Some time ago I read The Temple and the Lodge, by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh – http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1559701269/qid=1135448962/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-9291609-1967151?n=507846&s=books&v=glance. This book is mainly about the Freemasons. According to the authors, Masonry played a usually unacknowledged role in the American Revolution: A significant number of American and British officers were Freemasons, sometimes attending joint lodge meetings during the war. These British Masons were of two minds as to whether they even wanted to win; the republican ideals for which the Patriots were fighting were substantially the same as Masonic social ideals. This situation gave the Americans an enormous strategic and propaganda advantage. It also made peace and independence easier to sell to Parliament back in Britain, where many politicians were Masons.
Now, Baigent and Leigh are best known for their credulous expositions of “pseudohistory” such as Holy Blood, Holy Grail – http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0440136482/ref=pd_sim_b_2/104-9291609-1967151?_encoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155. So I have to wonder how much to credit anything they write. Does anybody know more? Did the Masons play an even more important role in the Revolution than one would infer from driving past the huge Masonic Memorial to George Washington in Alexandria, VA?
Many important Americans and Brits of the era were Masons, it would be hard to accept that this had no impact on the events of the time. On the other hand, it is also hard to believe that the Craft was operating behind events in a way that is today unknown.
It is worthy of note that many leaders of the Filipino independence movement (and the Latin American movements) were also Brothers.
Well, that was not the thesis of the book. There was no high Masonic leadership that decreed the revolutionaries should win – it was only that the Masonic connections of some of the British officers (and of some British politicians back home) made them sympathetic to the revolutionary cause.
Washington was definitely a Mason. The others I don’t know about. I know Lord Cornwallis of Yorktown infamy came from a Whig family that probably supported the initial claims of the Americans. He probably felt it was his duty to serve the Crown, nonetheless. The more extreme Whigs, like Fox, hated the George III monarchy and wanted eventually to do away with kings, especially ones that manipulated Parliament.
I think of Freemasonry as a symptom rather than a cause. Washington and the other “founding fathers” were “liberals” from the tradition of the 1688 English Bill of Rights. They believed in the equality of “men” (whatever “men” meant), brotherhood, etc. Freemasonry made sense to them; it offered a club of very liked-minded people. If it reinforced and strengthened their beliefs, it was building on pre-existing foundations.
As a note, some Christians claim a very “Christian” background for Washington. I’m sure that wherever he is, he at first was furious and then got a good chuckle out of it. This was, after all, a man who refused to say the word “God”, prefering the term “Providence”!
