History of the Masonic Revolution in America

The American and French Revolutions basically started over the same issues—taxation and representation—but took very different courses. The revolutions were upheavals that would transform America, France, and the world. And they were largely the handiwork of secret societies. But did the secret societies—especially the Freemasons— instigate or control the revolutions? Did they infuse them with a Masonic agenda?

The Sons of Liberty

 

  • ‹‹ On December 16, 1773, a crowd gathered at Boston’s Griffin’s Wharf to protest the presence of three East India Company ships, all carrying cargoes of tea. Somewhere between 50 and 200 men, most disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded the vessels and threw overboard 342 chests, equal to about 45 tons, of tea. This act was later dubbed the Boston Tea Party. And as an act of overt resistance to British rule, it was a critical step toward the American Revolution.
  • ‹‹ In the American colonies, the group most responsible for the revolution was the Sons of Liberty. It first appeared in Boston around 1765 in response to new British taxes on the colonies and became a kind of franchise, spreading throughout the colonies. Sons of Liberty members organized resistance—even physical attacks—against royal authorities. After 1776, the organization acted as a shadow government in British-controlled areas. But the group was a spin-off of an older, more important, and more familiar secret order: the Freemasons.George Washington, the greatest hero of the American Revolution, was a Mason. But so, too, was its greatest traitor, Benedict Arnold.George Washington

     

    Lecture 4 — Masonic Revolutions in America and France 19

 

  • ‹‹ Great Britain’s East India Company had actually reduced the cost of tea in the colonies—so much so that American smugglers faced being put out of business. Two future revolutionary luminaries in the British sites, Samuel Adams and John Hancock, were Sons of Liberty members and Freemasons.
  • ‹‹ But not all Masonic brothers approved of their actions. Two other American Masons and future revolutionaries—Benjamin Franklin and George Washington—were appalled by what they regarded as vandalism. Franklin thought the East India Company should have been reimbursed for its loss.
  • ‹‹ This points to a danger of generalizing about Freemasons: Despite all the boilerplate rhetoric about brotherhood and loyalty, Freemasons were as likely to end up on opposing sides as the same ones.Lodge of Nine Sisters
  • ‹‹ In May 1789, France faced national bankruptcy, partly caused by King Louis XVI’s financing of the American Revolution. This state of affairs forced Louis to summon France’s long-disused consultative assembly, the Estates-General.
  • ‹‹ Two of the estates—the clergy and the nobility—represented only two percent of the French population but held more than half of the assembly’s seats. The third estate—basically everybody else—naturally thought this grossly unfair. Instead of finding a solution, the Estates-General ignited a revolution.
  • ‹‹ As the revolution progressed, radical groups took more and more control. The most important of these radicals, the Jacobins, first appeared in late 1789 as the Society of the Friends of the Constitution. The Jacobins would later abolish traditional religion and initiate a reign of terror.
  • ‹‹ The storming of the Bastille—which took place on July 14, 1789, and incited the French Revolution—is usually portrayed as a spontaneous attack on a hated symbol of royal tyranny. But it was anything but spontaneous. Three days before the assault on the Bastille, King Louis dismissed his liberal finance minister, Jacques Necker. While this may or may not have been a plot by Louis to restore royal authority, that’s the way it was spun by agitators in the Palais- Royal in Paris.

20 The Real History of Secret Societies

The storming of the Bastille

‹‹ The Palais was owned by Louis Philippe, the Duke of Orleans, the most powerful Freemason in France. He was master of the powerful Grand Orient Lodge and brother of the influential
Lodge of Nine Sisters—which was founded in 1776 and served as an important link between the French and American Revolutions.

The Palais-Royal in Paris was a popular area of stalls, shops, and coffee houses considered a “hotbed of Masonic activity.”

‹‹ Louis Philippe was also the king’s
cousin. But the duke himself dreamed
of sitting on the throne, and at the
Bastille, the mob carried his bust
around like an idol. And the radical
orator who whipped up the mob—
which demanded the surrender of
the old fortress—was the duke’s Masonic brother in the Nine Sisters, Camille Desmoulins, who was the protégé of another prominent Freemason, Count Mirabeau. All three would end up joining the Jacobins.

Lecture 4 — Masonic Revolutions in America and France 21

‹‹ Two American revolutionists, Benjamin Franklin and John Paul Jones, were initiated as members of the Lodge of Nine Sisters in 1778. And Franklin introduced at least three other Americans into its circle: Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. The great French hero of the American Revolution, Marquis de Lafayette, was yet another Nine Sisters brother.

The Freemasons

‹‹ In 1776, Freemasons were a tiny minority in the American colonial population, and they were not evenly distributed. Despite lots of talk about brotherhood and equality, American Freemasonry wasn’t egalitarian. Membership was pricey—and deliberately so. Lodges attracted the upwardly mobile and well- to-do. Masons were far more likely to be literate and well-educated than small farmers and working men. Thus, lodges were filled with men who already occupied positions of influence and already saw themselves as hereditary, or natural, leaders. But while they were an elite, they weren’t a unified elite.

The capital of the American Revolution, Philadelphia, was home to at least 2,000 Masonic brethren, meaning that about one out of five eligible males was a member.

  • ‹‹ Freemasonry first took off in the colonies in the 1730s. This coincided with a bitter schism in the Grand Lodge of England that pitted the more free- thinking—and more political—faction, known as the Moderns, against the more traditional and religious Ancients. But all American Masons—whatever their camp—swore allegiance to King George. Thus, patriot Masons violated their oath when they turned rebel.
  • ‹‹ Of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, nine were indisputably Masons. Among the 39 signers of the Constitution, 13 were confirmed Masons. Among the 33 generals of Washington’s Continental Army, 74 were confirmed Masons—including the future president. So, none of these groups was exclusively, or even mostly, Freemason. But the brothers were disproportionately represented among the revolution’s founders and leading officers. Still, does that translate to Masonic control?

22 The Real History of Secret Societies

‹‹ Something often pointed to as evidence of a secret Masonic agenda in the American Revolution is the great seal of the United States. Special significance is attributed to its reverse side, which features an incomplete pyramid topped by a radiant all-seeing eye, commonly interpreted as the Eye of God or Eye of Providence. Some claim it’s the ancient Egyptian Eye of Horus.

Between 1934 and 1935, American Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, a Freemason, convinced President Franklin Roosevelt—also a Freemason—to put the seal of the United States on the dollar bill. To Wallace, the all-seeing eye on its reverse side symbolized the Masonic Great Architect of the Universe.

The great seal is also commonly believed to have been designed, or at least inspired, by Benjamin Franklin—definitely a Freemason—and Thomas Jefferson. However, none of their proposals ended up in the final version of the seal.

Instead, its creation took half a dozen years and three committees, and consultants did most of the design work. One of the most influential was Francis Hopkinson, another Freemason who had put an unfinished pyramid on a 50-dollar bill issued in 1778. And it’s a dead ringer for the one on the seal.

‹

  • ‹ Alleged Masonic influence also crops up in the layout of the new capital, Washington DC. One Masonic publication hailed it as “the world’s foremost Masonic City.” The man tasked with the job, Pierre L’Enfant, was indeed a Freemason. He laid out DC streets in a diamond pattern that formed triangles and pentagrams, and the Capitol building squats like an all-seeing eye at the top of a pyramid formed by Maryland and Pennsylvania Avenues.
  • ‹‹ A more blatant example of Masonic influence was the laying of the cornerstone in 1793. George Washington officiated, decked out in full Masonic regalia, surrounded by fellow Freemasons.
  • ‹‹ The first proposal for Washington’s monument was a pyramid. What he ultimately got was something akin to an Egyptian obelisk, and Egyptian imagery had significance not just to some Freemasons but to other secret societies as well, such as the Rosicrucians.

Lecture 4 — Masonic Revolutions in America and France 23

  • ‹‹ Masonic influence didn’t end with the revolution. At least 14 presidents, 37 Supreme Court justices, and countless senators, congressmen, diplomats, bureaucrats, and soldiers would be lodge brothers.
  • ‹‹ Public concern about Masonic influence sparked a national backlash in the 1820s, starting with the disappearance—and presumed murder—of a dissident Mason named William Morgan in Upstate New York. This so-called Morgan affair gave rise to a national Anti-Masonic Party. It declined after the 1828 election of Andrew Jackson, who was a Freemason.
  • ‹‹ Freemasonry wasn’t the only secret society that was active in the revolution, or in the fledgling republic. After the creation of the republic, some of the Sons of Liberty morphed into dissident “democratic” or “democratic-republican” societies. Washington believed they harbored dangerous elements. Dissident Sons of Liberty helped ignite at least one abortive uprising: the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion. The Jacobins

 

  • ‹‹ The Jacobin Reign of Terror has come to symbolize the French Revolution in the minds of many. The Jacobins had their roots in a secret association of politicians from Brittany. These men shared membership—and, to some degree, ideology— with other quasi secret societies that sprouted like mushrooms in the revolutionary ferment. Those include the Society of Thirty, which counted Lafayette as a member, and the Club des Cordeliers, to which Desmoulins belonged.
  • ‹‹ The Jacobins finally got their name when they set up shop in an old Dominican monastery in Paris. The Dominican monks had been called Jacobins because they were associated with the Church of Saint Jacques. The name Jacques also belonged to the last Grand Master of the infamous Knights Templar, Jacques de Molay. Some inevitably suspected that the name Jacobin was a thinly disguised homage to de Molay. Others suspected that the Jacobins’ hostility to king and church were part of a long-cherished secret plan of revenge.
  • ‹‹ Radical Jacobins were obsessed with de-Christianizing French society and replacing the Catholic Church with a Cult of Reason or Cult of the Supreme Being. And some see this supreme being as identical to the Freemason’s Great Architect of the Universe.

24 The Real History of Secret Societies

‹

  • ‹ Many Jacobins were Freemasons. The bloodiest of the lot, Maximilien Robespierre—a champion of the Cult of the Supreme Being who presided over the terror—might have been a Masonic brother.
  • ‹‹ Jacobins were split by bitter ideological and personal rivalries. The two main factions were the relatively moderate Girondins and the more radical Montagnards. When Robespierre—a Montagnard—and his faction took control in 1793, they launched a purge of the Girondins.The Bavarian Illuminati ‹‹ Soon, two books appeared alleging that the French Revolution was a Masonic conspiracy. But behind this supposedly lurked a more insidious secret society: the Bavarian Illuminati.

 

  • ‹‹ The first book, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, was written by refugee French priest Augustin Barruel, who argued that the French Revolution was the end result of “subterranean warfare” waged by secret societies to destroy the church and the monarchy.
  • ‹‹ Scottish scientist John Robison produced the second work, Proofs of a Conspiracy, which alleged that the Illuminati laid the groundwork for the French Revolution by infiltrating and manipulating Masonic lodges and reading societies—which is precisely what Illuminati founder Adam Weishaupt said they should do.
  • ‹‹ Robison and Barruel arrived separately at their conclusions. However, Robison got much of his information from a Catholic monk and British secret agent named Alexander Horn. That’s led some to conjecture that both books were part of a Vatican-inspired plot to discredit the French Revolution. Others see the hidden hand of the British government, then at war with revolutionary France.
  • ‹‹ In 1777, right after the founding of the Illuminati, Italian adventurer Count Alessandro Cagliostro visited Germany, where he reportedly met Weishaupt. Like Weishaupt, he was initiated into the Masonic Rite of Strict Observance. In 1785 in Paris, Cagliostro created a new Masonic rite, the Egyptian, which he touted as “true” Freemasonry. It later became the Rite of Memphis-Misraim, which attracted radical and nonconformists across Europe.

Lecture 4 — Masonic Revolutions in America and France 25

‹‹ In 1786, Cagliostro ended up jailed in the Bastille. Demonstrations organized by his Masonic supporters eventually secured his release. Cagliostro later wrote an open letter to the French people, urging them to mount a “peaceful revolution” and destroy the Bastille. So, some believe the Duke of Orleans and Desmoulins were following Cagliostro’s instruction when they targeted the old fortress in 1789.