John Skene of Aberdeen, Scotland, was a member of the Aberdeen Lodge, as we know from the "Lodge Book" which it published in 1670 A.D. in all probability it was the Lodge in which James Anderson was made a Mason. With a number of other Aberdoenians, five or six of whom were Masons, Skene came to what it is now New Jersey to work for a large company which owned much of that territory and was Deputy Governor of East Jersey from 1685 A.D., until his death five years later. The other Masons returned to Scotland after short stays. Jonathan Belcher, a Governor of Massachusetts, was a wealthy land-owner, and otherwise one of the leading men in that vast Province; also he was an officer in an English corporation having large American holdings in which company Christopher Wren was a member of the Board. On a business voyage to London in 1701 A.D., he was made a Mason, possibly by Sir Christopher Wren himself, who was a member of Antiquity Lodge, and had been what the Book of Constitutions described as "Grand Master." Skene and Belcher were the earliest Masons in America of whom any record remains.
This means that Masonry came at a very early date indeed, because the settlement at Plymouth was only sixty-five years old when Skene arrived; it means that there was Masonry here, and in all probability a few Lodges, before the first Grand Lodge was erected in England in 1717 A.D.; and it also means that Free-masonry did not begin here in germinal form, crude and undeveloped (as a number of British writers have assumed), but was full-fledged and complete; there were Lodges in Britain centuries before there were Lodges in America but the Masonry in those American Lodges was itself as old as the Masonry in any British Lodge because it was the same Masonry. Furthermore it means that Americans did not invent anything which could be called American Masonry; they could have done so, as men had done in France, because they could have invented a new kind of fraternity and called it Masonry; but they did not, from the first Mason and the first Lodge their Masonry was self-same with the Masonry in Britain, and the history here is not a history of Freemasonry in America. Masons insisted in the beginning, as they continue to insist now, that there cannot be a number of different Freemasonries scattered about among the nations but that there is but one Fraternity of regular Freemasonry, and it is the same the world over.
The oldest existing written Lodge record is that of a Lodge in Philadelphia which was at work as early as 1729 A.D.; Benjamin Franklin was made a Mason in it, became an officer, was an officer when he published his edition of the Book of Constitutions in 1734 A.D.; this Lodge, called St. John's acted as a Mother Lodge and in 1734 A.D., must have turned itself into a Grand Lodge because in that year Franklin was "elected" Grand Master. It has been argued that this Philadelphia Masonry was not duly constituted because St. John's Lodge had no charter from the Grand Lodge of London, and Franklin was not appointed by the Grand Master of that Grand Lodge. It is true that according too rules later adopted that every Philadelphia Lodge and its daughter Lodges were not "duly constituted" but the fact tells nothing against their legitimacy as Lodges or the regularity of their Masonry: 1) a large number of regular but independent Lodges in Britain were not on the Grand Lodge List yet were recognized by it; 2) at that date Charters were not required; 3) the Grand Lodge at London slid not have exclusive Territorial Jurisdiction of North America, and never did have; before 1717 A.D., each and every Lodge was self-constituted; it was not until many years after 1717 A.D., that self-constitution made a Lodge irregular; 4) after the Grand Lodge at London had set up Provincial Grand Lodges here, they recognized the legitimacy of the Lodges in Pennsylvania.
It is unfortunate that the young Grand Lodge at Philadelphia did not stick by its guns, and that Lodges in other Colonies did not do likewise, because if they had we should have possessed such independent Grand Lodges as did Ireland and Scotland, and they would have been preferable on every count to the ill-adjusted, creaky, feeble Provincial Grand Lodges which were set up instead. There was coo much private ownership by indivduals, families, or companies of whole "Colonies" or parts of colonies here for anything to be as it should have been. Before be Revolution America suffered as much from the incalculable evils of absentee landlordism as did Ireland, and Freemasonry suffered along with it. American Masons administered Provincial Grand Lodges with only a tenuous and intermittent superavision or assistance from Britain; they just as easily could have administered their own independent, sovereign Grand Lodges.
But not for half a century was that to be. In 1733 A.D., Henry Price, who was in literal fact one of "the makers of Masonry in America," returned from London with a written deputation from the Grand Lodge there to constitute a Lodge in Boston, and to establish a Provincial Grand Lodge with himself as Provincial Grand Master; his deputation was for the whole of "North America" (that included Canada); this did not mean that he was to have exclusive jurisdiction at that period but only that he could issue warrants to Lodges anywhere in North America. Later other Provincial Grand Masters were appointed with the same rght. This was the first Lodge and the first American Provincial Gand Lodge to be constituted by written authorization from the Grand Lodge at London, and of whose uninterrupted activity a written record exists. Three years before, in 1730 A.D., Daniel Coxe, of New Jersey, was appointed Provincial Grand Master of New York, New Jersey, etc., but though he remained in residence in New Jersey, where he had a large place in public affairs, there is no record to show that he ever acted upon his Masonic authority. From the period 1730-1733 A.D., and until the eve of the Revolution one Provincial Grand Lodge after another was constituted by the London Grand Lodge of 1717 A.D., the Ancient Grand Lodge of 1751 A.D., the Grand Lodge of Ireland, the Grand Lodge of Scotland, and in a number of instances Lodges were constituted on authority from France and from the West Indies.
In any given country, during any given period, Freemasonry is there, and then, what the Lodges in their hundreds, or the members in their thousands, or their millions, are making of it. The few histories thus far published of Freemasonry in America before the Revolution describe it, with few exceptions, in the form of a history of the Provincial Grand Lodge and thereby mis-describe it, for the planting of Freemasonry in what is now the United States was not done by those Provincial Grand Lodges except to a minute extent, but by thousands of individual Masons and by a few hundred local Lodges. The Minute Books of the earliest Lodges here show that in some instances Lodges did not know what Provincial Grand Lodge they belonged to, and few of them ever saw a Provincial Grand Master. It was done, that planting, by the rank and file of ordinary Masons, and since it was done by them then great glory is due to them, because in the long history of the Fraternity there is no chapter so large, no achievement so magnificent, as the setting up without fanfare or assistance of the undivided and undivisible, magnificent, simple Masonic Fraternity from New York to San Francisco, from Duluth to New Orleans, and all within only a century of time! Consider this catena of facts.
1. No Officer, Committee, Board or group of Masons came here from abroad with any directions or plans for the Fraternity in America; it established itself, and acted out of its own nature.
2. No place was chosen for its capital, or center, or headquarters, or base; it had no London or Dublin to act as its center of gravity but the Craft planted a Lodge wherever it found a place for one, and members carried their Masonry wherever they wished. This fact helps to explain why we did not constitute one Grand Lodge for the whole nation; we doubtless would have done so if in its formative period the Fraternity had possessed a Masonic London, or Dublin, or Paris.
3. Thousands of sailors and hundreds of sea captains either lived in our port cities or spent a part of their time there; thousands of men came to work as employees of the large companies or families which owned so large a part of the Colonies; settlers, trappers, explorers, adventurers, traders, soldiers and sailors came by the tens of thousands; among them was a Mason here and there, and a number of regiments and ships brought their own Lodges with them. By using ambulatory warrants (a travelling warrant) they set up Lodges, some transitory and some permanent, wherever a sufficient number of Masons might chance to settle in some new community. Freemasonry then entrusted itself to that uneven and unpredictable flood of men, making no at tempt to set either limits or conditions to its own extension, and it therefore went wherever the first Americans went, and arrived there at the same time.
4. What kind of Masonry did these men have? The kind called for by the warrants (or charters) they carried. This in itself is a decisive fact which crops up in any history, one which is so easily overlooked because it appears to be a small fact too small to identify with the breadth and vastness of its consequences.
On the one side was the almost boundless, vasty, yeasty uncontrolled, undirected movement of peoples which populated this country, itself almost as large as a world, in the extraordinary short period of only two centuries it had taken 1500 years to fill permanently and with an organized citizenship each and every area of the Island of England! Carried about and tossed about in that flood, Freemasonry might easily have been twisted out of all recognition. On the other side, and explaining why it was not so twisted, was the fact, which above was described as apparently a small fact, that wherever these restless and ever-moving settlers and soldiers carried Freemasonry with them they carried a warrant with it; it was that warrant which prevented the twisting out of recognition and caused Lodges, even in the Wild West, to adhere to the Ancient Landmarks. Some measure of how much Freemasonry might have been changed from its original form is furnished by a contrast of American denominationalism in 1800 A.D., with the parent church in England and Scotland as of that same year; the use of warrants and charters saved us from being divided into a congeries of Masonic denominations and sects; and it is at the same time another eloquent testimony to the truth that the extreme of unity can be attained in the center of the extreme of diversity by means other than force, compulsion, or despotism.
5. If the Lodges constituted from about 1730 A.D., to about 1853 A.D., are marked on an outline map of the United States, a dot and a date for each Lodge, and if a line is drawn from each Lodge to its mother Lodge or Grand Lodge, the story of the planting of Freemasonry here can be visualized; among the dots which bear dates prior to about 1788 A.D., every Lodge had a Charter from the Modern or Ancient Grand Lodges in England, from those of Ireland, Scotland, the West Indies, or France; if the Lodges and their connecting lines chartered by any one of these sources are put down in one color, the Lodges from another source in a second color, etc., the proportionate share of each of those Grand Lodges in the planting of American Masonry would also be visualized.
If a complete map of this sort were made (it has been made in part) it would lay bare to the eye some four or five of the largest facts about American Masonry which are not easy to see among the multitudinous details of a written history. The most important cities in the earliest period were Philadelphia, Boston, and New York; other cities and Masonic centers in succeeding periods were Albany, Norfolk, Louisville, Cincinnati, New Orleans, St. Louis, Cedar Rapids, Santa Fe, and San Francisco a Masonic history of those and a few other cities would be almost a history of the Fraternity in the United States. Port cities and towns, almost without exception, were early local centers because of the number of Masons among soldiers and sailors.
Freemasonry did not advance steadily and evenly westward across a north south frontier line but in the form of thrusts or currents a map of the movement of the Fraternity would look like a weather map. Different currents passed through Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and Norfolk; a large current came southwest out of Canada into the Mississippi Valley, another flowed westward out of New England, a third moved from North Carolina and Virginia toward Cincinnati through the Cumberland gap; the largest current flowed westward out of St. Louis and then divided into three, one each toward the South West, the Far West, and the North West. Another one consisted of a large number of Lodges brought to the West Coast by ships from Atlantic ports. The main current from France came first to the West Indies, and then divided, one up the Atlantic Coast as far as Philadelphia, the other entering the Deep South through New Orleans.
The map would show that in the histories of the Fraternity in America, which are either local histories or chapters or parts in general histories (for a reason too mysterious to guess no complete history of Masonry in America has ever been published), there are gaps and hiatuses. They usually ignore the Masonic consequences of the French-Indian War; the part played by Canada in New England Masonry; the peculiarity of New England Masonry; the part played by Lodges in the settlement of the West, South West, and North West; the effect of the Mormon Empire on Masonry in the Mountain States; the part played by Lodges in the settlement of the Republic of Texas; the leadership of Masonry in establishing the Public School System; and almost without exception they ignore the large role of the West Indies in the planting of Lodges; and few of the accounts have anything to say about the militant and destructive Anti-Masonry of the Roman Catholic Church in the deep south, especially in Florida and in Louisiana.
If the same Masonic map were to be interpreted in the same manner with which a field commander interprets a military map, it would also show (this is written without prejudice!) that the larger number of our writers have misinterpreted the part of Masonry in the Revolutionary War, and the story of the attempt to set up a National (or General) Grand Lodge. Freemasonry as a single Fraternity was not on the side of the Patriots in the Revolution as a body; it never takes sides in any war; there were in as many Lodges and Masons in the British army and navy as in the American, and they fraternized across the lines General Washington himself visited a British military Lodge under a flag of truce and received a degree in it (probably the Mark Degree). The Masons who early in the war started a movement for a National Grand Lodge expected, like the majority of Americans, to see a single government take the place of thirteen separate governments, and they therefore expected to see a single Masonic government for the same reasons a compromise, hybrid system of one Federal Government plus forty-eight sovereign State Governments was something they could not even picture at the time.
The main reason for the failure to set up a National Grand Lodge was the formation of those independent and sovereign States; the secondary reason was that in spite of the Revolution, and for some years after it in some cases, American Provincial Grand Lodges refused to believe that the Revolution had had anything to do with Freemasonry therefore they continued to keep their Masonic connections with Britain as long as they could in order to make sure of violating no Landmarks; in a few instances British Grand Lodges themselves took the initiative in persuading American Grand Lodges to become sovereign and independent.
Next only after the general planting and establishing of the Fraternity in the United States the most epochal event was the setting up and perfecting of that which now everywhere is called The American System. Royal Arch Masonry was brought over before 1750 A.D.; Templarism, the Cryptic Rite, and the Scottish Rite were brought over (in pieces, as it were) between that date and about 1800 A.D. When these High Grades began to constitute Grand Bodies and local Chapters, Encampments, Lodges, and Councils of their own the question, of whether each Rite was to function independently was posed to the Craft, or if one Rite should absorb the other four; the question was answered by declaring Freemasonry to consist of these five Rites and of no others, and then by forming them into a single Fraternity by means of a system of Comity.
Among Masons as among the people at large
events or movements occur which are dramatic and therefore remain
long in the national memory, or are of national importance; general
historians devote separate chapters to events or movements of
that kind, and Masonic historians do the same for like reasons.
Among the subjects for those chapters in American Masonic history
are such as these: The New England Anti-Masonic Movement of 1800
A.D., the Morgan Affair and the Anti-Masonic crusade which began
in 1826 A.D.; the "Degree Peddler" evil, and the movement
to establish Uniform Work; the Mormon Anti-Masonic campaign; Freemasonry
in camps and covered wagons in the trek of westward immigration;
Freemasonry in the Civil War; the establishing of a number of
academies and colleges by Masons; Freemasonry in the two World
Wars; the Masonic Educational movement which began about 1915
A.D.; the extraordinary craze for new Temples between the World
Wars; the rise and prosperity of Side Orders, especially of the
Shrine, the Grotto and of the Eastern Star; the present powerful
movement toward a general co-operation among the 49 Grand Lodges;
etc., etc.
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