Introduction
British Freemasons were involved in many of the revolutionary ruptures of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. This accommodation of radical politics eroded by the 1790s as the British Parliament and Ministry contemplated war against France, and turned their attention to suppressing internal radicalism, most particularly the United Irish Rebellion, as well as any associations they defined as seditious, which included Freemasons. The British Grand Lodges engaged in a rebranding exercise to show their loyalty, involving such strategies as adopting royal patrons, eradicating competitors, and consolidating their authority as the only legitimate governors of Freemasonry. On the ground, however, the transformation of Freemasonry from an elastic and cosmopolitan fraternity that accommodated rebellion and dissidence, to a loyalist institution that deliberately associated itself with the “defining features of the British state,” including loyalty to monarch and empire, Protestantism, and a celebration of British cultural and political superiority, was highly embattled.1
Against this backdrop, this essay sheds light on the uses of Freemasonry by American Revolutionary War Loyalists who organized themselves in Masonic lodges in British North America. It examines the contested shift away from political cosmopolitanism, in this context by focusing on one lodge, “Hiram Lodge No. 17,” established in 1784 in Saint John, New Brunswick, the largest settlement in a colony created in British North America in 1784 due to the arrival of Loyalist exiles after the American Revolutionary War. Lodge members became engaged in developing the institutions of government, running as opposition candidates in the colony’s first election. The election quickly became conflicted, but members remained engaged despite Masonic charges that dictated that members should not be involved in political disputes. A decade later, lodge members also sparred with Masonic officialdom, as the provincial lodge in Nova Scotia sought to impose the new, anti-revolutionary lead of their parent lodges and clamped down on Hiram Lodge and other lodges it considered fractious. In sum, the case of Hiram Lodge No. 17 clearly demonstrates the complexities of the relationship between fraternal organizations and political culture in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world.
The authority exerted by Masonic hierarchies in this period reveals that the fate of individual and provincial lodges was partly determined by developments in the larger fraternal Atlantic. To understand why Hiram Lodge members engaged in political unrest and were forced to surrender their warrant, one must adopt “multiple and intersecting units and scales of analysis,” consisting not only of “nations, empires and worlds” but also of “localities.”2 This essay thus adopts a “cis-Atlantic” approach, examining local developments in Saint John within the context of a “wider web of connections (and comparisons).”3 It also draws attention to the “limits of expansion” within British Freemasonry, i.e. the “schisms” among members, “ruptures” between local and parent bodies, and the “processes of disconnection” leading to the eradication of lodges like Hiram Lodge No. 17.4
Historians are beginning to appreciate the “prospects and potentials” of studying Masonic networks in imperial and Atlantic World contexts.5 Jessica Harland-Jacobs shows how British freemasonry connected people across oceans by offering services and sociability, and by “encouraging an ‘imperialist’ identity that helped consolidate the British Empire.”6 Freemasons also articulated a “pronounced cosmopolitan attitude” which “sought to ignore confessional, political, social, national, and continental boundaries.” Fraternal values and virtues were enabled by Freemasonry’sefficient transnational structure. As Jan C. Jensen has noted, “Only a few other non-religious movements of the time adopted institutional structures of a comparable intercontinental scope.”7
There are few academic analyses of Freemasonry in British North America. Michael Eamon, in his recent book Imprinting Britain, incorporates Nova Scotia Masons into his analysis of print culture and sociability in eighteenth-century Halifax and Quebec City, while Hannah M. Lane examines the relationship between evangelical churches and Freemasonry in the early nineteenth-century Canadian-American borderlands of New Brunswick and eastern Maine.8 Chris Raible discusses Antimasonry in early nineteenth-century Ontario, while Gregory Klages engages in a comparative analysis of the Freemasons and Orange Order in late Victorian rural Ontario.9 And sociologist J. Scott Kenney brings us into the present-day by reflecting on the contemporary meaning of Freemasonry in his analysis of lodge members in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia.10
Scholarship on Loyalist Freemasons is also spotty. Studies of American Freemasonry during the Revolutionary War tend to illustrate the heavy involvement of Patriots in the fraternity: it is estimated that 29 percent of the 241 men who signed either the Articles of Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, or the Constitution, or who served as generals in the Continental Army or as Washington’s aides or military secretaries, were Freemasons.11 Stephen C. Bullock’s work provides myriad insights into the evolution of revolutionary and post-revolutionary Freemasonry within the United States, but he does not extend his focus to the Loyalist lodges.12 In her review of the American literature on Freemasonry, Harland-Jacobs notes that that Freemasonry had a “significant presence among Loyalists, a point that eighteenth-century historians have insufficiently addressed.”13 And Neil L. York reminds us that “[n]ot every Mason became a Revolutionary, and some became or remained Loyalists.”14
This study of Hiram Lodge in Saint John, as well as a previous analysis of Loyalist lodges in Shelburne Nova Scotia, owes a great debt to the scholarship of Jessica Harland-Jacobs and David G. Bell. Harland-Jacobs’s identification of a shift in British Freemasonry from a cosmopolitan fraternity to a loyalist institution is the scaffolding on which this essay is based.15 Bell’s research provides the necessary local context on Loyalist history in New Brunswick. In his book Loyalist rebellion in New Brunswick, Bell is the first scholar to identify a relationship between political dissidence and membership in Hiram Lodge No. 17.16 Also useful are the institutional studies written by Masonic historians, most notably William Franklin Bunting’s History of St. John’s Lodge, F. & A. M. of Saint John, New Brunswick, Together with Sketches of All Masonic Bodies in New Brunswick from A.D. 1784 to A.D. 1894 (1895), A.J.B. Milbourne’s research on Loyalist Freemasons in the Maritime colonies, a history of Freemasonry in Nova Scotia penned by Ronald S. Longley and Reginald V. Harris, and a brief overview of Hiram Lodge No. 17 compiled by Stuart MacDonald, based largely on the research of Reginald V. Harris.17 Aside from these selected works, this essay is based largely on the manuscript collection of the Nova Scotia Grand Lodge Ancient Free and Accepted Masons. This collection consists of minutes, correspondence and other records from the Nova Scotia Grand Lodge in Halifax as well as the individual lodges, including Hiram Lodge. Access to evidence generated by both the provincial and local lodges has provided insight into the escalation of conflict between the two, resulting in a more polyphonic analysis.
British Freemasonry and loyalist Masons
The fate of Hiram Lodge No 17 in Saint John must be placed in the context of British Freemasonry and its expansion into Britain’s American colonies. British Freemasons essentially adapted the infrastructure, regulations, and rituals of the medieval stonemasons’ guilds as they declined in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries due to the decline of castle and cathedral building, the expansion of the marketplace, urbanization, population growth, and migration. In order to survive, the guilds turned to the patronage of aristocrats and gentlemen as “free and accepted” brothers. This marked the transition from “operative” to “speculative” Masonry. Speculative Masons operated in an “increasingly cosmopolitan London society, where enlightened thinking and polite social practices led to the creation of a new form of Masonic brotherhood.”18 They subsequently adapted the guilds into a system of lodges with parent or “grand” lodges. In 1717 the first “grand” lodge was formed in England – the Premier Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons – followed by grand lodges in Ireland (1725) and Scotland (1736). What had formerly been operative regulations became Freemasonic constitutions. Hand signals, grips and handshakes, initially used by stonemasons to identify each other and retain trade secrets, helped to transform Freemasonry into a secret society. The guilds’ three basic degrees – Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craftsman, and Master Mason – which had initially marked their initiation and passage through their trade, was adapted by speculative Masons as a means of progressing “by degrees toward a veiled yet constantly unfolding wisdom and enlightenment.”19
The Enlightenment and the revolutions of the Three Kingdoms – England, Scotland, and Ireland (1640–1660 and 1688–1689) – had a profound impact on the emergence of British Freemasonry. After the Glorious Revolution (1688–89), which witnessed the establishment of the first cabinet government in England, Freemasonic societies emerged as schools of parliamentary and constitutional government, according to Margaret C. Jacob. Their regulations, now termed “constitutions,” turned them into “microscopic, and contractually founded and constitutionally governed, civil societies.” Moreover, the historical roots of Freemasonry identified by James Anderson in 1723 privileged the development of “strong constitutional and court-centred government.” Whig leaders became Freemasons and championed constitutional practices such as holding elections, forming representative assemblies, imposing taxes (dues) and holding courts where disputes could be adjudicated. T...
