national membership (conservatively) at eighty thousand. By then, lodges met in nearly every village, town, and city in the country. Post-Revolutionary brothers celebrated this growth as evidence of the fraternity's identification with the ideals of the Revolution and the new nation. Like the Republic, they proclaimed, the fraternity supported learning, education, morality, and nonsectarian Christianity. Its rituals and fraternal oversight provided a particularly effective means of teaching these values. As a Massachusetts minister, Preserved Smith, argued in 1798, Masonry was "the great instrument of civilization."
Such bold claims partly responded to anxieties about the problem of preserving the Republic. But they also spoke to continuing criticism of the fraternity, questions that focused primarily on Masonic secrecy and religious diversity (the exclusion of women also was a common issue). These doubts, however, remained secondary except in a few rural areas and some conservative religious groups. Even the attacks on the Illuminati first raised by the clergyman Jedidiah Morse and others in 1798, claiming that this subversive order had caused the French Revolution partly through infiltration of continental Masonic lodges, generally explicitly exempted the American fraternity. Ministers and church members often joined and led lodges. Churches even called on the fraternity to dedicate their buildings. Such cornerstone-laying ceremonies became popular for all sorts of public structures, including the United States Capitol (1793), the University of Virginia (1817), and the Bunker Hill Monument (1825).
More than public ideals made Masonry attractive. Membership also conferred private advantages. Lodges and grand lodges provided substantial charitable aid to needy brothers and their families. More important, Masonic affiliation also helped build contacts that could prove extremely valuable in business and politics. Members typically joined the fraternity in their twenties as they were moving into manhood, a pattern followed by such prominent leaders as New York governor DeWitt Clinton, Kentucky senator and U.S. secretary of state Henry Clay, and President Andrew Jackson. Fraternal membership helped establish an honorable reputation and develop relationships with local and national leaders. According to the idea of "preference" that became widespread in these years, Masons were obligated to help and support brothers over similarly qualified non-Masons.
As Masonry grew both in size and significance, the fraternity itself changed as well. What had been a series of scattered lodges now became a well-organized institution with complex rules and organizations. Reform-minded brothers carefully revised rituals to make them more powerful and more uni-form—and pressed for exact memorization of these new ceremonies. Higher degrees also became popular. Established in organizations outside the lodge, these new ceremonies included what would later become the Scottish Rite (founded in 1802, but relatively small until the twentieth century) as well as the York Rite (a system that included the degrees of the Royal Arch and the Knights Templar).
Success, however, also brought problems. Expansion sharpened tensions inherent in Masonry itself, between public and private goals, between inclusiveness and exclusivity, between adherence to religious ideals and acceptance of diversity. These fault lines were exposed when, in September 1826, a number of Masons, acting unofficially, kidnapped and possibly murdered William Morgan, a Freemason who had announced plans to publish a volume containing the rituals of both the original three degrees and some higher degrees. Morgan's disappearance, and an attempted cover-up by the fraternity, sparked a huge reaction. The anti-Masonic movement that emerged from this anger attacked the fraternity as a threat to both Christianity and republicanism. American Masonry was weakened in the South and nearly destroyed in the North. Membership began to revive only after 1840 with the weakening of anti-Masonic anger. This revival marked the start of another, even more substantial expansion lasting into the middle of the twentieth century.