New England and the Bavarian Illuminati

The obligations incurred in the preparation of the following study are much too numerous and varied to admit of adequate notice. Special mention must, however, be made of my indebtedness to the staffs of the following libraries: The Boston Athenaeum, Congregational, Masonic (Boston), American Antiquarian Society, Connecticut Historical Society, New York Historical Society, Library of Congress, the public libraries of the cities of Boston and New York, the library of Hiram College, and the university libraries of Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. In addition to the many courtesies received from these sources, I have had valuable assistance from the following persons: Mr. Newton R. Parvin, grand secretary of the Grand Lodge of Iowa, A. F. & A. M., Cedar Rapids, Iowa, whose warm personal interest in my investigation has found expression in the loan of many valuable volumes; Mr. Worthington C. Ford, of the Massachusetts Historical Society, who besides opening freely to me the unpublished treasures of the Society, has given me the benefit of peculiarly stimulating suggestions; Mr. Walter C. Green, librarian of Meadville Theological School, who has most generously met all my drafts upon his patience and time; and Professor Guy Stanton Ford, of the University of Minnesota, who has made it possible for me to use his copy of Forestier’s Les Illuminés de Bavière et la Franc-Maçonnerie allemande, without which in this war period, with its partial stoppage of the inflow of European literature, my chapter on “The European Order of the Illuminati” could scarcely have been written.

My greatest debt is to Professor William Walker Rockwell, of Union Theological Seminary, who from the day that he suggested the theme not only has followed the progress of the work with unwearied interest, but at many points has guided my efforts and helped me to avoid numerous pitfalls. Whatever excellencies the study contains are due to Professor Rockwell’s stimulating criticism; the faults are altogether chargeable to me.

There remains to acknowledge my obligation and express my best thanks to my colleagues, Professors Ralph Hinsdale Goodale, Lee Edwin Cannon, and John Samuel Kenyon, and to Miss Bertha Peckham, Registrar of Hiram College, who have greatly assisted me by correcting copy, reading proof, and otherwise helping to see the work through the press. To my wife a special obligation is due because of the benefits derived from her critical insight and heartening sympathy throughout the performance of the task.

V. S

HIRAM, OHIO.

Few if any periods in our national history have been marked by a greater variety of clashing interests than the closing decade of the eighteenth century. Owing in part to inexperience in grappling with the problems of government, in part to widely belligerent and irreconcilable elements among the people, in part to grave international complications and concerns, and in part, confessedly, to rumors and excitements for which, as events proved, no adequate grounds existed, the lives of the people of New England were tossed rudely about on rough currents and counter-currents of mingled hope and anguish. To a dispassionate observer (if anywhere on the green earth at the close of the eighteenth century such an individual might have been found) it must have seemed as though the citizens of New England were as so many bits of wood, bobbing up and down on waters excessively choppy but otherwise motionless. The agitation, however, was not merely superficial; issues and movements of the most profound significance were pouring their impetuous torrents through channels freshly cut and steadily deepened by new streams of human interest which the erection of the national government, in particular, had started on their tortuous ways.

The development of this thesis calls for an evaluation of the more significant elements and forces which gave to the period the characteristic temper of nervous excitability by which it was stamped. The profound spirit of apprehension, amounting to positive distress, with which for many a thoughtful religious patriot of New England the eighteenth century closed, constitutes a phenomenon as impressive as it is curious. To isolate that spirit, to analyze it, to explain its genesis and its development, to take account of its attachments and antipathies with respect to the special interest under consideration,—this must be regarded as no inconsiderable portion of the general task.

On the morning of May 9, 1798, in the pulpit of the New North Church in Boston, and on the afternoon of the same day in his own pulpit at Charlestown, the occasion being that of the national fast, the Reverend Jedediah Morse[1] made a sensational pronouncement. He first discussed with his hearers “the awful events” which the European Illuminati had precipitated upon an already distracted world, and then proceeded solemnly to affirm that the secret European association had extended its operations to this side of the Atlantic and was now actively engaged among the people of the United States, with a view to the overthrow of their civil and religious institutions. In the eyes of the distinguished clergyman, the matter was of such serious moment that he felt moved to remark:

Morse’s warning by no means fell upon deaf ears. The “due attention” he claimed for the alarm which he that day sounded was promptly and generally accorded. Soon ministers were preaching, newspaper editors and contributors writing and clearheaded statesmen like Oliver Wolcott, Timothy Pickering, John Adams, and even the great Washington, inquiring, and voicing their serious concern over the secret presence in America of those conspirators whose greatest single achievement, a multitude had come to believe, was the enormities of the French Revolution.

It is true that before two years had passed men generally began to admit the baseless nature of the alarm that Morse had sounded. None the less one may not dismiss the incident with the light and easy judgment that it signified nothing more than the absurd fears of a New England clergyman who, under the strain of deep political and religious concern, and after a hasty reading of the latest volume of religious and political horrors that had just arrived from Europe,[3] rushed into his pulpit and gave utterance to preposterous statements which his imagination for the moment led him to believe were justified. The episode has considerably larger and more important bearings. No man could possibly have awakened such wide-spread concern as the minister of Charlestown succeeded in awakening if it had not been true that significant concurrent and related circumstances gave both setting and force to the alarm which with such stout conviction he sounded.

What previous influences and events had tended to predispose the public mind favorably to Morse’s alarm? What was the peculiar combination and cast of events which gave the notion of a conspiracy against religion and government in Europe and in America a clear semblance of truth? In what ways, and to what extent, did the alarm affect the lives and the institutions of the people of New England? Finally, what were the grounds, real or imaginary, upon which the charge of an Illuminati conspiracy rested? To answering these questions the following pages are devoted.

THE UNDERMINING OF PURITAN STANDARDS AND INSTITUTIONS

Back of the War of Independence was the less absorbing but scarcely less harrowing contest of the French and Indian War. Thus for a period of fully thirty years the people of New England had been subjected to the rough and unsettling experiences of military life. This consideration, taken in connection with the fact that a growing declension from the standards of the Puritan fathers had been the occasion of increasing comment and concern from the middle of the seventeenth century on,[4] will make explicable the fact that the average citizen of New England emerged from the Revolutionary struggle with the edge of his conscience dulled. The secularizing spirit of the post-Revolutionary period, when questions of national organization and unity, of the rehabilitation of commerce and industry, and of international relations and policies were foremost in the thought of the day, left marks upon the human spirit over which stern and rigorous adherents to the old order wept copiously and long. For one thing, the lives of the men and women of New England were never again to be as barren of diversified interests as they had been in the past. The successful issue of the struggle for political independence had so enlarged the mind of the common man that he of necessity entertained considerations of private desire and of public policy which he formerly would have rejected entirely. The avenue of retreat to the ancient simplicity and seclusion was forever closed.

The soundness of this estimate of the rapid disintegration of Puritanism will be apparent if the changing attitude of the people on the subject of theatrical entertainments is considered.[5] As early as the year 1750 the General Court of Massachusetts had found it necessary to enact legislation to prevent stage-plays and other theatrical entertainments.[6] That Puritan standards dominated the situation at the time is evidenced both by the reasons advanced by the framers of the law for its enactment and by the stringent penalties attached to it. The justification of the measure was found in the economic waste, the discouraging effect upon industry and frugality, and the deleterious effect upon morality and religion which stage-plays were believed to exercise. The penalties imposed called for a fine of twenty pounds upon any owner of property who permitted his property to be used for such purposes, while a fine of five pounds was to be assessed upon any actor or spectator found in attendance upon or participating in any such exercises where more than twenty persons were assembled together.[7] How meekly the craving for pleasurable excitement bowed its head in submission, there is no evidence to show; but it is very clear that as the century drew toward its close the people of Massachusetts began to manifest a decidedly intractable spirit with respect to legislative control of their amusements and pleasures.

The days of the Revolution supplied thrills of their own, and the colonists gave themselves in devotion to their great task-at-arms, with little desire for the amenities of life. Accordingly, when the Continental Congress, on October 16, 1778, passed a resolution deprecating every species of public entertainment which would be likely to divert the minds of the people from the considerations of public defence and the safeguarding of their liberties,[8] there was nothing singular about the episode, and we may believe readily that the people of New England, fortified by their grim spirit of determination and their long tradition of self-denial, in no sense fell short of the general standard. But by the year 1790 the people living in and about Boston had come to a very different state of mind. In that year by petition to the General Court they sought to have the prohibitory act of 1750 revoked.[9] The incident has importance because it registers a determined effort to feed desires whose hunger-pains had grown insistent.

The history of this particular effort to remove legislative restrictions in the way of harmless amusements is illuminating. The petition referred to received scant consideration at the hands of the legislators of Massachusetts. The following year certain gentlemen of Boston, to the number of thirty-nine, presented a memorial to the selectmen of that city, requesting that a vote of the citizens be taken on the questions of permitting the erection and use of a building for theatrical entertainments, and the issuing of instructions to Boston’s representatives in the legislature calling for the repeal of the obnoxious law. Apparently the plebiscite was not taken; but the general question was debated in town meeting. A committee was appointed to prepare instructions. The committee reported favorably concerning the proposed instructions to Boston’s representatives in the legislature, and these representatives later undertook the task of bringing a majority of the members of the General Court to the more liberal point of view; not, however, with immediate success. Meanwhile, to the scandal of Governor John Hancock, and doubtless many another advocate of decency and order, theatrical entertainments, “under the Stile & Appellation of Moral Lectures,”[10] flourished openly in Boston.[11]

It was during the progress of the debate in the legislature over the proposed repeal of the law against theatrical entertainments that John Gardiner, one of Boston’s representatives in that body, delivered himself of sentiments touching what he styled “the illiberal, unmanly, and despotic act” of 1750. His speech gave evidence of how fresh and independent the judgments of some minds had come to be. Addressing the presiding officer, Gardiner said:

That Gardiner was the spokesman of a very considerable number of citizens is demonstrated by the fact that on March 28, 1793, a bill drawn to take the place of the older legislation against theatrical amusements and granting specifically to the people of Boston the right to erect a theatre and to have “stage plays performed under certain regulations and restrictions,” was enacted by the legislature of Massachusetts.[13] It is very evident that public sentiment had veered round to a radically new and different view respecting the place and function of the theatre. So much so, indeed, that some who sought to shape the thought and determination of the times recommended the establishment of the theatre as the only possible way of drawing the desires and interests of the people away from grosser and more injurious excitements toward which, it was believed, an alarming growth of frivolity and lack of moral concern was rapidly sweeping the people of New England.[14]

This alleged declension of morals may be more vitally viewed from the standpoint of the subject of intemperance. Convivial habits were a fixed part of the New England character, and the sin of drunkenness was as old as the settlement of the country. The practice of brewing was numbered among the employments of the first settlers.[15] Rum was generally used by the people, and the commercial life of the colonies was inextricably woven with its importation and exportation.[16] Cider was the native New England beverage.[17] The importation of wine was large from the first.[18] A general tendency in the direction of increased habits of drinking was to be expected.[19]

The period of the Revolution made its own special contribution to the gravity of the case. The soldiers of the Continental armies received regular rations of liquor,[20] and at the expiration of the war carried back to their respective communities the habits of intemperance which in many cases their army life had strengthened. Rum was more and more coming to be regarded as one of the necessities of life;[21] and with the revival of industry and commerce after the war the business of distilling mounted rapidly to amazing proportions.[22]

A growing uneasiness over the social and economic consequences involved in the spread of alcoholism is apparent. Under the date of July 29, 1789, the Reverend Jeremy Belknap, minister of the church in Long Lane, Boston, is found writing thus to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Philadelphia’s celebrated physician and early apostle of temperance reform:

The correspondence which the Reverend Bulkley Olcott, minister of the church in Charlestown, New Hampshire, had with Belknap is of like import.[24] He had tried to obtain accurate statistical information from the Excise Master as to the quantity of spirituous liquors consumed in his county, and had not succeeded. However, it is a matter of his personal knowledge that many good estates have been squandered through drinking, and much time, labor, and health, and many lives destroyed in the same way. He recognizes that many concurring circumstances come to the aid of spirituous liquors in working fatal results; still the general abuse of drink is declared to be one of the heaviest and most threatening evils under which the country groans.

The taverns of the day on all public occasions,[25] and frequently in the ordinary course of their business, were filled with gambling, carousing, drinking crowds. The extent to which the great occasions of state were seized upon as opportunities for open and shameless drinking had become a scandal. The custom of granting a certain allowance of rum per day to laborers was honored in at least some sections of the country.[26] Accidental deaths due to drunkenness, and cases of suicide and insanity traceable to the same cause, were frequently reported.[27] All classes of society, young and old, rich and poor, men and women, fell victims to the great scourge. The colleges were not immune. At Yale, wine and liquors were kept in the rooms of many of the students and intemperance was one of the commonest of student faults.[28] Clergymen, though generally restraining themselves from gross indulgence, were accustomed to feel that the spirit of conviviality and the discussion of the affairs of church and state went hand in hand;[29] and now and then the bounds of propriety were overstepped.

Other unfavorable aspects of the situation may be found in the habits of card-playing and gambling which everywhere prevailed, and in the frequent allusions to instances of social vice and illegitimacy with which the pages of the diary of such a careful observer as the Reverend William Bentley were laden.[30]

The opinion that the social life of the period was desperately unsound was accepted without question by many a so-called interpreter of the times. The observations which President Timothy Dwight, of Yale, made in his Century Sermon[31] expressed the views of many minds. Dating “the first considerable change in the religious character of the people of this country” with the beginning of the French and Indian War,[32] he continued:

But this sweeping judgment of Yale’s president, together with the specific explanation of the situation which he offered, are to be checked up by other and less pessimistic considerations. That there was much pertaining to the customs and manners of the times to be deplored, is not to be denied. On the other hand, that society in New England, as the eighteenth century drew toward its close, was actually lapsing from soundness and virtue to the extent that its fundamental views and habits were being altered, is far from clear. Observers who spoke to the contrary listened chiefly to the murmurs of the shallows and were unresponsive to the deeps.

The fact is, new ideals and new forces were working upward in the common life of the age. The new sense of freedom which the War of Independence ushered in, the steadily growing prosperity of the people, the development of social intimacies as the population of the country increased, the intrusion and growing influence of foreign ideas and customs, the steadily diminishing domination of the clergy—these all tended to inaugurate a new order which clashed more or less violently with the old. The memories of the old Puritan régime were still sufficiently vivid to make every lapse from liberty into license appear ominous in the extreme.

A general relaxing of social customs expressed itself in manifold ways over all those areas where actual stagnation had not come to pass; but this loosening was by no means characterized by deep-seated coarseness or general immorality.[34] The people had begun to claim for themselves some relaxation, and hence to amuse and satisfy themselves in the light of their enlarged conceptions of the freedom and privileges of life. On the whole, their enjoyments and amusements were such as characterize a state of healthy-mindedness at a time of marked transition.

In the main, the condition of the people was deplorable for what they lacked in the way of incitements to pleasurable and helpful social and cultural employments rather than because of what they possessed.[35] When it is recalled how considerable was the dearth of material for mental occupation; how undeveloped, for example, were music and painting;[36] how the newspapers and magazines of the day supplied little or nothing of a constructive or inspiring character; how science was almost totally undeveloped,[37] libraries few in number and destitute of stimulating material, the colleges for the most part mooning the years away over insipid and useless abstractions and dogmatic formulations, the wonder is that the rebound against Puritanism, in this period of intense political excitement and the growing secularization of thought, was not tenfold more violent and subversive than it was.[38]

The impression communicated by this view is heightened when it is recalled that the struggle for political independence not only had affected profoundly the status of the people of New England with respect to both their internal and their external relations; it had also made substantial and significant modifications in the very constitution of society itself. When the reorganization of affairs after the Revolutionary struggle was over, it became increasingly apparent that the control of the forces and institutions of society in New England was in the hands of new leaders and arbiters. The aristocracy of unquestioned conservatism which had all society under its thumb before the Revolution, had been swept away generally in the flood of that epochal event. Up from the small towns and villages of the country to the great centers, to Boston particularly, came a small army, made up largely of squires and gentry,[39] to establish a new but less secure sovereignty, to assume control of the social and political forces of the day, and, more or less unaware of the precise significance of the turn of events, to measure its strength against those new forces of democracy which in New England, as no place else in the nation, were to find themselves compelled to fight a long and stubborn battle to secure their emancipation.

Assuming without question the direction of affairs, this new aristocracy, after the fashion of the old leaders who were gone, addressed itself to the task of social, political, and religious control.[40] Manifestly the situation was big with possibilities with respect to the effect to be produced upon the thought and habits of the people. There they dwelt in their spacious houses,[41] these modern aristocrats and autocrats of fashion and custom, by no means rolling in luxury and idleness, yet claiming and enjoying a degree of relaxation and social pleasure vastly more lavish than that accorded to their plebeian neighbors, occupying themselves with their parties, their weddings and dances,[42] their refinements of dress[43] and behavior, but with little or no disposition to abandon themselves to scandalous conduct.

The constant challenge of the political necessities of the times, it may be urged, was altogether too compelling to admit of any such looseness. Still, one cannot scan the newspapers of the period, or read the story of the social commerce of the times as it pieces itself together out of the private records and correspondence of the day, or listen even to the pulpit’s copious flood of denunciations,[44] without a feeling of mingled admiration and astonishment that in an age everywhere characterized by upheaval and ferment there was really as little of shameless and wanton conduct in New England as the records of the period reveal. It cannot but be viewed as a notable tribute to the essential soundness and nobility of that type of moral and religious culture which Puritanism had supplied from the first that the New England character should be able to pass through a period of profound social readjustment, of the discarding of old value judgments and the adoption of new, such as came near the close of the eighteenth century, and this without serious loss of moral power and prestige. Manifestly, whatever hollowness and insincerity Puritanism may have developed in other lands and times, it did not so cramp and fetter the human spirit in New England as to render it incapable of self-guidance when the old restraints and limitations were no more.[45]

Now that its controlling spirit of gravity and provincialism was being replaced by a general temper of comparative light-heartedness and open-mindedness, of unaffected enjoyment of the good things of life, of the acceptance of standards far more natural than those of the earlier day, the transition was accomplished with a relative absence of accompanying instances of moral lapse and disaster nothing less than remarkable. A considerable amount of the boisterousness and heat of the day over which clerical Jeremiahs and others of like conservative leanings ceased not to pour out their complaints,[46] is explicable on the ground of the growing habit of the mass of the people to exercise the rights of citizenship through direct participation in the affairs of the day. For far more significant than any evidence of moral blindness and perversity on the part of the people in general is the fact that a great, crowding, hungry democracy was knocking at the gates of the old aristocratic régime and insistently urging the consideration of its rights.

The general impression of a revolt against morality and religion in New England near the close of the eighteenth century was deepened by the bitterness of spirit which marked the last stages of the long struggle waged by dissenters to cut the bond between church and state.[47] The Congregational Church was one of the fundamental institutions of New England, and from the first the sword of the magistrate had been invoked to enforce conformity to its worship and polity. Strange enough seem the terms “Establishment” and “Standing Order”[48] in the history of a people whose forefathers came to America in quest of religious freedom. The freedom sought, however, was to be construed as loyalty to a new order rather than as the embodiment of tolerance. Thus it happened that for two whole centuries the battle on behalf of the rights of dissent had to be waged in New England.[49] To have this struggle construed by the aggrieved representatives of the Establishment as the crowning expression of what they had come to regard as the deep-seated and widespread irreligion of the age, was not the least of the bitter taunts which dissenters had to bear.

In Massachusetts the eighteenth century dawned with some faint promise of a kindlier day. The Charter of 1691 granted full liberty of conscience to all Christians except Roman Catholics.[50] The practical effects of this apparently sweeping reform were largely nullified, however, when in the following year the General Court made it obligatory for each town to have a minister for whose support all its inhabitants should be taxed.[51] With the removal of all bonds upon conscience and of all religious restrictions upon the right of suffrage on the one hand, but with the principle of enforced support of the institutions of religion on the other, the hallowed union of church and state in Massachusetts obviously stood in no immediate danger. The slight modifications speedily made in the law of 1692 did not touch the principle of taxation in the interests of religious worship.[52]

A measure of relief came to the Episcopalians in 1727,[53] and to the Quakers and Baptists in 1728,[54] in the form of exemption laws. In the case of the Baptists the exemption granted was not absolute, but only for a limited period of years. With the expiration of this period the struggle for relief of necessity had to be renewed.[55] The rights of dissent had begun to receive some recognition, but the limitations embodied in the foregoing legislation bore convincing testimony of a grudging temper of mind which would yield no ground without strong pressure.

The spirit of excitement and controversy which characterized the revival of religion of the third and fourth decades of the eighteenth century (i. e., the Great Awakening) led to new complications and difficulties. Stirred by the revival, itinerant preachers, some of them of little learning and of less tact, invaded parishes of their clerical brethren without their consent, and presumed to censure the ministers and congregations that had not yielded to the emotional impulses of the revival.[56] A clash of parties followed, producing new antipathies and cleavages. Many who were in sympathy with the revival withdrew from orthodox congregations to organize new churches, nominally Baptist, with a view to obtaining exemption from the obligation to support the state church. To meet this evasion in 1752 the General Court of Massachusetts passed an act which provided

A further provision of the act denied to Baptist ministers and their parishioners the right of furnishing the required certificates unless three other Baptist churches previously should have certified that the persons granting the certificates were regarded as members of that body.[58] To make the situation more galling, if that were possible, certificates so obtained had to be lodged annually with the town clerk before the time to pay the rates arrived.

From every point of view this legislation was objectionable to the Baptists. Their protest was instant and vigorous.[59] It was decided to send one of their number as agent to England, to carry their case before the government of the mother country.[60] A sharp remonstrance, so plain in its language that its signers came very near being taken into custody, was drawn up and presented to the General Court at Boston.[61] But great as was the sense of injustice under which the Baptists smarted, the operations of the act appear to have been most severe in the case of those who had drawn off from the orthodox churches on account of the disturbances created by the Great Awakening. The position of these Separatists[62] was peculiarly vulnerable. Baptist leaders found themselves embarrassed when called upon to certify to the Baptist affiliations of the Separatists; such a distasteful judgment of the motives and scruples of others was to be avoided wherever possible.[63] On the other hand, if the Separatists sought to set up churches and establish ministers of their own, they were confronted by the fact that a second Congregational church could not be formed in a parish without legislative permission, and the orthodox party usually showed itself capable of forestalling all such sanction on the part of the state. It was left, therefore, to the Separatists either for conscience’ sake to bear the double burden of taxation,[64] or to seek a permanent religious home in one of the recognized dissenting bodies.[65]

Five years later, when the exemption law of 1752 expired and with it the exemption laws that previously had been passed for the relief of the Quakers, a new law was enacted governing both sects.[66] Henceforth a Baptist who desired exemption must have his name upon a list to be presented annually to the assessor and signed by the minister and three principal members of the Baptist congregation to which the applicant belonged, with the accompanying certification that the applicant was recognized as a conscientious and faithful Baptist. Quakers were placed under the same regulations. For thirteen years this law was in operation, with manifold instances of distress resulting, particularly in the case of Baptists.[67] Through difficulty in obtaining the certificates, goods were seized, expensive and otherwise irritating court trials were held, and not a few victims, either because of poverty or on account of conscientious scruples, found their way to prison. In some instances, despite the fact that the certificates were duly obtained and presented, they were waved aside and the payment of the tax required or the process of distraint invoked.[68] It is little wonder that the feeling in the minds and hearts of New England Baptists that there was a spirit of iniquity back of the oppressive measures of the Standing Order, came to have all the significance of a settled conviction.[69]

Further modifications in the exemption laws, made in 1770, were so slight, leaving as they did the certificate principle practically untouched,[70] that Baptist opposition was aroused even more deeply and the determination struck deeper root to push the battle for religious freedom to a decision. The times also were propitious. The near approach of the Revolutionary struggle focused attention upon the subject of tyranny and caused acts of oppression, whether civil or ecclesiastical in character, to stand out in a new relief before the eye of the public. That dissenters were quick to see the bearing of political events will appear from the following pithy comments in the address which the Committee of Grievances[71] drew up late in 1774 and presented to the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts:

As the event proved, the Revolutionary period brought little legislative relief to dissenters in Massachusetts. Wherever the distractions of the war did not interrupt the ordinary course of ecclesiastical affairs, the state church continued to assert its time-honored prerogatives. The new constitution of the commonwealth which was adopted in 1780 gave conclusive proof that the Standing Order still had the situation well in hand. That instrument contained a bill of rights which reaffirmed the authority of the legislature to authorize and require the various towns and parishes “to make suitable provision, at their own expense, for the institution of the public worship of God”;[73] affirmed also that the legislature had authority to enjoin attendance upon public worship; that towns and parishes were to have the right to elect their ministers and make contracts with them for their support; and that moneys, in the form of rates paid by the people in the support of public worship, were to be applied according to the preference of the rate-payer, “provided, there be any [minister] on whose instructions he attends”; otherwise the minister selected by the town or parish was to receive the benefit of the tax.[74] There is no difficulty in discerning here the outlines of the old ideal of a state church. The day of deliverance for dissent was not yet.[75]

What did take place during the Revolutionary period to promote the cause of religious freedom and to hasten the day of its triumph was the publication of various pamphlets and treatises devoted to the cause of toleration or championing the closely allied cause of democracy in church and state.[76] Several of these[77] were from the pen of the indomitable Isaac Backus, whose unwearied advocacy of the rights of the individual conscience was exceeded by none. The likeness of the struggle which dissenters were making for freedom of conscience to that which the colonists were making for civil liberty was a favorite notion of this doughty penman; and such an argument presented when the imaginations of his countrymen were stirred by the political situation, could not fail of its appeal. Three years before the war broke out, in his Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty, Backus had drawn for the benefit of the public a sharp distinction between the spheres of ecclesiastical and civil governments. The former was armed only with light and truth, and was commissioned to “pull down the strongholds of iniquity,” to gather into Christ’s church those who were willing to be governed by His teachings, and to exclude those who would not be so governed; while the latter “is armed with the sword to guard the peace and to punish those who violate the same.”[78] In his Government and Liberty Described, and Ecclesiastical Tyranny Exposed, published in 1778, he attacked the notion of men “assuming a power to govern religion, instead of being governed by it,” and asserted that the essence of true religion is a voluntary obedience to God.[79] Here was strong meat for a people for whom the word freedom was rapidly coming to have an enlarged signification.

The most convincing exposition of the democratic tendencies of the age came from another quarter, and in a sense belonged to the past. Spurred by the fact that at the beginning of the century a resolute effort had been made, both in Massachusetts and Connecticut, to obtain more compact and rigid ecclesiastical control,[80] the Reverend John Wise, of Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1710 had issued a satirical tract entitled, The Churches’ Quarrel Espoused, and later, in 1717, a more serious production entitled, A Vindication of the Government of the New England Churches. In 1772 a new edition of these tracts, published by subscription, came from the Boston press.[81] The enduring quality of the task Wise had performed is shown by the fact that, while these two slight volumes had been conceived as a protest against the encroachments of ecclesiastical tyranny in the first two decades of the century, they now, a half-century later, served equally well to voice the deep passions and impulses of a people who for the moment were engrossed in the concerns of civil government.[82] Wise rejected the ideals of monarchy and aristocracy for the church, and took his stand upon the proposition that democracy alone stands the test of reason and revelation.[83] Of all systems, democracy alone cherishes the precious interests of man’s original liberty and equality. It alone serves effectually to restrain the disposition to prey and embezzle, and to keep the administration of government firmly fixed upon the main point, “the peculiar good and benefit of the whole.” “It is as plain as daylight, there are no species of government like a democracy to attain this end.”[84]

Such literary assaults upon the usurpations of government, upon the violation of individual rights, and upon obstructions erected in the path of democracy, were frontal. As has been said, they were also happily timed. The oppressed would have to content themselves a little longer with a type of toleration which seemed but the shadow of genuine freedom; but the broad dissemination of such principles as those proclaimed by Backus and Wise had had the effect of altering appreciably the spirit of the times.

The close of the struggle for political freedom gave early proof that the cause of religious toleration had passed into a new stage. Dissent had grown in numbers and influence.[85] Distant voices, too, were being heard. Virginia’s noble example in adopting the Act Establishing Religious Freedom had given a practical demonstration of the complete severance of church and state. The impression created by this determination of the issue of religious freedom on the broadest possible basis had been profound throughout the country. When the Constitution of the United States was before the people of Massachusetts for ratification, in the fall and winter of 1787–88, they found in it a single provision concerning religion. Article VI provided: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust in the United States.” So far had the eyes of dissenters in Massachusetts been opened to dangers lurking in legislative measures that a large proportion of the Baptist delegates in the state constitutional convention voted against the adoption of the instrument.[86] Besides, their hearts were set on some broad and yet specific guarantee of religious freedom under which their liberties would be safe. The First Amendment to the Constitution, which Congress proposed in 1789, seemed to fulfil their desire. It provided that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” With the adoption of this law by the majority of the states, the principle of full liberty of mind, conscience, and worship, had been written finally into the law of the land.

Yet this pronouncement of the national government could not bring to a full end the long struggle which had been waged. Only the sphere of the federal government was involved, and individual states were still free to deal with the institutions of religion and the rights of individuals as they might feel disposed, as long as the national welfare was not involved.[87] What actually happened in Massachusetts is well expressed by Isaac Backus: “The amendment about liberty of conscience is kept out of sight.”[88] The goods of Baptists continued to be levied upon to meet the ministerial tax.[89] Dissensions continued to arise in parishes over the settlement and support of ministers, dissenting minorities usually contesting the right of the majority to saddle upon them clergymen for whose ministrations they had no desire.[90] The annoyances and disabilities that dissenters and disaffected members of the Establishment suffered were clearly not so numerous nor so severe as they had been in the past;[91] none the less they were able to keep alive the impression that nothing but a spirit of bigotry and obdurate tyranny could explain the prolonged attitude and policy of the Standing Order.[92]

Before directing attention to the effect which this weakening of the forces of ecclesiastical domination had upon the minds of the leaders of the Establishment, it will be necessary to review briefly the course which affairs took in Connecticut.[93]

Despite the fact that the founding of Connecticut had directly resulted from the ecclesiasticism of Massachusetts, the forces of ecclesiastical tyranny proved to be more strongly entrenched in Connecticut than in the parent state.[94] This was due in part to the homogeneity of the population,[95] but more largely to the degree of oversight of the religious life of the people, unusual even for Puritan New England, which the General Court of Connecticut exercised from the first.[96] In this connection it is to be observed that the impulses that lay back of the oppression of dissenters in Connecticut were not the same as those that shaped the situation in Massachusetts. The founders of Connecticut were out of sympathy with the theocratic ideal that prevailed in the mother colony; they frowned upon the harsh measures of repression which the authorities of Massachusetts adopted.[97] They held before them the ideal of a state wherein the maintenance of religion and the exercise of individual freedom should not be incompatible.

Yet as the event proved, the hand of religious tyranny fell heavily upon their posterity.[98] This happened, not because they were disposed to exercise harsher repressive measures than their fathers in curbing dissent, but because, in their extraordinary devotion to the churches of their own order, in their extreme care and watchfulness to strengthen them and to safeguard the whole range of their interests, they came into open conflict with the interests of dissenting bodies.[99] As early as 1669 the Congregational church was formally adopted as the state church.[100] From that day forward an intimate and intense paternalism characterized the attitude of the civil government toward the Establishment. Its most serious and permanent, as well as its lighter and occasional concerns, all were provided for with equal constancy. Contingencies of every description were either prudently anticipated or, arising suddenly, received the immediate and painstaking attention of the magistrates.[101]

The following list, though far from complete, will serve to illustrate this point. Without the consent of the General Court, churches could not be organized,[102] nor bonds be severed between pastors and their flocks.[103] The formation of new parishes and the fixing of their limits,[104] the calling of new ministers,[105] the determination of the time at which arrearages in ministers’ salaries must be paid fully,[106] the fixing of the location of new houses of worship,[107] the disposition of cases of discipline appealed from the decisions of local church courts,[108] the settlement of the question as to who were to be permitted to receive the Lord’s Supper,[109] the proffer of counsel concerning the behavior offended members were expected to manifest toward pastors for whom they entertained no affection nor respect[110]—these all were regarded as part of the proper business of the General Court.

The dangers inherent in such a system are not difficult to divine. The churches themselves upon which such paternal legislative care was imposed generally found their affairs taken out of their hands. Civil authority disciplined them and their members, and made independent ecclesiastical rule little more than a fiction. Again, the committal of the political government to a particular type of religious polity and worship aroused antagonisms in the minds of men who hated the palest shadow of the principle that the religion of a prince or government must be the religion of the people. However tolerant toward non-conformity such a state may show itself to be—and none will deny that Connecticut rose to comparatively high levels of justice in this regard[111]—the favoritism of government puts dissent at a disadvantage; and when narrow and intolerant men are at the helm of state, disadvantage passes rapidly into positive deprivation and injury. Once more, so close an alliance between politics and religion as the Standing Order in Connecticut represented, invites similar combinations on the part of men, some of whom have political and some religious objects to serve, and who, therefore, in the presence of a common foe gladly make common cause. All of which we shall see illustrated later.

Another general aspect of the situation in Connecticut concerns the development of synodical government within the Congregational church. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, out of a sense of the decay of religion in New England, as evidenced by the loosening of discipline and the weakening of ministerial influence,[112] the clergy of Massachusetts attempted to buttress church government and ministerial authority through the “Proposals of 1705.” These provided for the grouping of ministers in Associations which were to function in the following ways: pastors were to adopt their advice in all difficult cases; ministerial candidates were to be examined and licensed by them; pastorless, or “bereaved” churches were to be urged to apply to them for candidates; they were also to exercise a general oversight of religion, and to inquire into charges made against the character, conduct, or faith of any of their members. The “Proposals” also made provision for Standing Councils to be made up of delegates from these Ministerial Associations and lay members of the churches. These Standing Councils were “to consult, advise, and determine all affairs that shall be proper matter for the consideration of an ecclesiastical council within their respective limits.” Their judgments were to be accepted as final and obedience was to be enforced on penalty of forfeiting church-fellowship.[113] This bold step in the direction of bringing the churches of Massachusetts under more rigorous ecclesiastical control was not destined to succeed. Liberalizing elements stirred up powerful opposition, the legislature failed to give to the “Proposals” its support, and the movement fell through.[114]

A very different situation developed in Connecticut. The yearning for the strengthening of church government in the interests of a general improvement of religion was if anything stronger in that commonwealth; and a propitious hour for the inauguration of such a movement came when, in 1707, the most influential minister of the colony, Gurdon Saltonstall, of New London, was raised to the governor’s chair. The following May the General Court issued the call for the famous Saybrook Synod.[115] Ministers and messengers of the churches were to assemble in their respective county towns, “on the last Monday in June next … to consider and agree upon those methods and rules for the management of ecclesiastical discipline which by them shall be judged agreeable and conformable to the word of God.”[116] By these county councils ministers and delegates were to be chosen to meet at Saybrook, at the commencement of the “infant college” (i. e., Yale), there “to compare the results of the ministers of the several counties, and out of them and from them to draw a form of ecclesiastical discipline which by two or more persons delegated by them shall be offered to this Court … to be considered of and confirmed by them.”[117]

The directions of the General Court were complied with. The doctrinal results of the Saybrook Synod are no part of our concern; but this is not so with regard to its ecclesiastical formulations. The principles contained in the “Proposals of 1705” were accepted and worked out in more complete detail. Churches were to be grouped in Consociations, one or more in each county as the churches might determine. Cases of discipline too difficult of management in local congregations were to be heard and determined by these Consociations. Refusal to answer to the summons of a Consociation, or to submit to its decision, incurred excommunication, whether a church or a pastor might be the guilty party. All matters relating to the installation, ordination, and dismissal of ministers were to be submitted by the churches to these Consociations. In like manner the ministers of the various counties were to be grouped together in Associations to consult concerning the affairs of the church, provide ministerial licensure, examine complaints, and make recommendations to the legislature concerning the settlement of pastors with “bereaved” churches.[118]

The result of the deliberations of the Saybrook Synod was laid duly before the sessions of the General Court, in October, 1708, and formally adopted by that body in the following terms:

This reëstablishment of the Congregational church in Connecticut determined the course of events, as far as the religious interests of the commonwealth were concerned, for a hundred years to come. By this it is not meant that the ecclesiastical system which was thus worked out and imposed upon the churches of the colony continued to operate in full force for that period; the Saybrook Platform was abrogated in 1784. But the Congregational church in Connecticut, by the act of 1708, “attained the height of its security and power,”[120] and, as one of the chief consequences of the act, ministerial domination was accorded a recognition and support, the tradition of which outlived by at least a quarter of a century the system by which it had been so firmly established.

Thus to the paternalism of the state the authority and sense of importance of the clergy had been added. These principles established, it was to be expected that the religious history of Connecticut during the eighteenth century would reveal the following characteristics and tendencies: a disposition on the part of the state to treat the clergy of the Establishment as the pillars of conservative thought and custom; and a disposition on the part of the clergy to exercise a controlling hand over all the religious activities of the people, as well as to react violently against all radical impulses and movements which appeared to endanger centralization of government, whether ecclesiastical or political. Certainly these were the tendencies, expressed in the attitude of mind and the activities of the Standing Order, with which the forces of non-conformity and democracy had to contend throughout the whole of the century.

We may now turn to take a brief survey of the more important events in the course of this conflict. The concluding statement of the act whereby the Connecticut General Court adopted the recommendations of the Saybrook Synod,[121] gave evidence of a tender regard for the consciences and rights of dissenters which subsequent occurrences far from justified. The fact is, the act of reëstablishment did not stand alone. Earlier in the same year (1708) the General Court had written into the law of the colony another statute whose provisions were in no way affected by the later act. For the worthy object of granting liberty of worship to sober dissenters, a liberty which they were to be permitted to enjoy “without let, or hindrance or molestation,” it was provided that dissenting congregations were to qualify (i. e., obtain license) under the law.[122] It was likewise provided that this permission to qualify should in no way operate to the prejudice of the rights and privileges of the churches of the Establishment, or “to the excusing any person from paying any such minister or town dues, as are now, or shall hereafter be due from them.”[123] This double burden of obtaining license and supporting the state church was not to be borne easily. An agitation to obtain relief promptly began.[124]

After two decades of effort the Episcopalians were the first to meet with any measure of success. Henceforth their rate money was to be spent in the support of their own ministers and they were no longer to be required to help build meeting-houses for the state church.[125] Two years later, relief was granted to Baptists and Quakers. The exemption laws passed in their behalf, however, made necessary the presentation of certificates vouching for the claims of the holders that they were conscientious supporters of the principles and faithful attendants upon the worship of one or the other of these bodies.[126]

The introduction of the custom of requiring certificates encountered the same sense of injustice and bitter resentment that dissenters in Massachusetts manifested. Besides, the exemption laws just referred to failed to operate in a uniform and equitable manner. Episcopalians and Baptists, particularly, found frequent occasion to complain of the miscarriage of this legislation and to groan under the double burden of taxation from which they had obtained no actual relief.[127]

But as in Massachusetts, so in Connecticut, the greatest hardships befell the Separatists who went out from the fold of the orthodox church. Unable to achieve within the Establishment that reformation of doctrine, polity, and spiritual life which they deemed requisite, they associated themselves together in churches committed to their own convictions. Opposition confronted them at every turn. Obstructions were thrown in the way of their efforts to obtain legal permission to constitute their churches; the civil power persisted in treating them as law-breakers and incorrigibles; their ministers were drastically dealt with by Consociations which regarded them as wicked men filled with the spirit of insubordination.[128] A group of laws as severe and intolerant as any the statute books of Connecticut ever contained were enacted in 1742–43 to curb and if possible to eradicate the Separatist defection.[129] Ordained ministers were forbidden to preach outside the bounds of their parishes unless expressly invited so to do.[130] Ministerial Associations were restrained from licensing candidates to preach outside the territorial jurisdiction of the Association granting licensure.[131] Ministers of the Establishment were empowered to lodge certificates with society clerks, attesting that men had entered their parishes and preached therein without first having received permission. No provision for ascertaining the facts in such cases was contemplated by the law. Justices of the peace were forbidden to sign a warrant authorizing the collection of a minister’s rates until they were assured that no such certificate had been lodged against the clergyman involved.[132] Heavy bonds were to be imposed upon ministers from outside the colony who might venture to preach within its limits without invitation, with the added provision that such men were to be treated as vagrants and bundled out of the colony as speedily as possible.[133] Ministers who had not been graduated from Yale or Harvard, or some other Protestant college or university, were debarred from all benefits of ministerial support as provided by law.[134]

The climax of the high-handed measures of the supporters of the Establishment was doubtless reached in this legislation. A retrograde movement in the cause of religious toleration set in,[135] the direct effects of which were not quickly overcome. Henceforth dissenters were to be annoyed and hampered as they had not been before. The necessity of appearing in person before the General Court when seeking exemption from ecclesiastical burdens,[136] the embarrassments and hardships that dissenting ministers suffered in their efforts to supply religious counsel to their people,[137] the growing aversion of the General Court to granting permission to unorthodox and dissenting groups to organize,[138] all serve to indicate the strength of the reaction that had set in.

The impressions produced by this excess were even more significant than the direct results, deplorable as the latter were.[139] In the middle of the eighteenth century the Standing Order in Connecticut had gained for themselves an unenviable record for bigotry and persecution from which the events of the latter half of the century by no means cleared them.

For a quarter of a century following the enactment of the legislative measures just considered, no advance step, general in its nature, was taken. Here and there a little larger measure of freedom was doled out to this or that aggrieved dissenting minister or church; but the situation as a whole was not materially changed. “Restriction was the rule, freedom the exception, and government the absolute and irresponsible dispenser of both.”[140] Finally, in 1778 some evidence that a change in sentiment was under way appeared in the fact that Separatists were exempted from taxes to support the state church. Six years later, in 1784, more satisfactory proof was forthcoming. That year, by the passing of an act entitled, “An Act for Securing the Rights of Conscience in Matters of Religion, to Christians of Every Denomination in this State,”[141] the General Court tacitly abrogated the Saybrook Platform and set the institutions of religion in Connecticut upon a new base. The act declared

It was further declared that Christians of every Protestant denomination, “whether Episcopal Church, of those Congregationalists called Separates, or of the people called Baptists, or Quakers, or any other Denomination who shall have formed themselves in distinct Churches or Congregations,” and who helped to maintain their worship, were to be exempted from the support of any other church than their own. Further, all such dissenting congregations were to enjoy the same power and privileges in the support of their ministry, and in the building and repairing of their houses of worship, as those churches which were established by law. Such persons as did not belong to any of these dissenting bodies were to be taxed for the support of the state church.[142]

The spirit of toleration had traveled far; but that the struggle for complete religious freedom was yet by no means won will immediately appear from the following restrictions: (1) Protestants only were contemplated as beneficiaries under the act; (2) the principle of taxation for the support of the state church was retained; (3) the obligation to support some form of Christian worship was required; (4) the benefits of that provision of the act which guaranteed to dissenters exemption from ecclesiastical taxation were to be available only on the condition that a certificate, signed by an officer of a dissenting congregation, should be deposited with the clerk of the state church near which the dissenter lived.

A formidable number of the objectionable features of the older legislation were thus retained. The state church was still in existence. Taxation for the support of religion was still the law of the commonwealth. Dissenters were still compelled to put themselves to the trouble and humiliation of obtaining the detested certificates. Besides, the ghost of religious persecution was not yet laid. Goods and chattels of the religiously indifferent, or of conscientious dissenters, continued to be seized and sold by officers of the law, to discharge unsatisfied levies made for the support of the Establishment.[143]

The principle of requiring certificates proved to be the chief bone of contention between the Standing Order and dissenters as the century drew to its close. The rapid growth of dissenting bodies in the period following the Revolution, aided as they were by a zeal for proselyting on the part of their leaders and by a set of the public mind decidedly favorable to their propaganda because of their democratic leanings, was met by corresponding anxiety and sternness on the part of the supporters of the Establishment. Confusing, as they habitually did, the interests of the state church with the cause of religion, the representatives of the Standing Order led themselves to believe that a contagion of irreligion was spreading alarmingly, and therefore restrictive religious legislation was in order.[144] In line with this conviction, in May, 1791, the legislature enacted a law requiring dissenters to have their certificates signed by at least one, and preferably two, civil officers, instead of as provided in the act of 1784. This law proved peculiarly distasteful to dissenters.[145] A powerful opposition developed; and the authorities, made aware of the fact that they had over-reached themselves, six months later withdrew the obnoxious act, substituting for it another which permitted each dissenter to write and sign his own certificate, but requiring him, as before, to file it with the clerk of the state church near which he lived.[146] The momentary wrath of dissenters was thus mollified; however, the retention of the certificate principle continued to gall and to excite them. A disagreeable discussion dragged itself along, marked by acrimony, pettiness, and personal attacks on both sides; by a consolidation of the forces and interests of dissenters and Republicans on the one hand, and a growing sense of injured innocence and of concern for the fate of religion on the part of the Standing Order.[147]

By way of summary, a few general comments, based upon the situation in Massachusetts and Connecticut jointly considered, are now in order. Looking back upon the activities of the Standing Order after the lapse of something more than a century, we see that they were zealously contending for an ideal which had won their whole allegiance—a body politic safeguarded and made secure by a state church. To prevent deterioration of the state and its people the bulwark of a religion established by law seemed imperative.[148] The interests involved were far too serious to put them at the mercy of a voluntary support of the institutions of religion.[149] Moreover, an established church seemed to this group of men no necessary enemy of non-conformity. The degree of toleration possible under an establishment of religion was deemed sufficient actually to favor the growth of sects, and at the same time to make the sway of orthodoxy secure.[150]

How, then, were men of such opinions to interpret the ever-growing agitation for a larger measure of toleration, accompanied as it was by an ever-growing resentment toward the political influence and activities of the Standing Order, as anything other than a covert attack upon religion itself? These bitter complainings over the religious measures adopted by government, these flauntings of authority through stubborn refusal or passive resistance to the payment of ecclesiastical rates, these unrelenting efforts to dispossess the clergy of the Establishment of their traditional honors and emoluments—what were they all but so many proofs of the impiety of the age and an abominable conspiracy to drive pure religion from the land? As the representatives of the Standing Order saw the situation, the church was obviously in grave danger and to steady the tottering ark of the Lord was the most imperative duty of the hour.

On the other hand, in the light of the growing liberality of the times, it was impossible for the forces of dissent to be patient with such men. They were men of the past, callously unresponsive to the spirit of the new age. They were an embittered minority, exerting themselves to keep a struggling and confident majority a little longer under their thumb. They were mischievous meddlers in the affairs of others, using religion as a cloak to hide their social and political self-seeking. As for the cry, “The church is in danger!”, that was to be regarded as the most signal proof of the hypocrisy of those who raised it.[151]

During the eighteenth century the progress of religious thought in New England in the direction of liberal positions was marked. Near the beginning of the century, in his Ratio Disciplinae, Cotton Mather was able to speak confidently of the solid and compact character of religious opinion in his generation, and felt free to dispose of the subject with a few general statements regarding the universal adherence of the churches of New England to the orthodox standards of the mother country. He made the added comment: “I can not learn, That among all the Pastors of Two Hundred Churches, there is one Arminian: much less Arian, or a Gentilist.”[152] At the end of the century, it is very certain that no such all-inclusive generalization, by the widest stretch of the imagination, would have been possible. Indeed, when a noted Philadelphia minister of the day, the Reverend Ashbel Green, visited New England in 1791, he found an aptitude for polemical discussion on the part of the clergy which impressed him as most extraordinary. Through his contact with the Boston Ministerial Association he encountered “Calvinists, Universalists, Arminians, Arians,” and at least one “Socinian,” all participating in pleasant social intercourse, despite their radical differences of religious opinion. To the mind of the visiting Philadelphia clergyman the situation was explicable only on the basis of an extreme laxness in the matter of religious sentiments and doctrines, a judgment which obviously requires some modification in view of the predilection for doctrinal controversy which he himself remarked.[153]

From the days of the Great Awakening, the lines of doctrinal cleavage had grown increasingly distinct in the religious thought of New England. Apart from those effects of the revival which already have been noted,[154] it may be said that the one really permanent result of that notable wave of religious enthusiasm was the polemical controversy which it precipitated.[155] The question concerning the “means of grace,” around which the controversy in its initial stage raged,[156] became larger and more complicated by virtue of the massive system of theology which Jonathan Edwards developed upon the fundamental notion of the utter worthlessness of man, due to his depravity and consequent helplessness.

Into the metaphysical subtleties of the Edwardean system we are not called to go; it is sufficient to observe that the reaction against such a conception of human nature was bound to be marked in the midst of an age generally responsive to enthusiasms born of fresh conceptions of the essential dignity and worth of man. The virtue of humility was destined to divest itself of much of that abject quality with which the whole Calvinistic theology had clothed it, and to accommodate itself to candid and unblushing convictions of human endowments, abilities, excellencies, and prospects, because of which it would be impossible to retain the traditional contempt for human nature.[157]

The reaction against the Edwardean theology was fruitful in the encouragement of liberal notions along other closely related lines. The bold necessitarianism of that system could not but produce an effect generally favorable to the promotion of man’s confidence in himself, in the midst of an age characterized by prodigious political initiative and love of liberty, and by conceptions of the Deity which stressed the very vastness of those reaches of space stretching between God and the world. The heavy emphasis which the new theological system laid upon the notion of the divine sovereignty, true as it was in spirit to the traditional Puritan interest in the cause of theocracy, was doomed to find itself belated within an age beginning to glow with humanitarian passion and with enthusiasm for the ideal of democracy; and, positively considered, to give impulse in the general direction just noted. The very heat and intensity of the controversy which, from the middle of the century on, filled New England with its din and confusion, in itself bore witness to the degree of pressure which the more secularized notions of human worth and destiny had begun to exert. That a system so staggering in its assumptions, so all but invulnerable in its logical self-consistency, and withal so inexorable in its demands upon the human spirit for the abandonment of all thought of independent ability and worth, having been brought to close quarters with more or less vague and undefined, but none the less vital human interests and passions, should tend to give rise to a variety of radical opinions and judgments, was to be expected. And thus it operated,[158] not, to be sure, without the assistance of significant concurrent causes.

The wash of the wave of the great deistic controversy on the other side of the Atlantic was not without its effect upon the religious thought of New England. The direct evidence of this is, however, much more elusive than one might at first suppose.[159] That the reading public was acquainted with the writings of the great English deists, Herbert, Chubb, Shaftesbury, Tindal, Wollaston, Toland, Hume, is clear from references to their works which appear with considerable frequency in the private and public records of the day; but invariably these references are made in a more or less casual manner, and, for the most part, in connection with sweeping generalizations made by the clergy respecting the prevailing scepticism of the age. Apart from such allusions and the appearance of titles in the lists of booksellers who were advertising their stocks in the newspapers, it would be difficult to cite specific evidence, Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason alone excepted, to the effect that the impact of English deism upon the thought of New England was anything like direct.

The amount of independent literary expression which the doctrines of deism obtained in New England was practically negligible.[160] The quality was even less noteworthy. Ethan Allen’s Reason the Only Oracle of Man,[161] published in 1784, was perhaps the only production of native orig into which anything like general attention was accorded; and the evident inability of this work to root itself deeply in the thought of the people, despite the prestige due to the author’s Revolutionary record, was demonstrated the moment Paine’s more serious work began to circulate in this country. The crudeness of Allen’s style, coupled with the ferocity of his onslaught on the advocates and absurdly credulous devotees of supernaturalism, as Allen regarded the orthodox party of his day, went far toward determining the attitude of contempt and high-minded scorn with which his work was generally treated, when leaders of conservative thought deigned to notice it at all.[162]

But Thomas Paine’s attack upon the foundations of supernaturalism was by no means taken lightly. From the time of its arrival in this country, the Age of Reason produced an amount of excited comment which gave to its appearance and circulation all the elements of a sensation.[163] The natural interest of the public in the appearance of the production was admittedly great; but at least a partial explanation of the attention which the book received is to be found in the fact that its author was able to effect plans to have the work published cheaply abroad and extensively circulated in this country.[164] In any event, whatever may have been the precise influences which promoted the distribution and perusal of the book, the Age of Reason aroused an immediate public interest, chiefly antagonistic, the like of which probably had been accorded to no other volume circulated in America before its day. The bumptious and militant nature of its deism, as well as its raw and unceremonious ridicule of much that passed in the thought of the times for essential orthodoxy, drew popular attention from the worthier and more exalted passages in the volume,[165] and irritated the opposition beyond control. A vociferous chorus of hostile criticism arose.[166] Clergymen poured out the vials of their wrath and execration, despite their evident desire to appear undisturbed; newspaper editors and contributors gave voluminous expression to their sense of chagrin and pained disappointment that so scandalous and impious a publication should be in circulation;[167] observers of and participants in the college life of the day felt called upon to lament the extent to which unsettling opinions of the nature of those expressed by Paine had laid hold of the imaginations and altered the convictions of youthful minds.[168] The impression that Paine had aided and abetted the cause of impiety and irreligion was general.[169]

It was not the doctrinal controversies of the period, however, nor yet the intrusion of the principles of natural religion, by which the unsettling tendencies of the times were believed to be promoted most directly and powerfully. In the judgment of practically every leader of conservative thought in New England, and of all America for that matter, that unholy preëminence belonged to the effect produced upon the public mind in this country by the French Revolution, and more especially the impious principles of infidelity and atheism by which, they concluded, that colossal overturning of institutions was stimulated and guided. No single phenomenon of our national history stands out in sharper relief than the impression which the great European convulsion made, first upon the imaginations and later upon the political and religious ideals of the citizens of this young republic in the West, who followed the earlier fortunes of the French Revolutionary cause with breathless interest and concern. The memory of the recent struggle of the American colonists for independence, for the happy issue of which France had made such timely and substantial contributions, in itself supplied a pledge of profound sympathy for that country. That the spark of revolution had been communicated originally by America to France was, moreover, one of the favorite conceits of the day. Gratitude, the bonds of political friendship and alliance, the supposed similarity of popular enthusiasms and passions—all the essential factors requisite for the development of a spirit of tender and affectionate regard were clearly present.

Thus it happened that from the hour when the first rumblings of the impending European revolution were heard on this side of the Atlantic, the citizens of these states evinced an earnest and sympathetic concern;[170] and as the revolutionary drama unfolded through its earlier scenes the enthusiasm and lively sympathy of the people grew apace. The atmosphere was electric. Anticipations of citizens ran high. Liberty was again in travail.[171] The institutions of freedom were about to descend upon another nation. The shackles of political and ecclesiastical tyranny were being torn from the limbs of twenty-five millions of slaves.[172] Having revolutionized France, America’s ideals might be expected to leaven the whole of Europe.[173] The millennium could not be far away. Admiration for the French cause and devotion to it swept all before them. So much so that when, in the autumn and winter of 1792–93, the thrilling news of the successes achieved by the French armies in repelling the invaders of the new republic began to arrive in America, a wave of irresistible and uncontrolled enthusiasm swept over the land.[174] The “French Frenzy,” with its maudlin outbursts of professed attachment for the great watchwords of the Revolution—Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—with its pageants and civic feasts, its cockades and liberty caps, its ribald singing of republican songs and dramatic intertwinings of the standards of the two sister republics, deserves a place altogether by itself as an extraordinary expression of the public mind.

To this wild riot of tumultuous and spectacular enthusiasm an effectual check was soon to be given. With the execution of Louis XVI, in January, 1793, the admiration of the more thoughtful observers of the Revolution, who had accustomed themselves to pass soberly but apologetically over the earlier excesses of the revolutionists as unavoidable concomitants of a struggle necessarily desperate in its character,[175] received a rude shock.[176] The brutal death of a monarch whose personal services on behalf of their own cause during the days of deep necessity had been considerable, brought home to American citizens their first clear conviction respecting the excessively bloody and relentless spirit of the forces in control of the Revolution. The day of disillusionment had dawned. Leaders of thought made no effort to conceal their sense of mingled horror and regret. The amount of popular sympathy for the cause of the Revolution was still too great to allow anything approaching a general condemnation; but none the less a decided chill was felt.[177]

The murder of the king soon enough appeared to Americans a mere incident in a wild orgy of unbridled violence and blood-letting. A stream of information concerning the swift march of events in France, mostly having to do with enormities and excesses which gave all too patent proof of the fury of the currents of passion upon which the participants in the Revolution were being tossed, began to pour its waters through the channels of public utterance and discussion in America. The atrocities of the Reign of Terror brought fully home to the American public, to the conservative-minded particularly, the conviction that the Revolution had become diverted from its original principles and aims, and had descended to the plane of brutal despotism, reprehensible both in principle and practice above anything the eyes of men had ever beheld.[178] The leaders of the Revolution clearly were not the high-minded patriots and emancipators their admirers on this side of the ocean had adjudged them to be. The terms “assassin,” “savage,” “monster,” “regicide,” began to be employed as the only fit terms whereby to characterize the leading figures in an awful spectacle of butchery and rapine.[179]

But not until the religious aspects of the French Revolution are considered, is the deep revulsion of feeling which took place in New England completely laid bare. This feature of the situation had been regarded with deep solicitude from the beginning;[180] and as time went on through the cloud of confusion raised by the dust and smoke of the political developments of the Revolution, it became increasingly clear to the conservative class in New England that an alliance between the forces of anarchy and impiety had been effected. What else could explain the rapid development of a fierce reforming spirit, which in turn, within the space of not more than two or three years at the most, stood forth as a spirit of overt persecution in the handling of all ecclesiastical affairs? The vociferous affirmation of deistical and atheistical principles on the part of Revolutionary leaders in the councils of clubs and in sessions of the National Assembly, the reiteration and growing boldness of the demand for the elimination of the ancient system of religious faith, the successive efforts to supplant that system, first with the cult of Reason and later with the cult of the Supreme Being,—how were these to be construed other than as the expressions and performances of men who were bent upon the utter abolition of the Christian faith? There was wanting in New England, of course, intimate knowledge of the true state of French religious affairs and of the reactionary spirit displayed by the higher clergy and their devotion to the cause of monarchy. Little was known of the growing sense of resentment felt by a people who had begun to contemplate frankly the burdens which had been imposed upon them under the ancient régime, the multiplication of religious offices and establishments, the absorption of the land into vast ecclesiastical estates, and the indifference of the spiritual guides of the nation to private and public distress. It was hardly to be expected that spectators as far removed from the scene as the shores of New England would be able to interpret correctly the essential spirit of a people who had grown weary of the abuses of a religious system in whose principles and purer forms they still believed, despite the momentary violence of their leaders.[181]

By the year 1794 the belief that the revolutionists in France had added atheism to their program of anarchy was well established in New England. The difficulty of weighing this opinion exactly is greatly enhanced on account of the political handling which the situation received. Over the question of foreign alliances the Federalists and Republicans had split violently in 1793. The war which had broken out between England and France, regarded from any point of view, was of vast consequence in the eyes of the citizens of this young nation, just beginning to cope with the problems of diplomacy and international relations. The outbreak of hostilities between the two European nations with which the United States had had and must continue to have its most intimate and important intercourse forced an alignment among its citizens so sharp and decisive as to constitute the outstanding political feature of the country for years to come.[182] For reasons which we shall not now pause to consider, Federalists championed the cause of England in the European conflict, and Republicans the cause of France. Seizing upon the issue of “French infidelity,” Federalist editors were disposed to see in it the gravest peril by which the American people were threatened. The anti-religious spirit of the French Revolutionary leaders represented a danger-point of infection against which every citizen must needs be warned. On the other hand, Republican editors felt it incumbent upon them to do their utmost to minimize the genuineness and importance of all such damaging views of the case.[183]

But considerations of party advantage fall far short of furnishing a full explanation of the general sense of alarm the people of New England experienced on account of the open hostility to religion which they saw manifest in France. Out of France came a series of reports which taken together were calculated to raise their fears to the highest pitch. The confiscation of the property of the church, the abolition of religious vows, the promulgation of the “Civil Constitution of the Clergy,”[184] the banishment of non-juror priests, the infamy of the Goddess of Reason, the abolition of the Christian Sabbath, the secularization of festivals[185]—here were evidences of impiety as shameless as they were shocking.[186] Such principles and measures appeared as so many deadly thrusts at the Christian faith. It was difficult, if not impossible, for the most sympathetic admirers of France to find a way to explain this ominous cast of events.[187]

How thoroughly the fear of “French infidelity” had gripped the imaginations of men in New England will appear more clearly if the following considerations are weighed. The presumption that the intimate relations which Americans had been having with the people of France had produced a serious blight of morals and religion among the former, seemed to find its justification in the currents of skepticism and irreverence which, by common consent, had set in among the youth of the land. This phase of the situation as reflected in conditions within the colleges was held to be particularly deplorable. It was the settled conviction of President Dwight of Yale that “the infidelity of Voltaire and his coadjutors” had a special attractiveness for youth, for reasons which do not impress one as being highly charitable, to say the least:

This somewhat theoretical view of the case was not unsupported by tangible evidence. The students of Yale were sceptical.[189] In the religious discussions of the lecture-rooms the cause of infidelity stood high in student favor.[190] Of seventy-six members of the class that graduated in 1802 only one was a professed Christian at the time of matriculation.[191] At the time President Dwight entered upon the leadership of the college, the college church was practically extinct.[192] Altogether the situation was highly alarming to the friends of Christianity.[193]

The condition of affairs at Harvard showed little if any improvement. When William Ellery Channing matriculated in that institution in 1794 he found the thought and principles of the students on a lower level than they ever before had reached.[194] The French Revolution, which generally throughout the country had shown itself to be contaminating, already had left its marks deep upon the life of the college. The old loyalties were shaken; conversation had become bold and daring in tone; the foundations upon which morals and religion had been built in the past were now believed to be seriously undermined.[195]

On the part of men who held themselves responsible for the education of youth, everywhere the feeling prevailed that a popular mood of skepticism had developed for which the precepts and example of the French were chiefly responsible.

With the clergy—and in their state of mind we are interested especially—this feeling was hardly less than an obsession. The special conservators of the moral and religious health of the people, they had long been concerned over the possible effects of radical French political and religious notions; and when they seemed to see the triumph of those notions in the excesses of the French Revolution, their sense of alarm was intense. It was, of course, the exhibition of violent hostility to organized Christianity in France which the Revolutionists were making, over which their hands were flung high in horror.

The clergy of New England, like the majority of their fellow-countrymen, in the beginning had not adopted an attitude of hostility toward the French upheaval. There was that in the earlier struggles of the French people to tear the yoke of despotism from their necks which appealed mightily to the sympathies of the clerical heart. It was not without some travail of spirit that clergymen arrived at the conclusion that their sympathy and enthusiasm for the French Revolution had been misplaced.[196] Two factors contributed to this result. In the first place, the changed complexion of the Revolution; in the second place, the new party alignments at home which brought the orthodox clergy, almost to a man, into the Federalist camp.

Which of these two factors was the more decisive in its power of control over the clerical mind, it would be difficult to say. As a matter of fact, the two influences were interrelated to an extraordinary degree. Political alignments, as we have seen, were interwoven closely with the question of foreign alliances. Conversely, the status of foreign affairs was bound to react strongly upon the judgments of clergymen with whom patriotic concerns were second in importance only to the interests of religion. Be that as it may, the years 1793 and 1794 saw the Federalist clergy in New England rapidly veering round to the fixed position of vehement antagonism to French principles. The following is a brief account of the course they pursued.

On the occasion of the annual fast in Massachusetts, April 11, 1793, the Reverend David Tappan, professor of divinity in Harvard College, preached a sermon that indicated the trend of a clerical mind.[197] In language not unmarked by vagueness, he called upon his hearers to bear witness to the present corrupted state of religion, due to the bold advance and rapid diffusion of “sceptical, deistical, and other loose and pernicious sentiments.” Waxing more confident, he continued: “May I not add that a species of atheistical philosophy, which has of late triumphantly reared its head in Europe, and which affects to be the offspring and the nurse of sound reason, science, and liberty, seems in danger of infecting some of the more sprightly and free-thinking geniuses of America.”[198]

Something more than a year later, a pulpit deliverance was made at Medford, Massachusetts, on the occasion of the annual state Thanksgiving, which supplied ample evidence that clerical fears were rapidly gathering force. Medford’s minister, the Reverend David Osgood,[199] was heard in a vigorous discussion of the leading political and religious concerns of the day.[200] First taking occasion to eulogize the Federal government by way of atonement for the failure of Governor Samuel Adams to make reference to the same in his Thanksgiving proclamation, the reverend gentleman thereupon launched into a vehement denunciation of the Democratic Societies,[201] because of their subservience to foreign emissaries, and because of the outrageous activities of Minister Genet. Not content with this, he proceeded to lay heavy emphasis upon the ferocious zeal and desperate fury which the French were manifesting in their attacks upon the institutions of religion, the far-reaching import of which, he declared, was already apparent in the fact that, under the power of their blind devotion to the French cause, not a few American citizens were casting off their allegiance to the Christian religion.[202]

The notes of warning sounded by Osgood in this sermon were both clear and loud. They fell on numerous sympathetic and responsive ears. Committed promptly to type, the sermon passed rapidly through six editions, a sufficient proof of the extent of the sensation which it produced. Its author’s reputation was established; but beyond this, and what is more to the point, the shibboleths of future clerical pronouncements had been uttered. Henceforth the public utterances of the Federal clergy were to be characterized by a violent antagonism to the French Revolution and the spread of French influence in America.[203]

The chorus of clerical complaint on account of the dangers that threatened the cause of religion, either because of the progress of the Revolution abroad or the overt and secret diffusion of infidel principles at home, grew steadily in volume. One or two added instances of this type of pulpit utterance will suffice.

Tappan was again heard from, in February, 1795, on the day set for the observance of the national thanksgiving.[204] He dealt with the political situation at length, and emphasized particularly the destructive effects of French influence. Before his sermon was committed to the hands of the printer, Tappan was made acquainted with the fact that the minister of Rowley, the Reverend Ebenezer Bradford, had made certain apologetic comments, on the occasion of the national thanksgiving, respecting the importance of French success to the peace and tranquility of America, and the propriety of seeking the reason for the recent insurrection in western Pennsylvania in “impolitic laws” rather than in French influence exerted through Democratic Clubs,[205] as Federalists had made bold to claim.[206] To these observations Tappan made the following sharp retort:

Medford’s minister acquitted himself with something more than his customary fiery earnestness on the occasion of this same national festival. Mounting his pulpit, he pictured to his hearers “the reign of a ferocious and atheistical anarchy in France,” whose authors had “formed the design of bringing other nations to fraternize with them in their infernal principles and conduct.”[208] Their emissaries, Osgood argued, have spread themselves abroad and entered into every country open to them. In Geneva these abandoned creatures have been “horribly successful in overthrowing a free government but lately established, and in bringing on, in imitation of what had happened in their own country, one revolution after another.” The same identical agents have found their way into the United States and have begun here their poisonous fraternizing system.[209] The sermon as a whole could scarcely have been more violent in tone. It is very clear that Osgood had resolved to do what he could to rouse the country.

As a direct result of this kind of pulpit utterance—a result that doubtless had much to do with persuading the clergy that an alarming decline of religion was under way in New England—the charge of “political preaching” rapidly developed into one of the standing accusations of the day. The bitterness of party strife grew apace. Opposition to Federalist measures of government, such as Jay’s Treaty and the handling of diplomatic relations with France, mounted steadily higher. In consequence, the Federal clergy found themselves drawn farther and farther into the maelstrom of political discussion. Out of this developed the sentiments entertained by the opposition that the clergy were the tools of the Federalists, and that public occasions were eagerly pounced upon by them and used to promote the cause of party advantage.

This shaft struck home; and yet not so much in the nature of a personal affront as an added proof that a state of deep impiety had settled down upon the land. Well might the clergy lament, not that they had been so foully slandered, but that they were called upon to reckon with a people who had drifted out so far upon the sea of irreverence and disrespect. To illustrate: The Reverend Jeremy Belknap was before the convention of the clergy of Massachusetts, in May, 1796, to preach the convention sermon. His mind turned to this new burden which had lately fallen on the already heavily-laden shoulders of the ministry. Thus he sought to mollify the wounded feelings of his brethren:

A couple of years later another staunch clerical supporter of Federalist policies, the Reverend John Thornton Kirkland, minister of the New South Church in Boston, came somewhat closer to the main point. The spirit of the times, he urged, had greatly changed, and that for the worse. Clergymen now were being severely censured for what only a few years earlier they had been warmly commended for as constituting a peculiar merit. The leaders of the American Revolution, for example, had praised the clergy for throwing the weight of their influence into the political scale, recognizing that there exists a moral and religious as well as a civil obligation on the part of ministers to warn the people of the dangers which threaten their liberty and happiness. But now, however, at a time when the dearest interests of religion and patriotism, of church and state, are fiercely assailed and imperiled, the clergy are met with calumny and insult when they venture to speak out. Only the debasement of morals and piety could explain so lamentable a transformation.[211]

A growing sensitiveness to the objections of Republican partisans that they were stepping aside from the legitimate responsibilities of their calling and prostituting the functions of their sacred office to unworthy ends, is apparent on the part of the clergy;[212] but when the very slander and abuse which they suffered supplied added evidence, if that were needed, that the institutions of religion and of government were being rapidly undermined, there could be no damping of their spirit nor turning back from the performance of a service, however unappreciated, to which by tradition and by present necessity they believed themselves bound.

Thus matters stood with the clergy of the Standing Order in New England at the close of the eighteenth century. Whether they were mistaken or not, a state of general irreligion seemed to them to have been ushered in. On all sides the positions of traditional orthodoxy were being called in question. The cause of revealed religion had found new enemies, and the cause of natural religion new agencies for its promotion. The French Revolution had given a terrifying exhibition of what might be expected to happen to a nation in which radical and sceptical opinions were allowed to have complete expression. As for the progress of impiety at home, the youth of the land were contaminated, the state of public morals was unsound, opposition to measures of government was increasing in power and virulence, the institutions of religion were commanding less and less respect, the clergy were treated with a coldness and criticalness of spirit they had never faced before. Seeking for the causes of this baneful condition of affairs, the clergy believed they were to be found mainly in the dissemination of revolutionary opinions issuing from France, but in part also in native tendencies to exalt reason and throw off the restraints of government in church and state.

Before taking leave of the subject, a few final illustrations may be considered by way of fixing upon the mind the strength of this general impression which the New England clergy entertained.

On the occasion of the general fast, May 4, 1797, at West Springfield, Massachusetts, the Reverend Joseph Lathrop preached a sermon to which he gave the expressive title, God’s Challenge to Infidels to Defend Their Cause.[213] The inspiration of the discourse was drawn from the conviction that “this is a day when infidelity appears with unusual boldness, and advances with threatening progress, to the hazard of our national freedom and happiness, as well as to the danger of our future salvation.”[214] According to this interpreter of the signs of the times, the dissemination of infidelity was to be regarded as the outstanding fact in the life of America, as well as in the life of the world.

An unusually lugubrious view of the situation was that taken by the Reverend Nathan Strong, in the sermon which he preached, April 6, 1798, on the occasion of the Connecticut state fast. In the eyes of this modern Jeremiah, the situation was desperate almost beyond remedy:

Far less subjective in its analysis was the sermon which the now celebrated minister of Medford, the Reverend David Osgood, preached not many days later, on the occasion of the national fast.[216] Once more the eyes of his hearers were invited to contemplate the horrible spectacle abroad. It had now become certain that the legislators of France had abolished the Christian religion. Preposterous indeed was the idea of those who supposed that they were engaged in anything so beneficent as “stripping the whore of Babylon, pulling down the man of sin, destroying popery,”[217] and making way for the introduction of the millennium. That which they had set their hearts upon was to bring it to pass that Christ and His religion should no longer be remembered upon the earth. The French republicans were so many infernals who had broken loose from the pit below.[218] Their profession of principles of liberty and philanthropy were deceptive in the highest degree. They sought to fraternize with other nations merely to seduce them. Their emissaries employed the arts of intrigue and corruption, they were charged to stir up factions, seditions, rebellions, so as to disorganize established governments and make them more readily the prey of the infamous French government.[219]

That these were not the pulpit utterances of men of peculiarly morbid dispositions, who stood apart from the main currents of thought and life in their day, would seem to be proved by the following instances of formal declarations issued by associations of churches.

On the 17th of May, 1798, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, then in session in the city of Philadelphia, issued an address to the members of its various congregations scattered throughout the country, urging attention to the extraordinarily gloomy aspect of affairs. The situation was interpreted as follows:

As to the “moral causes” referred to, the address proceeds to define them as “a general defection from God and corruption of the public principles and morals,” the evidences whereof are such as a general dereliction of religious principle and practice, a departure from the faith and simple purity of manners for which the fathers were remarkable, a visible and prevailing impiety, contempt for the laws and institutions of religion, and “an abounding infidelity.”[221]

The same year, on May 31, the Congregational clergy of Massachusetts, assembled in annual convention, “without a dissenting vote” adopted an address to their churches, wherein they expressed their deep sorrow and concern on account of “those atheistical, licentious and disorganizing principles which have been avowed and zealously propagated by the philosophers and politicians of France; which have produced the greatest crimes and miseries in that unhappy country, and like a mortal pestilence are diffusing their baneful influence even to distant nations.”[222] A year later the same body of clergy, again assembled in their annual convention, formulated and later published an address similar in tone, but strongly emphasizing the American aspects of the case. The growing disbelief and contempt of the Gospel are loudly lamented; the lack of exemplary piety and morality even among the members of churches, and the dissipation, irreligion, and licentiousness prevalent among the youth of the day, are accounted to be of so much weight as to constitute a national apostasy. “The voice of God to us in these events,” continues the address, “is emphatically this: Come out of the infidel, antichristian world, my people; that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.”[223]

To a very considerable number of earnest lovers of religion in New England and elsewhere throughout the nation, the century’s sun seemed to be setting amid black and sullen clouds of the most ominous character.

POLITICAL ENTANGLEMENTS AND HYSTERIA

Party history in New England, as elsewhere throughout the Union, began with the inauguration of the new government in 1789.[224] Such differences of opinion concerning matters of public policy as had previously existed were confined to unorganized groups whose leaders depended chiefly on the devotion of their personal following to mould popular opinion. But the setting up of the Federal government and the fixing of national standards brought to light issues which challenged fundamental conceptions and interests, and a definite rift in public sentiment was not long in appearing. By 1793 the main line of political cleavage was plainly visible. The Federalists, who stood for the importance of a strong central government, found themselves confronted with an organized opposition to which in time the terms Anti-Federalists, Republicans, and Democrats were applied.[225]

In 1793 the war between England and France came into American politics, providing issues for party controversy for years to come. The sympathies of the Federalists, who numbered in their ranks the conservative and aristocratic elements in the population, inclined strongly toward England; whereas the sympathies of Republicans, who attracted to their standard the radicals of the country concerned in the democratization of government, were disposed with equal warmth toward France.

The promulgation of the Neutrality Proclamation[226] of President Washington, April 22, 1793, seemed to settle the question of foreign alliances before the matter had become acute. On the whole, the response which New England gave to the President’s proclamation was gratifying. Messages of cordial approval came pouring in from many quarters.[227] The majority of the people rejoiced in the course of prudence and foresight which the national government had been led to pursue.

Still New England was not wholly satisfied. The sentiments of all her people had not been served. An opposition of respectable proportions developed. The columns of the public press carried numerous articles[228] voicing various degrees of hostility to the President’s cause of neutrality and affording ample evidence that instead of solidifying the sentiments of the people on the subject of foreign alliances, the proclamation had the effect of widening the breach between the political forces of the country.

This aspect of the case was much aggravated by two important circumstances, one of which developed simultaneously with the publication of the proclamation of neutrality, and the other came to light soon after. These two circumstances were the coming of Genet and the rise of the Democratic Societies.

In no part of the country was the news of the arrival of the French minister received with less suspicion than in New England.[229] Republican newspapers were, of course, loud in their exclamations of satisfaction over the word that came out of the south concerning the arrival and subsequent activities of the amazing French diplomat, so young, so ardent, so eloquent, and so absurd. Editors of Federalist journals, while in no mood to be swept off their feet by the latest excitement of the hour, yet showed no disposition to cavil or express distrust.

Such, however, were the exceptional performances of this altogether exceptional diplomat, who insisted on comporting himself more like a ruler of the people of this nation than an accredited representative to their government, that the day of revulsion and deep resentment could not long be postponed.[230]

The stir created by the activities of Genet, great as it was, soon was swallowed up in the excitement produced by the sudden emergence of a new factor in American politics; viz., indigenous political organizations that were secret. Coincident with the arrival of Genet, and with a view to capitalizing the state of public feeling that his arrival and reception brought to a head, there sprang up in various parts of the country a group of organizations devoted to the propagation of ultra-democratic ideals. These Democratic Societies, or Clubs, were destined to exert a degree of baneful influence upon political feeling out of all proportion to their actual number and weight.[231] Needless to say, the excited state of public feeling, together with the total unfamiliarity of American citizens with political agencies of a secret character, were responsible for this result. The embarrassments under which the French cause in America momentarily suffered on account of reports concerning the multiplied atrocities of the Reign of Terror and the swelling tide of popular resentment because of the indiscretions of Minister Genet, might induce the judgment that the times were unpropitious for the development of organizations whose sympathy for the principles of the French Revolution was notorious.[232] But there was another side to the situation. The heated public discussions provoked by Madison’s Commercial Resolutions, Clark’s Non-Intercourse Resolution, and the appointment of John Jay as Minister Extraordinary to Great Britain, set free such a torrent of anti-British feeling that the spirit of republicanism lifted its head with renewed vigor and stimulated a public sentiment decidedly favorable to the rapid formation and spread of the new organizations. From the day that the first of these sinister Societies was established, and its statement of principles blazoned forth in a multitude of newspapers throughout the country,[233] the public mind found itself wrought upon by a new species of excitement, by suggestions of tricks and plots, by appeals to passion and unreasoning fear, all conspiring to inject into the national spirit an element of haunting suspicion from which it was not soon to be cleared.

The fact that at least five of these Democratic Societies were located in New England strongly suggests the immediate concern which the people of that section were bound to have because of these unexpected and ominous secret political associations.[234] The creation of the Boston Society became at once the occasion of virulent opposition and infuriated comment. Organized in the late fall of 1793[235] under the innocent title, the Constitutional Club, the principles and alliances of the organization became quickly known, with the result that the already agitated waters of local party feeling were disturbed beyond all previous experience. Citizens whose sympathies were fully with the conduct of affairs under the Federalist régime were quick to believe that henceforth they might expect to be threatened, brow-beaten, and checkmated in a ruthless and scandalous fashion because of the activities of this pernicious Club.[236] They anticipated an amount of secret and dastardly political interference on the part of the Club, because of which the lives of their public officials would be filled with distraction and the minds of decent men aspiring to public office would be thrown into a state of disinclination and repugnance.

Nor in this did they prove to be false prophets. Newspaper innuendoes, sharp and poisonous as deadly arrows, were let fly with abandon; town meetings were disturbed and the opponents of democracy and French republicanism put to rout; the public mind was so altered that Democrats who sought to deprive Federalists of their hold upon the “Boston Seat” in the legislature were completely successful in their efforts. In these and similar ways the citizens of Boston were given tangible proofs of how effective an instrument of political action such an organization as the Constitutional Club could be.[237]

The address which President Washington delivered before both houses of Congress, November 19, 1794, wherein he traced a causal connection between the Democratic Societies and the Whiskey Rebellion, characterizing the former as “self-created societies” which had “assumed a tone of condemnation” of measures adopted by the government, being actuated by “a belief that, by a more formal concert” they would be able to defeat those measures,[238] proved to be a mortal blow to these secret organizations, and in New England, as elsewhere throughout the country, had consequences beyond the disappearance of the Clubs. Eagerly and with unconcealed joy, Federalist editors and orators seized upon the President’s denunciation and turned it to immediate political account.[239] A flood of condemnation and answering vituperation was instantly released. The champions of Federalism were at pains to secure publication of the discussions which took place in the national congress respecting the precise character of the response to be made to the President’s address, with special reference to his condemnation of the Democratic Clubs.[240] They were at equal pains, also, to lay hold of the President’s pregnant phrase, “self-created societies,” and turn it to account: that phrase should be regarded as a designation equally applicable to the odious Jacobin Clubs of France.[241] Henceforth the whole democratic faction might reasonably be expected to work under cover “to unhinge the whole order of government, and introduce confusion, so that union, the constitution, the laws, public order and private right would be all the sport of violence or chance.”[242]

Mortified and discomfited Republican editors made such response as they could. The members of the Clubs were declared to be independent citizens who were acting within their rights in so banding together. They were “proceeding in the paths of patriotic virtue with a composure and dignity which become men engaged in such important and timely services”;[243] whereas their opponents were men who hungered for the loaves and fishes of the government and who shared the secret fear that they would be discovered or have their plans deranged.[244]

The continual harping of the Federalist press on the phrase “self-created societies” particularly touched the raw. Was not the Society of the Cincinnati self-created? And are not many of the members of that organization war-worn soldiers of the American Republic? In a state of society in which we see such veterans toiling for their daily sustenance, while other men, enjoying the hard-earned property of the former, riot in all the luxuries of life, how can one but exclaim, O Tempora! O Mores![245] The national congress, moreover, might well be expected to be engaged in much more serious and timely business than to be burdening its sessions with discussions respecting the affairs of private societies.[246]

The hostile attitude that the Federalist clergy took toward the Democratic Societies gave special irritation to the editors of the Independent Chronicle. Because he ventured in his thanksgiving sermon of November 20 (1794) to denounce all Constitutional Societies, the rector of the Episcopal congregation in Boston was held up to ridicule in the columns of the Chronicle as a “ci-devant lawyer” and “a certain Episcopalian ‘thumper of the pulpit drum,’” whose pastoral care many of his substantial members had already renounced because of his injection of political discussion into the sacred sphere of the pulpit; while others had given evidence of their disposition to follow the example of the more courageous members of the flock, “if virulence is to take the place of religion.”[247] But the Reverend David Osgood, Medford’s “monk,” on account of his more extended and violent treatment of the Democratic Societies in his thanksgiving day sermon,[248] gave much deeper offence. That he should have represented these organizations as controlled by the same principles as the incendiary French Jacobin Clubs, and as set to watch the Federal government and plot its overthrow through the support of pernicious and inveterate faction, was more than ardent democratic patriots could endure. “A Friend to the Clergy and an Enemy to Ecclesiastical Presumption,” together with “A Friend of Decency and Free Inquiry,” sought entrance to the willing columns of the Chronicle in order to express their contempt for “a Rev. gentleman” who could lend himself to the peddling of such illiberal sentiments and could show himself capable of acting in a manner unbecoming the character of a Christian and a gentleman, and also in order to draw conclusions derogatory to his reputation as a scholar.[249] The castigations of “Stentor” were not less caustic. The red-hot anathemas of the Reverend Parson Osgood, whining preacher of politics that he was, had no other effect than to singe and sear the reputation of their author. “On the Constitutional Society their influence has been as small as though they had been issued in the form of a BULL from the Chancery of the Pope.”[250]

Thus were protracted for a time the frantic efforts of Democratic editors and scribblers to repair the damage which “the clownish Bishop of Medford”[251] and his clerical confederates were supposed to have effected.[252] But the main injury had by no means come from that quarter. Such was the veneration for the name and person of the great Washington throughout New England that few men had the hardihood to launch their resentment and abuse against him; yet it was his hand, and none other, that wrote the word Ichabod across the brow of these secret political associations. From the day that his address reproaching them was made, their doom was sealed. That doom might tarry for a season, but it could not long be averted. The apologists and defenders of these organizations which the presidential censure had made odious, might fiercely exert themselves to show how innocent they were of the offences charged and how unimpaired in usefulness they remained after the thrust had been made. This was but whistling to keep up their courage. The prestige of the Societies had been effectually destroyed by the President’s denunciation; in a surprisingly short time these ambitious and troublemaking organizations sank into desuetude and were lost to view.

The deep impression they had made upon the public mind was, however, much less readily effaced. That impression resolved itself into a memory most unpleasant and disturbing. For us the significance of these organizations is found chiefly in the fact that, appearing at a time when the two great opposing political parties were developing, and having vehemently espoused the cause of France in a rabidly democratic spirit, they consequently added enormously to the passion and the suspicion of the day. To the Federalists they were dangerous intruders, groups of unprincipled demagogues organized for unpatriotic purposes, working in the dark, ashamed to stoop at nothing in the way of duplicity and subterfuge, of deception and intrigue, if by any means the vicious designs of their hearts could be furthered. Thus they not only helped to make the strife of parties vituperative and bitter; in addition they made familiar to the thought of a great body of citizens in America the idea that the intrigues of secret organizations must needs be reckoned with as one of the constant perils of the times. Henceforth it would be easier to fill the public mind with uneasiness and gloomy forebodings on account of the supposed presence of hidden hostile forces working beneath the surface of the nation’s life. Should inexperienced and unsuspecting souls profess their incredulity, the appeal to the example of the Democratic Societies might be expected to go far toward dissolving all indifference and trusting unconcern.[253]

To trace in detail the increasingly bitter party strife in New England would not only call for the canvassing of material already well known, but would lead us far afield from the special object of this investigation. Only the main features of the case need to be noted.

The temporary check the Democrats suffered on account of the suppression of the secret political clubs was soon removed by the wave of anti-British sentiment that swept the country upon the publication of the treaty which John Jay negotiated between Great Britain and the United States, late in the autumn of 1794.[254]

The truth is, nothing less than a howl of rage went up from the throats of the people of the United States, and the voices of the men of New England were by no means lost in the chorus.[255] Nothing that could have been said to inflame the blind and passionate anger of the people was omitted. The United States, it was asserted, had been resolved back into the colonies of Great Britain.[256] The Senate had bargained away the blood-bought privileges of the people for less than the proverbial mess of pottage. It had signed the death-warrant of the country’s trade and entailed beggary on its inhabitants and their posterity forever.[257] The people’s cause had been most perfidiously betrayed. The trading class, whose pecuniary interests would be jeopardized if England were to be left free to prey upon our commerce, especially if the way should remain open for the two countries to drift into actual war, might show itself disposed to make a choice of the lesser of two evils and accept the treaty; but the great mass of the people were indignantly hostile, it must be added, to the point of unreason.[258]

The promulgation of the treaty by Washington, February 29, 1796, as the law of the land, had the effect of bringing to a close a period of agitation which deeply affected the national life.[259] For one thing, the violence of party spirit had been so augmented that henceforth there were to be no limits to which men would not go in the expression of their antipathies and prejudices. Even the great Washington had not been able to escape the venom of the tongue of the partisan in the controversy which had raged over the treaty.[260] A condition of the public mind which not only permitted but supported the burning in effigy of its public servants; which consented to brutal campaigns of newspaper calumniation, so unrestrained and indecent that the reader looks back upon them with shame; to the circulation of incendiary handbills and scurrilous pamphlets; to participation in lawless gatherings in which riotous utterances of the most violent character were freely made and disgraceful actions taken[261]—this could not possibly make for a wholesome discipline of the passions of the people.[262]

For another thing, the spirit of devotion to the cause of France had been greatly refreshed and quickened by the agitation over the treaty. From the moment that information concerning the nature of the treaty began to circulate, the cry of “British faction” was taken up by the Democrats and used with telling effect. That the treaty was an infamous instrument arranged for no other purpose than to injure the French cause was generally believed.[263] From beginning to end, Democrats could find nothing in the treaty which had not been directly inspired by hostility to France. Apart from the damage that would ensue to American commerce, the treaty would work for the elevation of monarchical and the undoing of republican principles.[264] Once again George the Third had become the master of the citizens of America, and thus the great accomplishments of the American Revolution had been made to count for nought. British gold had succeeded in effecting the betrayal of the republican cause in this country, and thus had worked itself into a strategic position where it could more easily strangle the life out of the spirit of republicanism in Europe, now so sorely beset in France.[265]

One other by-product of the agitation that arose over the treaty has been dwelt upon at length in another connection, but it should be adverted to briefly here. It was inevitable that a discussion so vital, so heated, and so protracted as that of which we have just been taking account, should draw into it those guardians of morals and mentors of public spirit in New England, the Federalist clergy.[266] The disturbance of the public mind over the treaty had been marked by two features full of grave import in the clerical view: vicious attacks upon the officers and measures of the existing government, and a reinvigorated crying-up of French political and religious notions.

The offices of government were all, or nearly all, in the hands of Federalists. This being the case, their occupants were doomed to be the chief targets of resentment and villification by men who found such a measure of government as Jay’s Treaty obnoxious in the extreme. But if officers of government were to be pilloried in the stocks of public slander and abuse, how then was the government itself to command the respect and obedience of its citizens? The Federalist clergy of New England saw the pathway of duty shining clear: they must hold up the hands of government at any hazard. Hence it happened that the outcry against “political preaching” grew rapidly in volume from 1795 on.[267]

As for the renewed zeal of the Democrats in the interests of French revolutionary ideals, that found a special point of interest and concern for the Federalist clergy in the prominence which the rapid growth of republicanism secured for Thomas Jefferson. An ardent friend of the French Revolution, a lover of French philosophy, the enemy of religious intolerance, in personal faith a deist—were not these sufficient to damn the man as an unbeliever and an atheist in the eyes of New England clergymen, to whom the faintest breath of rationalism was abhorrent and the very notion of toleration suspect? Accordingly the New England clergy launched a fierce attack upon him as the arch-apostle of the cause of irreligion and free-thought.[268] In language carefully guarded, his name usually being omitted, Jefferson was pointed out as the leader of the hosts of infidelity whose object was the extermination of the institutions of religion and the inauguration of an era wherein every man should think and do that which was right in his own eyes.[269]

Very few of the events in our national affairs which link together the history of the last decade of the eighteenth century are significant for our purpose. Having sought to discover the chief occasions for the apprehension and distress which weighed upon the minds of the citizens of New England, we may now proceed to focus attention exclusively upon the last three years of the century, within which developed that special disturbance of the public mind with which we are primarily concerned.

And first let it be said, we are approaching a period of as intense strain and nervous excitability as this nation in all its history has known. When Thomas Jefferson, in November, 1796, wrote Edward Rutledge of his deep personal satisfaction that he had escaped the presidency, he may have been influenced by unworthy but certainly not by imaginary constraints. “The newspapers,” so his letter runs, “will permit me to plant my corn, peas, &c., in hills or drills as I please … while our Eastern friend will be struggling with the storm which is gathering over us; perhaps be shipwrecked in it. This is certainly not a moment to covet the helm.”[270] Never has a defeated candidate for the presidency had more solid grounds for the justification of his fears, or shall we say, his hopes? The severe strain of domestic strife was about to be enormously augmented by a series of untoward and alarming events in the field of foreign relations, certain of which must receive our particular attention.

The complete change in the character of the relations between the United States and France is for us a matter of the first importance. The publication of the treaty negotiated between the United States and Great Britain by Jay produced definitive results as respects the attitude of France. With some reason that instrument was interpreted as inimical to the interests of the latter country, and the government and people of this nation were not long left in doubt of the fact.[271] By the employment toward her former ally of a policy of coercion, of which two chief instruments were the destruction of American commerce upon the high seas and the overbearing and insolent conduct of diplomatic negotiations, France speedily addressed herself to the task of attempting to gain by pressure what she conceived she had lost in the way of prestige and material advantage. The result was, to the discomfiture and disgrace of the Democrats in particular and to the alarm of the country in general, that the United States was made aware of the fact that its government was being driven into a corner from which, as far as a human mind could foresee, the only avenue of honorable escape would be recourse to arms.

The damage which American commerce sustained at the hands of French privateers is rendered appreciable when the following circumstances are taken into account. Within the year following the publication of the extraordinary decrees against the commerce of neutral nations, which the French Directory promulgated, beginning with June, 1796, something over three hundred American vessels had been captured. The crippling blow to American commerce was by no means the sole consideration in the case. In numerous instances the crews of captured vessels were treated in such an outrageous and brutal manner as to inflame and gall the American spirit beyond endurance. On account of abuses which American shipping and commerce had suffered previously, by virtue of methods adopted by England and France to gain control of the seas, the strain imposed upon the nation had been severe; but now that a sweeping and utterly ruthless policy of commerce-destruction had been inaugurated by the French, forbearance was no longer possible. In his maiden speech in the national congress, Harrison Gray Otis, Massachusetts’ gifted young representative, put the case with dramatic eloquence:

It was not to be expected that a deeply injured people, to whose just sense of wrong and indignation the youthful Federalist orator had given such exact expression, could long be restrained from acts of reprisal and war.

To the sense of injustice was added the burden of fear. The idea began to take possession of the minds of leaders of thought in America that France had darker and more terrible purposes in her councils than the blighting of American commerce in retaliation for the treaty-alliance which had recently been concluded with Great Britain; she sought war, war which would supply to her the opportunity to visit upon this nation the same overwhelming disasters which her armies had heaped upon the nations of Europe. The French, it was believed, were busy with schemes for employing the world in their favor and were drunk with the vision of universal dominion.[273] The true explanation of French violence and arrogance was to be sought in her aims at universal empire.[274] Her ravenous appetite could not be satisfied; she had resolved to make of the United States another mouthful.[275] What reason had the citizens of this country to claim exemption from the general deluge? Having fastened the chains of slavery upon nation after nation in Europe, the generals of France were now planning fresh triumphs; with our armies of the Mississippi and Ohio, of the Chesapeake and Delaware, her forces would contest the field on American soil.[276] Had not her geographers already partitioned the country according to the new system of government which would here be imposed?[277] Did not her agents and spies fill the land, constantly exerting themselves to thwart the purposes of the American government and to render fruitless its policies of administration?[278]

Such fears may not be brushed aside as silly and chimerical, in view of the steady stream of information which came across the Atlantic, announcing the downfall of one nation after another as the result of French intrigue and the prowess of French arms.[279] Besides, there was probably not a solitary Federalist leader in the United States who did not believe that French ministers and agents were in secret league with influential representatives of the Democratic party.

The bullying treatment which the French Directory accorded the ministers and envoys of this nation added much to the heat as well as to the dark suspicions which characterized public feeling in America. A government which boldly assumed to treat with impudent indifference and coldness one accredited minister of the United States, while at the same time it lavished the most extravagant expressions of friendship upon another whose disappointed executive had reluctantly summoned him home,[280] was obviously pursuing a course so high-handed and insolent as to stir the last dormant impulse of national honor. But the hot flame of public indignation which burst forth in this country when it became known that its Minister Plenipotentiary, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, after months of painful embarrassment and hazard, marked by neglect, evasions, and threats of arrest, was returning home, defeated in purpose, was as nothing to the lava-like stream of infuriated anger which swept through the land when it became known how treacherously the three envoys of the national government, Pinckney, Marshall, and Gerry, had been used.

By common consent the publication of the X.Y.Z. despatches, early in April, 1798, put the top sheaf upon a long series of intolerable actions which this nation had suffered at the hands of the government of France. Like a flash it was made clear that not mere whimsicality and offended hauteur were at the bottom of the unsatisfactory dealings which our ministers had had with the French: we had sent our ambassadors to negotiate with men who knew how to add bribery to threats. Though the government of France might seek to save its face on the pretext that the mysterious French emissaries had acted without proper warrant, yet back of the negotiators was Talleyrand, and back of Talleyrand the Directory. The revulsion of feeling in the United States was complete. All innocent delusions were shattered; all veils torn away. What the French government desired in its negotiations was not political sympathy, not commercial cooperation, not a fraternal alliance between two sister republics in order that the flame of liberty might not perish from the earth; what it desired was money—money for the pockets of the Directory and its tools, “for the purpose of making the customary distribution in diplomatic affairs,” money for the public treasury that the Directory might find itself in a position to give a “softening turn” to certain irritating statements of which President Adams had delivered himself in his message to the Fifth Congress.[281]

The passion for war with France became the one passion of the hour. Only abandoned men, men whose desire for “disorganization” was the one yearning of their hearts, were unresponsive to the spirit of militant patriotism which swayed the people’s will:[282] such at least was the confident and boastful view of Federalist leaders, and for once they were able to gauge accurately the depth and power of the currents of popular sympathy. That hour had passed when men could say, as Jefferson had but a brief day before President Adams turned over to Congress the astounding despatches, “The scales of peace & war are very nearly in equilibrio.”[283] The heavy weight of the despatches had sent the bowl of war to the bottom with a resounding thud.

So it seemed at the moment; and yet, though there has seldom been an hour in our national history when all purely factional counsels were more effectually hushed and when the war fever mounted higher, an amazing period of uncertainty and of conflicting impulses and passions immediately set in.

Addresses and memorials to the President came pouring in, pledging to the government the full confidence of its citizens and unswerving loyalty and support. Volunteer military companies sprang into existence in every quarter over night. War vessels were purchased, or their construction provided for, by public subscription and presented to the government. The white cockade, new emblem of an aroused public spirit, generally appeared. The fierce slogan, “Millions for defence, but not one cent for tribute!” and the tuneful strains of “Hail Columbia” and “Adams and Liberty” went ringing through the land. Within a brief period of little more than three months, Congress passed no less than twenty acts for the strengthening of the national defence.[284]

This was one side of the matter; there was another, as events soon made clear. The President, it appeared, was not at one with the more ardent leaders in his own political camp, whose resolution for war was unbounded; he exhibited an attitude of indifference to the whole notion of open war with France that became increasingly manifest as the weeks went by. The President would temporize; he would try to avoid the crisis by sending new commissioners to France to reestablish friendly relations. Against such a policy many of his advisers protested furiously. Besides, the problem of supplying the army with leaders who should serve with Washington had resulted in an unseemly struggle as to whether this or that patriot should stand next to the great hero of Mount Vernon. The President’s policy of conciliation took on the appearance of shameless procrastination;[285] the imbroglios of the Federalist leaders aroused public suspicion, and invited to the garnished hearth the spirits of confusion and clamor.

Those evil spirits, however, which most effectively coöperated to make the last state worse than the first came as the result of the extraordinarily stupid and blundering measures which the Federalists adopted to curb the activities of resident aliens and the abuse of free speech. Beginning with the Naturalization Act of June 18, 1798, there followed in quick succession three other repressive measures, the Act Concerning Aliens of June 25, the Act Respecting Alien Enemies of July 6, and the Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes against the United States (the Sedition Act) of July 14.[286] The purpose of these famous acts has already been indicated; the impulse out of which they grew is not so easily determined. Was it that the heads of the national government really anticipated danger on account of the presence of a multitude of foreigners and the unlicensed freedom of action and public utterance which thus far had been allowed?[287] Was it that the memory of more than four years of biting satire and vicious calumny which the opposition had visited upon the heads of Federalist leaders had filled the latter with longings for revenge? Or was it that, conscious of their undisputed control of national affairs and carried away by the sense of their power, the Federalist leaders proposed to show how strong and effective a centralized government could become? No single alternative, doubtless, suggests the full truth. No matter; the effect which these measures produced is, with us, the main point, and to that we turn.

No milder word than maddening will adequately describe the effect of these measures. All the old wounds were opened, all the old antipathies aggravated. Editors and pamphleteers, statesmen and demagogues, tore at each others’ throats as they had never done before and have never done since. A veritable “reign of terror” filled the land.[288] Insult and violence were everywhere. Mobs tore down liberty-poles which Federalist hands had erected and put in their place other poles bearing symbols of defiance to “British faction” and tyrannous Federal government; or the action was reversed, with Federalist mobs tearing down the standards of the opposition. White cockades were snatched from the hats of men who supported the government, and once more the black cockade blossomed forth. Toasts were drunk over tavern bars and on public occasions to the confusion of the British Eagle or the Gallic Cock; to the health and prosperity of the Federal government or to the downfall of tyrants; to the alien and sedition laws, with the fervent wish that “like the sword of Eden [they] may point everywhere to guard our country against intrigue from without and faction from within”;[289] or to “freedom of speech, trial by jury, and liberty of the press,”[290] according as the adherents of one faction or the other were assembled for patriotic or convivial purposes. Raucous and ribald outbreaks of party feeling burst out in the theaters to the interruption of performances, the confusion of performers, and the breaking of not a few heads. Such was the lighter and more ludicrous aspect of affairs.

But beneath this effervescence honest and whole-hearted antagonism to the odious legislation surged in countless breasts. In the power of an anger which scorned all frivolous and tawdry action, men declared their deep and irrevocable opposition to such measures of government. That respectable and well-meaning aliens, from lack either of inclination or opportunity to become citizens, should be expelled from the country, or remaining here should become the targets of suspicion and the victims of political oppression; that opposition to government must henceforth wear a muzzle, with a heavy bludgeon meanwhile held menacingly over its head; that the damage done by favored partisan scribblers was not to be repaired by answering opponents; and all this under the guise of laws which, whatever their intention, operated to the enormous disadvantage of one of the two great political bodies of the day—these were things not to be endured by men to whom liberty was the very breath of life.

The actual amount of personal injury inflicted by the operation of the alien and sedition laws was not enormous, though certainly not negligible. A considerable body of aliens fled the country, either during the period when the alien laws were pending or immediately after they went into effect.[291] Probably something more than a score of individuals were arrested under the sedition law, less than half of whom were compelled to stand trial.[292] But once again popular judgment was based upon qualitative rather than quantitative grounds. The popular sense of personal liberty had been outraged by these acts.[293] The Federalist leaders by their precipitate and inconsiderate action had very much overshot the mark and were about to bring their house tumbling down about their heads. As for the opposition, those of its leaders whose highest political interest was party advantage lived to bless the day when, blinded by hysteria or lust of power, the Federalist party made the alien and sedition acts the law of the land. Six months after these unsavory measures were passed, discerning Democrats were able to rejoice that this body of legislation was operating as a powerful sedative to quiet the inflammation which that “God-send” to the Federalists, the X.Y.Z. despatches, had incited.[294] By their own blunder in party strategy the Federalists had alienated the sympathies of the people and given to the ground-swell of republican principles a tremendous impetus which carried them to a speedy triumph.

Once again our special interest must be allowed to center upon a secondary element in the situation, i. e., the over-wrought tension of nerves because of which the most fantastic and unlikely of happenings seemed wholly within the circle of reason and probability. The circumstances which have just been considered were, in the main, upon the surface. As such they were capable of being evaluated and weighed. But who was to say that they were not attended by subterranean influences and designs? Affairs everywhere, be it remembered, were moving with incredible swiftness. In every quarter the beleaguered forces of conservatism found themselves surrounded and hemmed in by radical elements which manifested a spirit of militancy and a resolute will to conquer. With the European situation to lend strong emphasis to the suggestion of sinister tendencies and secret combinations, it cannot be thought extraordinary that here in America, where traditional opinions and institutions were as certainly being undermined, the conviction should take root that beneath all this commotion over foreign and domestic policies secret forces must be at work, perfecting organizations, promoting conspiracies, and ready at any hour to leap forth into the light to throttle government and order.

There is, of course, no desire to make it appear that apprehensions concerning hidden designs and movements were generally shared by the citizens of the United States. There was then, as there has always been, a very large body of citizens whose faith in the stability and high destiny of the nation made them immune to such fears; calm and philosophic souls who were equally unmoved by the rant of the demagogue or the distracted mood of the self-deceived alarmist. Their sympathy for and their faith in the democratic tendencies of the age inhibited every impulse to despair. But there were also other men, as has been the case in every deeply agitated generation, who were fully persuaded that they were able to catch deeper tones than their neighbors, to whom the gift had been given to read the signs of the times more accurately than their fellows. For them the conclusion was inescapable that no postulate which did not leave room for secret combinations was adequate to explain the peculiar cast of events in the United States at the end of the eighteenth century. To dismiss the case of such men with the casual judgment that they were temperamentally susceptible to such impressions, is to rule out of account the extraordinary character of the age to which they belonged. Apropos of this observation, the two following items are deserving of notice.

Some time previous to the celebration of the national fast of 1798, three anonymous letters were flung into President Adams’ house, announcing a plot to burn the city of Philadelphia on the day of the approaching fast. Convinced that the matter was of moment, the President made the contents of the letters publicly known. As a result, many people of the city packed their most valuable belongings and prepared to make a quick departure in the event that the threats made should come to fulfilment.[295] Was this a mere “artifice to agitate the popular mind,” the work of “war men” who were restless and impatient for an immediate declaration of hostilities against France? Quite possibly. Such, at least, was the private opinion of Thomas Jefferson.[296] But who was to know? The true lay of the land was not easily to be discovered in the midst of an age when, in the language of a contemporary, “all the passions of the human heart are in a ferment, and every rational being from the throne to the cottage is agitated by the picturesque circumstances of the day.”[297]

Alexander Hamilton left among his manuscripts certain comments which he had made upon the character and import of the French Revolution. Before we turn to consider the European Illuminati and the outcry against its alleged presence in the United States, we may, by perusing this document, throw a little added light upon the gnawings of anxiety and fear which were felt at the time by very rational gentlemen in America.

THE EUROPEAN ORDER OF THE ILLUMINATI

That great European movement in the direction of the secularization of thought to which the expressive term, the Aufklärung or Enlightenment, has been applied, and which reached its apogee in the latter half of the eighteenth century, encountered a stubborn opposition in southern Germany in the electorate of Bavaria. The pivot of Bavarian politics, particularly from the beginning of the sixteenth century, had been the alliance which had been effected between the clerical party and the civil power. The counter reformation which followed in the wake of the Lutheran movement was able to claim the field in Bavaria without the necessity of a combat.

In the third quarter of the eighteenth century Bavaria was a land where sacerdotalism reigned supreme. Religious houses flourished in abundance; the number of priests and nuns was incredibly large.[299] So easy were the ways of life in that fertile country that a lack of seriousness and intensity of feeling among the masses flung open the door for superstitious practices which made the popular religion little better than gross fetichism. So-called “miraculous” images were commonly paraded through the streets; innumerable statues and sacred relics were exposed to the gaze of crowds of the faithful; the patronage of the saints was assiduously solicited. Among the educated there was a widespread conviction that the piety of the people was ignorant and that their trustful attitude made them the prey of many impostors.

The degree of power to which the representatives of the Society of Jesus had been able to attain in Bavaria was all but absolute.[300] Members of the order were the confessors and preceptors of the electors; hence they had a direct influence upon the policies of government. The censorship of religion had fallen into their eager hands, to the extent that some of the parishes even were compelled to recognize their authority and power. To exterminate all Protestant influence and to render the Catholic establishment complete, they had taken possession of the instruments of public education. It was by Jesuits that the majority of the Bavarian colleges were founded, and by them they were controlled. By them also the secondary schools of the country were conducted.[301]

The prevailing type of education in Bavaria had little more to commend it than the popular type of religion.[302] The pedagogical aim of the Jesuits was the development of the memory with scant regard for other faculties of the mind. To learn the catechism, or in the case of advanced pupils to receive unquestioningly the dogmatic instruction offered by clerical pedagogues, was the ideal honored throughout the Bavarian schools. Books which bore the slightest taint of Protestant influence, or which in any other way gave evidence of a liberalizing spirit, were ruthlessly banned.[303]

Such were the conditions of life under which the great mass of the people lived. There was, however, a relatively small group of cultivated people in Bavaria who, despite the clerical oppression and bigotry from which they suffered, had contrived to share in the liberalizing spirit of the larger world. The censorship exerted by the Jesuits had found no adequate means to guard against the broadening influences of travel or of contact with travelers from other lands, or even to prevent the introduction of all contraband journals and books. The effect of the former had been to create a humiliating and galling sense of inferiority on the part of liberal-minded Bavarians,[304] while the latter had served to stimulate a thirst for the new knowledge which the rationalism of the age made available. To this small group of discontented and ambitious spirits the ancient faith had ceased to be satisfactory, and the burden of clericalism had become insufferable.

The University of Ingolstadt, established in 1472, was destined to become a rallying point for these radical tendencies. In the middle of the sixteenth century the Jesuits had gained control of its faculties of philosophy and theology, and for two centuries thereafter the university had been counted upon as the chief fortress of clericalism in Bavaria.[305] By the middle of the eighteenth century the deadening effect of the rigorous censorship exerted by the Jesuits had produced its full fruitage at Ingolstadt. The university had fallen into a state of profound decadence.[306]

With the accession of Maximilian Joseph[307] as elector, in 1745, the breath of a new life soon stirred within its walls. For the position of curator of the university the elector named a well-known and resolute radical of the day, Baron Johann Adam Ickstatt, and charged him with the responsibility of reorganizing the institution upon a more liberal basis.[308] Measures were adopted promptly by the latter looking to the restoration of the prestige of the university through the modernization of its life. The ban was lifted from books whose admission to the library had long been prohibited, chairs of public law and political economy were established, and recruits to the faculty were sought in other universities.[309]

It was, of course, not to be expected that the clerical party, whose power in the university, as has been intimated, was particularly well entrenched in the faculties of philosophy and theology, would retire from the field without a struggle.[310] A sharp contest arose over the introduction of non-Catholic books, into which the elector himself was drawn, and which in addition to the substantial victory that Ickstatt won, had the further effect of aligning the two parties in the university squarely against each other.[311] It was only a few years after this episode, when the Jesuits were still chafing under the sharp setback which their policies had suffered, that the name of Adam Weishaupt first appeared (in 1772) on the roll of the faculty of the university as professor extraordinary of law.

Weishaupt (born February 6, 1748; died November 18, 1830) entered upon his professional career at Ingolstadt after an educational experience which had made him a passionate enemy of clericalism. His father having died when the son was only seven, his godfather, none other than Baron Ickstatt, compelled doubtless by the necessities of the case, had turned the early training of the boy over to the Jesuits. The cramming process through which he thus passed was destined to prove unusually baneful in his case[312] on account of certain influences which penetrated his life from another quarter. Accorded free range in the private library of his godfather, the boy’s questioning spirit was deeply impressed by the brilliant though pretentious works of the French “philosophers” with which the shelves were plentifully stocked.[313] Here was food for the fires of imagination just beginning to flame up in this unsophisticated and pedantic youth. Here, also, were ready solvents for the doubts with which his experience with Jesuit teachers had filled his mind. The enthusiasm of the most susceptible of neophytes seized him: he would make proselytes, he would deliver others from their bondage to outworn beliefs, he would make it his duty to rescue men from the errors into which the race had long been plunged.[314] His object in life thus early determined, he threw himself with great zeal into the study of law, economics, politics, history, and philosophy. He devoured every book which chanced to fall into his hands.[315]

After graduating from the University of Ingolstadt in 1768, he served for four years in the capacity of tutor and catechist until his elevation to the rank of assistant instructor took place. The favor he was permitted to enjoy as the protégé of Ickstatt[316] brought him more rapid advancement than that to which his native abilities entitled him. In 1773 he was called to the chair of canon law, which for a period of ninety years had been held by representatives of the Jesuits.[317] Two years later, when he was but twenty-seven years of age, he was made dean of the faculty of law. Such a rapid improvement in his professional standing proved far from salutary. The young man’s vanity was immensely flattered and his reforming resolution unduly encouraged. His sense of personal worth as the leader of the liberal cause in the university quite outran his merit.[318]

Meantime the Jesuits, observing with deep resentment Weishaupt’s meteoric rise,[319] together with a growing disposition on his part to voice unrestrained criticism of ecclesiastical intolerance and bigotry, entered into intrigues to checkmate his influence and undermine his position.[320] The payment of his salary was protested and the notion that he was a dangerous free-thinker industriously disseminated.[321] On his part, Weishaupt did not scruple to furnish Ickstatt’s successor, Lori, with secret reports calculated to put the Jesuit professors in the university in an unfavorable light.[322] A disagreeable squabble resulted, marked on the one hand by clerical jealousy and pettiness and on the other by Weishaupt’s imprudence of speech[323] and indifference to considerations of professional honor.

The effect of this unseemly strife upon Weishaupt was to establish firmly in his mind the conviction that as the university’s most influential leader against the cause of ecclesiastical obscurantism he was being made a martyr for free speech.[324] In no way disposed to be sacrificed to the animosity of enemies whose power he greatly over-estimated, he arrived at the conclusion that a general offensive against the clerical party ought immediately to be undertaken. A secret association was needed which, growing more and more powerful through the increase of its members and their progress in enlightenment, should be able to outwit the manœuvres of the enemies of reason not only in Ingolstadt but throughout the world. Only by a secret coalition of the friends of liberal thought and progress could the forces of superstition and error be overwhelmed. Over the scheme of such an association consecrated to the cause of truth and reason, the self-esteem of Weishaupt kindled anew as he contemplated none other than himself at its head.[325]

His imagination having taken heat from his reflections upon the attractive power of the Eleusinian mysteries and the influence exerted by the secret cult of the Pythagoreans, it was first in Weishaupt’s thought to seek in the Masonic institutions of the day the opportunity he coveted for the propagation of his views. From this original intention, however, he was soon diverted, in part because of the difficulty he experienced in commanding sufficient funds to gain admission to a lodge of Masons, in part because his study of such Masonic books as came into his hands persuaded him that the “mysteries” of Freemasonry were too puerile and too readily accessible to the general public to make them worth while.[326] He deemed it necessary, therefore, to launch out on independent lines. He would form a model secret organization, comprising “schools of wisdom,” concealed from the gaze of the world behind walls of seclusion and mystery, wherein those truths which the folly and egotism of the priests banned from the public chairs of education might be taught with perfect freedom to susceptible youths.[327] By the constitution of an order whose chief function should be that of teaching, an instrument would be at hand for attaining the goal of human progress, the perfection of morals and the felicity of the race.[328]

On May 1, 1776, the new organization was founded, under the name of the Order of the Illuminati,[329] with a membership of five all told. The extremely modest beginning of the order in respect to its original membership was more than matched by the confusion which existed in Weishaupt’s mind as to the precise form which the organization had best take. Only three elementary grades, or ranks, had been worked out by him, and these only in a crude and bungling fashion, when the enterprise was launched. A feverish regard for action had full possession of the founder of the order; the working-out of his hazy ideas of organization might wait for quieter days.[330]

Out of the voluminous and rambling expositions which Weishaupt at various times made of the three primary grades, viz., Novice, Minerval, and Illuminated Minerval, the following brief descriptions are extracted.

To the grade of Novice youths of promise were to be admitted, particularly those who were rich, eager to learn, virtuous, and docile, though firm and persevering.[331] Such were to be enrolled only after their imaginations and desires had been artfully aroused by suggestions concerning the advantages to be derived from secret associations among like-minded men, the superiority of the social state over that of nature, the dependence of all governments upon the consent of the governed, and the delight of knowing and directing men.[332] Once enrolled, the instruction of each Novice was to be in the hands of his enroller, who kept well hidden from his pupil the identity of the rest of his superiors. Such statutes of the order as he was permitted to read impressed upon the mind of the Novice that the particular ends sought in his novitiate were to ameliorate and perfect his moral character, expand his principles of humanity and sociability, and solicit his interest in the laudable objects of thwarting the schemes of evil men, assisting oppressed virtue, and helping men of merit to find suitable places in the world.[333] Having had impressed upon him the necessity of maintaining inviolable secrecy respecting the affairs of the order, the further duties of subordinating his egoistic views and interests and of according respectful and complete obedience to his superiors were next enjoined. An important part of the responsibility of the Novice consisted in the drawing-up of a detailed report (for the archives of the order), containing complete information concerning his family and his personal career, covering such remote items as the titles of the books he possessed, the names of his personal enemies and the occasion of their enmity, his own strong and weak points of character, the dominant passions of his parents, the names of their parents and intimates, etc.[334] Monthly reports were also required, covering the benefits the recruit had received from and the services he had rendered to the order.[335] For the building-up of the order the Novice must undertake his share in the work of recruitment, his personal advancement to the higher grades being conditioned upon the success of such efforts.[336] To those whom he enrolled he became in turn a superior; and thus after a novitiate presumably two years in length,[337] the way was open for his promotion to the next higher grade.

The ceremony of initiation through which the Novice passed into the grade Minerval was expected to disabuse the mind of the candidate of any lingering suspicion that the order had as its supreme object the subjugation of the rich and powerful, or the overthrow of civil and ecclesiastical government.[338] It also pledged the candidate to be useful to humanity; to maintain a silence eternal, a fidelity inviolable, and an obedience implicit with respect to all the superiors and rules of the order; and to sacrifice all personal interests to those of the society.[339] Admitted to the rank of Minerval, the candidate received into his hands the printed statutes of the order, wherein he learned that in addition to the duties he had performed as novice, his obligations had been extended with special reference to his studies.[340] These were to be more highly specialized, and the fruits of his researches from time to time turned over to the superiors. In the prosecution of difficult labors of this character, he was to be free to call to his assistance other Minervals in his district.[341] He might also count upon the assistance of his superiors in the form of letters of recommendation in case he undertook travels in the pursuit of his studies; and should he form the resolve to publish his material, the order pledged itself to protect him against the rapacity of booksellers who might show themselves disposed to overcharge him for the works he wished to consult, as well as to render assistance in attracting the attention of the public to his work.[342]

In the assemblies of this grade the Minerval for the first time came into contact with the members of the order. In other words, his life within the society actually began.[343] The thirst for the sense of secret association with men of like interests and aims, which the members long novitiate had developed, began to find its satisfaction.[344] Ordinary Minervals and “illuminated” Minervals mingled together in these assemblies[345] and mutually devoted their deliberations to the affairs of the order.

To the grade Illuminated Minerval were admitted those Minervals who in the judgment of their superiors were worthy of advancement. Elaborate initiatory ceremonies fixed in the candidates mind the notions that the progressive purification of his life was to be expected as he worked his way upward in the order,[346] and that the mastery of the art of directing men was to be his special pursuit as long as he remained in the new grade. To accomplish the latter, i. e., to become an expert psychologist and director of men’s consciences, he must observe and study constantly the actions, purposes, desires, faults, and virtues of the little group of Minervals who were placed under his personal direction and care.[347] For his guidance in this difficult task a complicated mass of instructions was furnished him.[348]

In addition to their continued presence in the assemblies of the Minervals, the members of this grade came together once a month by themselves, to hear reports concerning their disciples, to discuss methods of accomplishing the best results in their work of direction and to solicit each other’s counsel in difficult and embarrassing cases.[349] In these meetings the records of the assemblies of the Minervals were reviewed and rectified and afterwards transmitted to the superior officers of the order.

Such, in brief, was the system of the Illuminati as it came from the brain of Weishaupt, its founder. By means of such an organization he proposed to effect nothing less than the redemption of the world. In its assemblies the truths of human equality and fraternity were to be taught and practised.[350] Its members were to be trained to labor for the welfare of the race; to strive for a civilization, not like that of the present, which left men savage and ferocious under its thin veneer, but one which would so radically change their moral dispositions as to put all their desires under the control of reason—the supreme end of life, which neither civil nor religious institutions had been able to secure.[351] The study of man was to be made at once so minute, so comprehensive, and so complete[352] that two immense advantages would result: first, the acquisition of the art of influencing favorably the wills of one’s fellows, thus making social reformation possible; and second, self-knowledge.[353] That is to say, the thorough scrutiny of the instincts, passions, thoughts, and prejudices of others, which the order imposed upon him, would react in turn upon the member’s judgment of his own personal life. As a result his conscience would be subjected to frequent examination, and the faults of his life might be expected to yield to correction. From both of these advantages, working together, a moral transformation of the whole of society would result, thus securing the state of universal well-being.[354]

But this conception of the order as essentially an instrument of social education requires to be balanced by another, viz., its anticlericalism. Its founder professed that at the time when the idea of the order was taking shape in his mind he was profoundly influenced by the persecutions which honest men of unorthodox sentiments had been compelled to suffer on account of their views.[355] Considerations growing out of his own personal embarrassments and imagined peril on account of his clashings with the Jesuits were also admittedly weighty in his thought.[356] It is therefore to be regarded as a substantial element in his purpose to forge a weapon against the Jesuits, and in a larger sense to create a league defensive and offensive against all the enemies of free thought.[357]

Accordingly, the expression of utterances hostile to Christian dogmas was early heard within the assemblies of the order,[358] and only the difficulty experienced in working out the supreme grade of the order inhibited Weishaupt’s intention of converting it into a council of war to circumvent and overwhelm the advocates of supernaturalism and the enemies of reason.[359] The pure religion of Christ, which, doctrinally conceived, had degenerated into asceticism and, from the institutional standpoint,[360] had become a school of fanaticism and intolerance, was pronounced a doctrine of reason, converted into a religion for no other purpose than to make it more efficacious.[361] To love God and one’s neighbor was to follow in the way of redemption which Jesus of Nazareth, the grand master of the Illuminati, marked out as constituting the sole road which leads to liberty.[362]

The objects of the order were such as to appeal to the discontented elements in a country suffering from intellectual stagnation due to ecclesiastical domination.[363] Despite this fact, its growth during the first four years of its existence was anything but rapid. By that time four centers of activity, in addition to Ingolstadt, had been established, and a total of possibly sixty members recruited.[364] While its visionary founder considered that a solid basis for encouragement had been laid,[365] as a matter of fact at the termination of the period just indicated the organization was seriously threatened with failure. Fundamental weaknesses had developed from within. Chief among these was the tension which existed almost from the first between Weishaupt and the men whom he associated with him in the supreme direction of the affairs of the order.[366] The thirst for domination, which was native to the soul of Weishaupt, converted the order into a despotism against which men who had been taught by their leader that they shared with him the innermost secrets of the organization, rebelled. The result was the constant breaking-out of a spirit of insubordination and a series of quarrels between the founder and his associates which rendered the future progress of the order very precarious.[367] The extreme poverty of the organization constituted another serious obstacle to its rapid growth. With a view to demonstrating the genuine disinterestedness of the society, an effort had been made from the beginning to emphasize the financial interests of the order as little as possible.[368] The rules of the organization were far from burdensome in this regard, and it is by no means surprising that many of the proposed measures of the leaders in the interests of a more extensive and effective propaganda proved abortive for the very practical reason that funds were not available to carry them into effect.[369]

A decidedly new turn in the wheel of fortune came some time within the compass of the year 1780,[370] with the enrollment of Baron Adolf Franz Friederich Knigge[371] as a member.

In the recruiting of this prominent North German diplomat Weishaupt and his associates found the resourceful and influential ally for which the organization had waited, a man endowed with a genius for organization and so widely and favorably connected that the order was able to reap an immense advantage from the prestige which his membership bestowed upon it. Two weighty consequences promptly followed as the result of Knigge’s advent into the order. The long-sought higher grades were worked out, and an alliance between the Illuminati and Freemasonry was effected.[372]

Such was the confidence which Knigge’s presence immediately inspired in Weishaupt and his associates that they hailed with enthusiasm his admission to the order, and gladly abandoned to him the task of perfecting the system, their own impotence for which they had been forced to admit.[373] Manifesting a zeal and competency which fully justified the high regard of his brethren, Knigge threw himself into the task of elaborating and rendering compact and coherent the childish ideas of organization which Weishaupt had evolved.

The general plan of the order was so shaped as to throw the various grades or ranks into three principal classes.[374] To the first class were to belong the grades Minerval and Illuminatus Minor; to the second,[375] (1) the usual three first grades of Masonry, Apprentice, Fellow, and Master, (2) Illuminatus Major, and (3) Illuminatus Dirigens, or Scottish Knight; and to the third class were reserved the Higher Mysteries, including (a) the Lesser Mysteries, made up of the ranks of Priest and Prince, and (b) the Greater Mysteries, comprising the ranks of Magus and King.[376]

A detailed description of the various grades of Knigge’s system would far outrun the reader’s interest and patience.[377] The present writer therefore will content himself with making such comments as seem best suited to supply a general idea of the revised system.

The grade Novice (a part of the system only in a preparatory sense) was left unchanged by Knigge, save for the addition of a printed communication to be put into the hands of all new recruits, advising them that the Order of the Illuminati stands over against all other forms of contemporary Freemasonry as the one type not degenerate, and as such alone able to restore the craft to its ancient splendor.[378] The grade Minerval was reproduced as respects its statutes but greatly elaborated in its ceremonies under the influence of Masonic usages with which Knigge was familiar.[379] The grade Illuminatus Minor was likewise left identical with Weishaupt’s redaction, save in unimportant particulars as to special duties and in the working-out and explanation of its symbolism.[380]

The three symbolic grades of the second class seem to have been devised solely for the purpose of supplying an avenue whereby members of the various branches of the great Masonic family could pass to the higher grades of the new order.[381] Membership in these grades was regarded as a mere formality, the peculiar objects and secrets of the order having, of course, to be apprehended later.

A candidate for admission to the grade of Illuminatus Major was first to be subjected to a rigorous examination as respects his connections with other secret organizations and his objects in seeking advancement. His superiors being satisfied upon these points, it was provided that he should be admitted to the grade by means of a ceremonial highly Masonic in its coloring. His special duties were four in number: (1) to prepare a detailed analysis of his character, according to specific instructions furnished him; (2) to assist in the training of those members of the order who were charged with the responsibility of recruiting new members; (3) to put his talents and his social position under tribute for the benefit of the order, either by himself stepping into places of honor which were open or by nominating for such places other members who were fitted to fill them; and (4) to coöperate with other members of his rank in the direction of the assemblies of the Minervals.[382]

Advanced to the grade of Illuminatus Dirigens, or Scottish Knight, the member bound himself with a written oath to withhold his support from every other system of Masonry, or from any other secret society, and to put all his talents and powers at the disposition of the order.[383] His obligations in this rank were purely administrative in their character. The inferior grades of the order were territorially grouped together into prefectures, and upon these the authority of the Illuminatus Dirigens was imposed. Each Illuminatus Dirigens had a certain number of Minerval assemblies and lodges assigned to him, and for the welfare of these he was responsible to the superiors of the order. The members of this grade constituted the “Sacred Secret Chapter of the Scottish Knights,” from which issued the patents of constitution for the organization of new lodges.[384]

To the first grade of the third class, that of Priest,[385] were admitted only such members as, in the grade Minerval, had given proof of their zeal and advancement in the particular sciences which they had chosen.[386] The initiatory ceremonies of the grade emphasized the wholly unsatisfactory character of existing political and religious systems and sounded the candidate’s readiness to serve the order in its efforts to lead the race away from the vain inventions of civil constitutions and religious dogmas from which it suffered.[387] Relieved entirely of administrative responsibilities, the members of this grade devoted themselves exclusively to the instruction of their subordinates in the following branches of science: physics, medicine, mathematics, natural history, political science, the arts and crafts, and the occult sciences. In brief, the final supervision of the teaching function of the order was in their hands, subject only to the ultimate authority of their supreme heads.[388]

Knigge’s statutes provided that only a very small number of members were to be admitted to the grade of Prince.[389] From this group the highest functionaries of the order were to be drawn: National Inspectors, Provincials,[390] Prefects, and Deans of the Priests. Over them, in turn, at the apex of the system and as sovereign heads of the order, ruled the Areopagites.[391]

So much for the external structure of the system which Knigge reshaped. With respect to the aims and principles of the order the modifications introduced by him were considerable, although scarcely as comprehensive as in the former case.[392] In certain instances the ideas of Weishaupt were retained and developed;[393] in others significant alterations were made or new ideas introduced. Of the new ideas the two following were unquestionably of greatest weight:[394] the notion of restricting the field of recruiting solely to the young was abandoned, and this phase of the propaganda was widened so as to include men of experience whose wisdom and influence might be counted upon to assist in attaining the objects of the order;[395] the policy was adopted that henceforth the order should not occupy itself with campaigns against particular political and religious systems, but that its energies should be exerted against superstition, despotism, and tyranny.[396] In other words, the battle for tolerance and enlightenment should be waged along universal and not local lines. Accordingly, the esoteric teaching of the order, under Knigge’s revision, was reserved to the higher grades.

The progress of the order from 1780 on[397] was so rapid as to raise greatly the spirits of its leaders. The new method of spreading Illuminism by means of its affiliation with Masonic lodges promptly demonstrated its worth. Largely because of the fine strategy of seeking its recruits among the officers and other influential personages in the lodges of Freemasonry, one after another of the latter in quick succession went over to the new system.[398] New prefectures were established, new provinces organized, and Provincials began to report a steady and copious stream of new recruits.[399] From Bavaria into the upper and lower Rhenish provinces the order spread into Suabia, Franconia, Westphalia, Upper and Lower Saxony, and outside of Germany into Austria[400] and Switzerland. Within a few months after Knigge rescued the order from the moribund condition in which he found it, the leaders were able to rejoice in the accession of three hundred members, many of whom by their membership immensely enhanced the prestige of the order. Students, merchants, doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, judges, professors in gymnasia and universities, preceptors, civil officers, pastors, priests—all were generously represented among the new recruits.[401] Distinguished names soon appeared upon the rosters of the lodges of the new system. Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, Duke Ernst of Gotha, Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar, Prince August of Saxe-Gotha, Prince Carl of Hesse, Baron Dalberg,[402] the philosopher Herder, the poet Goethe,[403] the educationist Pestalozzi,[404] were among the number enrolled. By the end of 1784 the leaders boasted of a total enrollment of between two and three thousand members,[405] and the establishment of the order upon a solid foundation seemed to be fully assured.[406]

But just at the moment when the prospects were brightest, the knell of doom suddenly sounded.[407] Dangers from within and from without, with bewildering celerity and concurrence, like a besom of destruction swept from the earth the order which Adam Weishaupt, with such exaggerated anticipations, had constituted out of a little group of obscure students at Ingolstadt, on May Day, 1776.

The internal difficulties were of the nature of dissensions among the chiefs. The old jealousies that existed between Weishaupt and the Areopagites[408] before Knigge reconstructed the order were not eradicated by the introduction of the new system, and in course of time they flamed forth anew.[409] But ugly in temper and subversive of discipline and order as these petty contentions were, they were of little importance as compared with the fatal discord which arose between Weishaupt and Knigge. The spirit of humility that the former manifested in 1780, when in desperation he turned to Knigge for assistance, did not long continue. Aroused by the danger of seeing his personal control of the order set aside and himself treated as a negligible factor, Weishaupt sought opportunities of asserting his prerogatives, and the ambition of Knigge being scarcely less selfish than that of Weishaupt, the two men quarreled repeatedly and long.[410] So bitter and implacable the spirit of the two became that in the end, exercising a discretion dictated by despair rather than generosity, Knigge withdrew from the field, leaving Weishaupt in undisputed possession of the coveted headship of the order.

But the fruits of his victory the latter had little chance to enjoy.[411] On June 22, 1784, Carl Theodore[412] launched the first of his edicts against all communities, societies, and brotherhoods in his lands which had been established without due authorization of law and the confirmation of the sovereign.[413] The edict, to be sure, was general in its character, and the Bavarian Illuminati were glad to believe that their system was not specially involved: by lying low for a season the squall would speedily blow over and the activities of the order might safely be resumed.[414] These anticipations, however, were doomed to disappointment. Having surrendered himself completely to the spirit of reaction, and spurred by reports of the covert disobedience of the order which his entourage spread before him,[415] the Bavarian monarch, on March 2 of the following year, issued another edict that specifically designated the Illuminati as one of the branches of Freemasonry, all of which were severely upbraided for their failure to yield implicit obedience to the will of the sovereign as expressed in the previous edict, and a new ban, more definite and sweeping in its terms than the former, was thereby proclaimed.[416]

A fixed resolution on the part of the government to give full force to the provisions of the interdict left no room for evasion.[417] In response to the call of its enemies, former members of the order who, either because of scruples of conscience or for less honorable reasons, had withdrawn from its fellowship, came forward to make formal declarations respecting their knowledge of its affairs.[418] In this direct manner the weapons needed for the waging of an effective campaign against the society were put into the government’s hands.[419] Judicial inquiries were inaugurated, beginning at Ingolstadt.[420] Measures of government, all aimed at nothing short of the complete suppression and annihilation of the order, followed one another in rapid succession. Officers and soldiers in the army were required to come forward and confess their relations with the Illuminati, under promise of immunity if ready and hearty in their response, but under pain of disgrace, cassation, or other punishment if refractory.[421] Members and officers of consular boards were subjected to similar regulations.[422] Officers of state and holders of ecclesiastical benefices who were found to have connections with the order were summarily dismissed from their posts.[423] Professors in universities and teachers in the public schools suffered a like fate.[424] Students who were recognized as adepts were dismissed, and in some cases were banished from the country.[425]

As a system the order was shattered, but its supporters were not wholly silenced. Weishaupt particularly, from his place of security in a neighboring country, lifted his voice against the men who had betrayed the order and the government which had ruined it. Taking recourse to his pen, with incredible rapidity he struck off one pamphlet and volume after another,[426] in a feverish effort, offensive and defensive, to avert if possible total disaster to the cause which, despite all his frailties, he truly loved. The one clear result of his polemical efforts was to draw the fire of those who defended the denunciators of the afflicted order and who supported the clerical party and the government. A war of pamphlets developed, the noise and vehemence of which were destined to add, if possible, to the embarrassment and pain of those members of the order who still remained in Bavaria. Once more the suspicions of the government were aroused; a search was made by the police for further evidence, and in the month of October, 1786, at Landshut, in the house of Xavier Zwack,[427] one of the order’s most prominent leaders, decisive results were achieved. A considerable number of books and papers were discovered,[428] the latter containing more than two hundred letters that had passed between Weishaupt and the Areopagites, dealing with the most intimate affairs of the order, together with tables containing the secret symbols, calendar, and geographical terms belonging to the system, imprints of its insignia, a partial roster of its membership, the statutes, instruction for recruiters, the primary ceremony of initiation, etc.[429]

Here was the complete range of evidence the authorities had long waited for. Out of the mouths of its friends, the accusations which its enemies made against the order were to be substantiated. By the admissions of its leaders, the system of the Illuminati had the appearance of an organization devoted to the overthrow of religion and the state, a band of poisoners and forgers, an association of men of disgusting morals and depraved tastes. The publication of these documents amounted to nothing less than a sensation.[430] New measures were forthwith adopted by the government. Leading representatives of the order, whose names appeared in the telltale documents, were placed under arrest and formally interrogated. Some of these, like the treasurer, Hertel, met the situation with courage and dignity, and escaped with no further punishment than a warning to have nothing to do with the organization in the future under fear of graver consequences.[431] Others, like the poltroon Mändl,[432] adopted the course of making monstrous “revelations” concerning the objects and practices of the order. Still others, like Massenhausen, against whom the charge of poison-mixing was specifically lodged,[433] sought safety in flight.

As a final blow against the devastated order, on August 16, 1787, the duke of Bavaria launched his third and last edict against the system.[434] The presentments of the former interdicts were reëmphasized, and in addition, to give maximum force to the sovereign’s will, criminal process, without distinction of person, dignity, state, or quality, was ordered against any Illuminatus who should be discovered continuing the work of recruiting. Any so charged and found guilty were to be deprived of their lives by the sword; while those thus recruited were to have their goods confiscated and themselves to be condemned to perpetual banishment from the territories of the duke.[435] Under the same penalties of confiscation and banishment, the members of the order, no matter under what name or circumstances, regular or irregular, they should gather, were forbidden to assemble as lodges.[436]

The end of the order was at hand. So far as the situation within Bavaria was concerned, the sun of the Illuminati had already set.[437] It remained for the government to stretch forth its hand as far as possible, to deal with those fugitives who, enjoying the protection of other governments, might plot and contrive to rebuild the ruined system. Accordingly, Zwack, who had sought asylum first in the court of Zweibrücken and had later obtained official position in the principality of Salm-Kyburg, was summoned by the duke of Bavaria to return to that country. The summons was not accepted,[438] but the activities of Zwack as a member of the Illuminati, as the event proved, were over. Count (Baron) Montgelas, whose services on behalf of the order do not appear to have been significant, but who, upon the publication of the correspondence seized in the residence of Zwack, had likewise sought the protection of the duke of Zweibrücken, found the favor of that sovereign sufficient to save him from the power of the Bavarian monarch.[439] As for Weishaupt, whose originary relation to the order the Bavarian government had discovered in the secret correspondence just referred to, his presence in Gotha, outside Bavarian territory but in close proximity to the Bavarian possessions, added greatly to the concern of Carl Theodore.[440] Efforts were made by the latter to counteract any possible influence he might exert to rehabilitate the Illuminati system.[441] They were as futile as they were unnecessary. Broken in spirit, making no effort to regain the kingdom which his vanity insisted he had lost, contenting himself with the publication of various apologetic writings,[442] permitted for a considerable period to enjoy the bounty of his generous patron, Duke Ernst of Gotha, he sank slowly into obscurity.[443]

As for the fortunes of the order outside of Bavaria, the measures adopted by the government of that country proved decisive. Here and there, especially in the case of Bode,[444] a Saxon Illuminatus, efforts were made to galvanize the expiring spirit of the order, but wholly without result.

Although the Order of the Illuminati was dead, the world had yet to reckon with its specter. So intense and widespread was the fear which the order engendered, so clearly did the traditionalists of the age see in its clientele the welding together into a secret machine of war of the most mischievous and dangerous of those elements which were discontented with the prevailing establishments of religion and civil government, that it was impossible that its shadow should pass immediately.[445]

The emergence of the order had attracted public attention so abruptly and sharply, and its downfall had been so violent and so swift, that public opinion lacked time to adjust itself to the facts in the case. In Bavaria, particularly, the enemies of the order were unable to persuade themselves that the machinations of the Illuminati could safely be regarded as wholly of the past.[446] The documents of the order were appealed to, to supply proof that its leaders had made deliberate calculations against the day of possible opposition and temporary disaster and with satanic cunning had made their preparations to wring victory out of apparent defeat.[447] Besides, the depth of the governments suspicions and hostility was such that additional, though needless measures of state[448] kept very much alive in that country the haunting fear of the continued existence of the order.

Outside of Bavaria numerous factors contributed to create the same general impression in the public mind. Among these were the efforts of the Rosicrucians to play upon the fears that the Illuminati had awakened, the mistaken connections which, in the Protestant world, were commonly made between the members of the Order of the Illuminati and the representatives and promoters of the Aufklärung, and the emergence of the German Union. To each of these in turn a word must be devoted.

Following the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773, members of that order in considerable numbers, attracted by the rapid growth and the pretentious occultism of the Rosicrucians,[449] had united with the latter system.[450] The result was the infusion of a definite strain of clericalism into the order of the Rosicrucians and, in consequence, a renewal of the attack upon the Illuminati. In Prussia, where the Rosicrucians had firmly established themselves in Berlin, King Frederick William II was under the influence of Wöllner, one of his ministers and a leading figure in the Rosicrucian system.[451] Through the latter’s relations with Frank, who at the time stood at the head of the Rosicrucian order in Bavaria, the Prussian monarch was easily persuaded that the operations of the Illuminati had not only been extended to his own territories, but throughout all Germany.[452] Encouraged by Wöllner, Frederick William took it upon himself to warn neighboring monarchs respecting the peril which he believed threatened, a course which bore at least one definite result in the measures taken by the elector of Saxony to investigate the situation at Leipzig where, according to the king of Prussia, a meeting of the chiefs of the Illuminati had been effected.[453] Thus the notion that the order of the Illuminati was still in existence was accorded the sanction of influential monarchs.

The disposition of orthodox Protestants to confuse the advocates of rationalism with the membership of the Illuminati finds its suggestion of plausibility at a glance and stands in little need of specific historical proof. The general effect of the undermining of traditional faiths, for which the dominating influences of the period of the Aufklärung were responsible, was to create the impression among the more simple-minded and credulous elements in the Protestant world that a vast combination of forces was at work, all hostile to the Christian religion and all striving to supplant faith by reason. So vast and significant a movement of thought naturally enough tended to engender various suspicions, and among these is to be numbered the naïve conviction that the order which the Bavarian government had felt compelled to stamp out, on account of its alleged impiety and its immoral and anarchical principles, was but a local expression of the prevailing opposition to the established systems and orthodox doctrines of the age.[454]

The excitement occasioned by the appearance of the German Union (Die Deutsche Union), on account of its definite connections with one of the former leaders[455] of Weishaupt’s system and the unsavory private character and avowed unscrupulous designs of its originator, gave still more specific force to the Illuminati legend. Charles Frederick Bahrdt,[456] a disreputable doctor of theology, in 1787, at Halle, proposed to reap advantage from the ruin of Weishaupt’s system and to recruit among its former members the supporters of a new league, organized to accomplish the enlightenment of the people principally by means of forming in every city secret associations of men[457] who were to keep in correspondence with similar groups of their brethren and who, by the employment of reading-rooms, were to familiarize the people with those writings which were specially calculated to remove popular prejudices and superstitions, and to break the force of appeals to tradition. Further, these associations were to supply financial assistance to writers who enlisted in the Union’s campaign, and to fill the palms of booksellers who for the sake of a bribe showed themselves willing to prevent the sale of the works of authors who withheld their coöperation.[458]

As an organization the German Union scarcely emerged from the stage of inception; but the absurd policy of publicity pursued by its founder gave to the project a wide airing and provoked hostile writings[459] that added immensely to the importance of the matter. The new system was boldly denounced as continuing the operations of the odious order dissolved in Bavaria, with a shrewd change of tactics which substituted “innocent” reading-rooms for the novitiate of Weishaupt’s organization, and thus, it was urged, the way was opened for the exertion of a really powerful influence upon the thought of the German people.[460]

By such means, and in such widely diverse and irrational ways, the popular belief in the survival of the defunct Order of the Illuminati was kept alive and supplied with definite points of attachment; but it remained for the French Revolution, in all the rapidity and vastness of its developments and in the terrifying effects which its more frightful aspects exercised upon its observers, to offer the most exciting suggestions and to stimulate to the freest play the imaginations of those who were already persuaded that the secret associations that plagued Bavaria still lived to trouble the earth.[461]

The supposed points of connection between the Order of the Illuminati and the French Revolution were partly tangible, though decidedly elusive,[462] but much more largely of the nature of theories framed to meet the necessities of a case which in the judgment of dilettante historians positively required the hypothesis of a diabolical conspiracy against thrones and altars (i. e., the civil power and the church), though the labors of Hercules might have to be exceeded in putting the same to paper.

Of the exiguous resources of interpreters of the Revolution who made serious efforts to trace its impious and anarchical principles and its savage enormities to their lair in the lodges of the Illuminati, the following are perhaps the only ones worthy of note.

The public discussion of the affairs and principles of Weishaupt’s organization, to which attention has already been called in various connections, continued with unabated zeal even beyond the close of the eighteenth century. At the very hour when the Revolution was shocking the world by its lapse from its original self-control into its horrible massacres, execution of monarchs, guillotine-lust, and ferocious struggles between parties, new pamphlets and reviews bearing on the demolished order’s constitution and objects found their way into the channels of public communication. Conspicuous among these were the following: Die neuesten Arbeiten des Spartacus und Philo in dem Illuminaten Orden, jetzt zum ersten Mal gedruckt und zur Beherzigung bei gegenwärtigen Zeitläuften herausgegeben,[463] and Illuminatus Dirigens oder Schottischer Ritter,[464] announced as a continuation of the former. These works, published at the instigation of the authorities at Munich, attracted public attention anew to the most extreme religious and social doctrines[465] of the order. Thus the revolutionary character of Illuminism received heavy emphasis[466] synchronously with contemporary events of the utmost significance to the imperilled cause of political and religious conservatism.

In Austria an independent literary assault upon Illuminism developed. At Vienna, Leopold Hoffman,[467] editor of the Wiener Zeitschrift, fully convinced that the Order of the Illuminati had exercised a baneful effect upon Freemasonry, to which he was devoted, abandoned his chair of language and German literature at the University of Vienna to dedicate his talents and his journal to the overthrow of Illuminated Freemasonry.[468] Finding a zealous collaborator in a certain Dr. Zimmerman, a physician of Hannover, a radical turned an extreme conservative by the developments of the French Revolution, the two labored energetically to stigmatize the Illuminati as the secret cause of the political explosion in France.

The discontinuance of the Wiener Zeitschrift in 1793 by no means marked the end of the campaign. A deluge of pamphlets[469] had been precipitated, all based upon the assumption that the order Weishaupt had founded had subsided only in appearance. Declamation did not wait upon evidence. It was alleged that the lower grades of the Illuminati had been dissolved, but the superior grades were still practised. Under cover of correspondence, recruits of the system were now being sought. Freemasonry was being subjugated by Illuminism only that it might be forced to serve the ends of its conqueror. Journalists partial to the interests of the Aufklärung had been enlisted for the same purpose. The German Union was thus only one of the enterprises fostered by the Illuminati to further their designs. The dogmas of the order had been spread secretly in France by means of the clubs of that country, and the effectiveness of the propaganda was being vividly demonstrated in the horrors of the Revolution. Unless German princes should promptly adopt rigorous measures against the various agents and enterprises of the order in their territories, they might confidently expect similar results to follow.[470]

Much more of like character was foisted upon the reading public. As for contemporary historians who searched for specific evidence of an alliance between the Illuminati of Germany and the Revolutionists in France, their energies were chiefly employed in the development of a clue which had as its kernel the supposed introduction of Illuminism into France at the hands of the French revolutionary leader, Mirabeau, and the German savant, Bode.[471] Unfolded, this view of the case may be stated briefly as follows: Mirabeau, during his residence at Berlin, in the years 1786 and 1787, came into touch with the Illuminati of that city and was received as an adept into the order. Upon his return to Paris he made the attempt to introduce Illuminism into that particular branch of Masonry of which he was also a member, the Philalèthes or Amis Réunis.[472] To give force to his purpose, he called upon the Illuminati in Berlin to send to his assistance two talented and influential representatives of the order. The men chosen by the Illuminati-circle in Berlin, Bode and von dem Busche,[473] arrived in Paris in the early summer of 1787. To conceal their purpose from prying eyes, they spread the report that they had come from Germany to investigate the subjects of magnetism and the extent of the influence exerted by the Jesuits upon the secret societies of the age. Meantime, the lodges of the Philalèthes, and through them the French Masonic lodges in general, were inoculated with the principles of Illuminism. French Freemasonry thus became committed to the project of forcing the overthrow of thrones and altars. So transformed, these lodges created secret committees who busied themselves with plans for the precipitation of a great revolutionary movement. To these committees belonged the subsequent leaders and heroes of the French Revolution—de Rochefoucauld, Condorcet, Pétion, the Duke of Orléans (Grand Master of French Masonry), Camille-Desmoulins, Danton, Lafayette, de Leutre, Fauchet, et al. Through these and their associates the connection between the lodges of Illuminated French Freemasonry and the powerful political clubs of the country was effected. Thus Illuminism was able to inspire Jacobinism. Finally, on the 14 of July, 1789, the revolutionary mine was sprung, and the great secret of the Illuminati became the possession of the world.[474]

At every point this fantastic exposition suffered the fatal defect of a lack of historical proof. Even the specific assertions of its inventors which were most necessary to their hypothesis were disproved by the facts brought to light by more cautious and unbiased investigators who followed. E. g., the idea of Mirabeau’s intimate connection with the program of the Order of the Illuminati and his profound faith in it as the best of all instruments for the work of social amelioration is rendered untenable the moment the rash and unrepublican temper of his spirit is called seriously to mind.[475] Again, the real object of Bode’s visit to Paris, a matter of vital importance in the Illuminati-French Revolution hypothesis, was not to communicate Illuminism to French Freemasons, but to attend an assembly of representatives of the Philalèthes, called to consider the results of an inquiry previously undertaken, respecting the occult interests and tendencies of that order. Convinced that that branch of French Masonry was yielding to an inordinate passion for the occult sciences, Bode had been prevailed upon by German Masons, von dem Busche[476] among the number, to make a journey to Paris to warn his French brethren of their mistake. A subsidiary personal interest in the newly-discovered “science” of animal magnetism[477] helped to form his decision to make the trip.[478]

The much more important contention that the Illuminati were instrumental in starting the French Revolution, shows a lack of historical perspective that either leaves out of account or obscures the importance of the economic, social, political, and religious causes, tangible and overt, though complex, that rendered the Revolution inevitable.

Yet the legend of Illuminism as the responsible author of the French Revolution found numerous vindicators and interpreters,[479] to the efforts of two of which, because of their intimate relation to the interests of the investigation in hand, our attention in the remainder of this chapter is to be confined.

In the year 1797 there appeared at Edinburgh, Scotland, a volume bearing the following title: Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the Secret Meetings of the Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies.[480] Its author, John Robison,[481] an English savant and Freemason, whose position in the academic world entitled his statements to respect, had had his curiosity regarding the character and effects of continental Freemasonry greatly stimulated by a stray volume of the German periodical, Religions Begebenheiten,[482] which came under his notice in 1795, and in which he found expositions of Masonic systems and schisms so numerous and so seriously maintained by their advocates as to create deep wonderment in his mind.[483] Bent upon discovering both the occasion and the significance of this tangled mass, Robison obtained possession of other volumes of the periodical mentioned[484] and set himself the task of elucidating the problem presented by Masonry’s luxuriant growth and its power of popular appeal.

The conclusions Robison came to are best stated in his own words:

The “proofs” to which Robison appealed to support these conclusions betrayed the same lack of critical mind[486] with which all the advocates of the Illuminati-French Revolution hypothesis are to be charged. Only the more significant elements are here brought under survey.[487]

That inclination for a multiplication of the degrees and an elaboration of the ceremonies of simple English Freemasonry which Robison found operative among French Freemasons from the beginning of the eighteenth century on,[488] had resulted in making the lodges attractive to those elements in France whose discontent over civil and ecclesiastical oppressions had grown great.[489] Under the pressure imposed upon private and public discussion by the state and by the church, men of letters, avocats au parlement, unbeneficed abbés, impecunious youths, and self-styled philosophers thronged the halls of the lodges, eager to take advantage of the opportunity their secret assemblies afforded to discuss the most intimate concerns of politics and religion.[490] Despite the wide contrariety of minor views thus represented, one general idea and language, that of “cosmopolitanism,” was made familiar to a multitude of minds. Worse still, the popular interest of the period in mysticism, theosophy, cabala, and genuine science was appealed to, in order to provide a more numerous clientele among whom might be disseminated the doctrines of atheism, materialism, and discontent with civil subordination.[491] Thus the Masonic lodges in France were made the “hot-beds, where the seeds were sown, and tenderly reared, of all the pernicious doctrines which soon after choaked every moral or religious cultivation, and have made … Society worse than a waste ….”[492]

The introduction of French Freemasonry into Germany, according to Robison, was followed by similar results.[493] Thither, as to France, simple English Freemasonry had first gone, and because of its exclusive emphasis upon the principle of brotherly love the Germans had welcomed it and treated it with deep seriousness;[494] but the sense of mystery and the taste for ritualistic embellishments which the advent of French Masonry promoted, speedily changed the temper of the German brethren.[495] A reckless tendency to innovation set in. The love of stars and ribbons,[496] and the desire to learn of ghost-raising, exorcism, and alchemy,[497] became the order of the day. Rosicrucianism flourished,[498] rival systems appeared, and questions of precedency split German Freemasonry into numerous fiercely hostile camps.[499]

Meantime, on account of the propaganda carried on by the Enlighteners,[500] a revolution of the public mind took place in Germany, marked by a great increase of scepticism, infidelity, and irreligion, not only among the wealthy and luxurious but among the profligate elements in the lower classes as well.[501] Rationalistic theologians, aided and abetted by booksellers and publishers and by educational theorists,[502] coöperated to make the ideas of orthodox Christianity distasteful to the general public.[503] To give effect to this campaign of seduction, the lodges of Freemasonry were invaded and their secret assemblies employed to spread free-thinking and cosmopolitical ideas.[504] Thus German Freemasonry became impregnated with the impious and revolutionary tendencies of French Freemasonry.[505]

At such an hour, according to Robison, Weishaupt founded his Order of the Illuminati.[506] Employing the opportunities afforded him by his connections with the Masons,[507] he exerted himself to make disciples and to lay the foundations of an “Association … which, in time, should govern the world,”[508] the express aim of which “was to abolish Christianity and overturn all civil government.”[509]

To accomplish this end a most insinuating pedagogy was adopted,[510] the members were trained to spy upon one another,[511] and hypocrisy which did not stop short of positive villainy was practised.[512] As a fitting climax to a program that involved the complete subversion of existing moral standards, women were to be admitted to the lodges.[513]

Following an analysis of the grades of the order,[514] lifted little if any above the general plane of ineptitude upon which the author moved, Robison incorporated into his history of the Bavarian Illuminati a table of the lodges that had been established prior to 1786.[515] Drawing professedly upon the private papers of the order as published by the Bavarian government, he worked out a list which included five lodges in Strassburg; four in Bonn; fourteen in Austria; “many” in each of the following states, Livonia, Courland, Alsace, Hesse, Poland, Switzerland, and Holland; eight in England; two in Scotland; and “several” in America.[516]

The suppression of the Illuminati by the Bavarian government was regarded by Robison as merely “formal” in its nature:[517] the evil genius of the banned order speedily reappeared in the guise of the German Union.[518] Into the discussion of the German Union Robison read the “proofs” of an enterprise truly gigantic both as to its proportions and its baneful influence. The illuminated lodges of Freemasonry were declared to have given way to reading societies wherein the initiated, i. e., the members of the Union, actively employed themselves, apparently to accomplish the noble ends of enlightening mankind and securing the dethronement of superstition and fanaticism,[519] but actually to secure the destruction of every sentiment of religion, morality and loyalty.[520] The higher mysteries of Bahrdt’s silly and abortive project were declared to be identical with those of Weishaupt’s order: natural religion and atheism were to be substituted for Christianity, and political principles equally anarchical with those of the Illuminati were fostered.[521]

Although Robison confessed himself driven to pronounce Bahrdt’s enterprise “coarse, and palpably mean,”[522] and although the archives and officers of the Union were held to be “contemptible,”[523] none the less an elaborate though most disjointed tale was unfolded by him. This involved the organization of the German literati and the control of the book trade, with a view to forming taste and directing public opinion;[524] and the establishment of reading societies to the number of eight hundred or more,[525] among whose members were to be circulated such books as were calculated to fortify the mind against all disposition to be startled on account of the appearance of “doctrines and maxims which are singular, or perhaps opposite to those which are current in ordinary societies.”[526] Thus it would be possible “to work in silence upon all courts, families, and individuals in every quarter, and acquire an influence in the appointment of court-officers, stewards, secretaries, parish-priests, public teachers, or private tutors.”[527]

Robison was unable to present anything beyond the most tenuous “proofs” that a direct relation existed between Weishaupt’s system and Bahrdt’s enterprise;[528] still he did not hesitate to affirm that, on account of the emergence of the latter, it had been made clear that the suppression of the Illuminati had been futile.[529] “Weishaupt and his agents were still busy and successful.”[530]

Arriving finally at the subject of the French Revolution, Robison devoted something more than sixty pages to an effort to connect the system of Weishaupt with the great European debacle. Approaching the matter with unconcealed dubiety,[531] he found his confidence and boldness growing as he proceeded. Relying chiefly upon such uncritical and promiscuous sources as the Religions Begebenheiten, the Wiener Zeitschrift, and the Magazin des Literatur et Kunst (sic), and a work entitled Mémoires Posthumes de Custine, he sought a point of direct contact between the Illuminati and the French revolutionary movement by stressing the enlistment of Mirabeau,[532] the mission of Bode and von Busche,[533] and the instructions which, he alleged, were given by the latter to the Amis Réunis and the Philalèthes through their chief lodges at Paris.[534]

The mission of Bode and von Busche, according to Robison, had been undertaken at the request of Mirabeau and the Abbé Perigord[535] (Talleyrand). When Weishaupt’s plan was thus communicated to the two French lodges mentioned, “they saw at once its importance, in all its branches, such as the use of the Masonic Lodges, to fish for Minervals—the rituals and ranks to entice the young, and to lead them by degrees to opinions and measures which, at first sight, would have shocked them.”[536] By the beginning of 1789 the lodges of the Grand Orient[537] had received the secrets of the Illuminati.[538] The Duke of Orléans, who had been “illuminated” by Mirabeau,[539] and whose personal political ambitions were strongly stressed by Robison,[540] gave hearty support to the enterprise; and thus in a very short time the Masonic lodges of France were converted into a set of secret affiliated societies, all corresponding with the mother lodges of Paris, and ready to rise instantly and overturn the government as soon as the signal should be given.[541] The political committees organized in each of these “illuminated” lodges familiarized not only their brethren but, through them, the country in general, with the secret revolutionary program.[542] Thus it happened that the “stupid Bavarians” became the instructors of the French “in the art of overturning the world”;[543] and thus, also, it happened that “the whole nation changed, and changed again, and again, as if by beat of drum.”[544]

Such in its main outlines and in its “principal links” of evidence is the Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe. Yet to obtain a just appraisal of the book it must not be overlooked that its author wrote an additional one hundred and fifty pages, not of “proofs” but of argument, partly to defend errors of judgment he may have committed in his treatment of the subject, but chiefly to persuade his fellow countrymen that the principles of Illuminism were false and to urge them to turn a deaf ear to these doctrines.

We turn now to consider another and much more elaborate exposition of the Illuminati-French Revolution legend. Almost at the moment of the appearance of Robison’s book, there appeared in French, at London and Hamburg, a far more finished production, devoted to the same thesis and bearing the title, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme.[545] Its author, the Abbé Barruel,[546] who had been trained as a Jesuit, enjoying literary talents much superior to those of Robison and relying upon documentary evidence more copious if not more convincing, defined his purpose in the following manner:

The amazing breadth of Barruel’s canvass, as well as the naiveté of the artist, are immediately disclosed in his foreword respecting the “triple conspiracy” which he proposes to lay bare.[548] To present this “triple conspiracy” in his own words will do more than define the abbé’s conception of his task: its transparent incoordination will make it apparent that much of the work of examination that might otherwise seem to be called for is futile.

The sole proposition which Barruel proposed to maintain is thus made clear enough. All the developments of the French Revolution were to be explained on the basis of the following postulate: The Encyclopedists, Freemasons, and Bavarian Illuminati, working together, not unconsciously but with well-planned coördination, produced the Jacobins, and the Jacobins in turn produced the Revolution. Over all, embracing all, the word “conspiracy” must needs be written large.

The first volume of the Memoirs was devoted to the conspiracy of the philosophers. Voltaire, D’Alembert, Frederick II, and Diderot—“Voltaire the chief, D’Alembert the most subtle agent, Frederick the protector and often the adviser, Diderot the forlorn hope”[551]—these were the men who originally leagued themselves together “in the most inveterate hatred of Christianity.”[552] Bringing out into bold relief the most malignant and brutal of the anticlerical and anti-Christian utterances of Voltaire and his friends,[553] as well as all available evidence of a crafty strategy on the part of the conspirators to avoid detection of their plan,[554] Barruel was emboldened to affirm a desperate plan to overturn every altar where Christ was adored, whether in London, Geneva, Stockholm, Petersburg, Paris, Madrid, Vienna, or Rome, whether Protestant or Catholic.[555]

The first definite step in this campaign of the philosophers is declared to have been the publication of L’Encyclopédie;[556] the second, the suppression of the Jesuits and the widespread elimination of religious houses;[557] and the third, the capture of the French Academy by the philosophers and the diversion of its honors to impious writers.[558]

The foregoing were measures which primarily concerned “the chiefs,” or “better sort.”[559] Efforts to extend the conspiracy to the hovel and the cottage were also made. Accordingly, appeals to toleration, reason, and humanity became the order of the day.[560] These were intended to impress the populace and, by a show of sympathy with those who complained of their condition, prepare the way for the days of rebellion, violence, and murder which were yet to come.[561] Free schools were established, directed by men who, privy to the great conspiracy, became zealous corrupters of youth.[562] All was carefully calculated and planned to render possible the full fruitage of the designs of the conspirators when the harvest day should come.

Having thus dealt with the conspiracy against altars, Barruel turned in his second volume to consider the plot against thrones. The great inspirers of this covert attack upon monarchy were Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. Voltaire, though by nature a friend of kings, whose favor and caresses were his delight, yet, since he found them standing in the way of his efforts to extirpate Christianity, was led to oppose them, and to substitute the doctrines of equality of rights and liberty of reason for his earlier emphasis upon loyalty to sovereigns.[563] Unwittingly, through his Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu had helped on the anti-monarchical resolution by his heavy emphasis upon the essential differences between monarchies and democracies, thus for the first time suggesting to the French people that they lived under a despotic government and helping to alienate them from their king.[564] As for Rousseau, in his Social Contract he had widened the path which Montesquieu had opened.[565] His doctrines had the effect of placing monarchy in an abhorrent light. They filled the minds of the people with a passion for Liberty and Equality.

The systems of Montesquieu and Rousseau, particularly, induced the Sophisters of Impiety to combine the task of overthrowing monarchy with the task of overthrowing religion.[566] A sweeping attempt to popularize the leveling principles embodied in those two systems immediately developed. A flood of antimonarchical writings appeared,[567] governments were sharply criticized, despotism was roundly denounced, the minds of the people were agitated and inflamed, and the notion of revolution was rendered familiar both by precept and example.[568]

Some powerful secret agency was needed, however, to promote this vast conspiracy. The lodges of Freemasonry suggested a tempting possibility. The members of the craft gave ample evidence that they were susceptible.[569] The occult lodges,[570] moreover, already had traveled far toward the goal of revolution. All their protests to the contrary, their one secret was: “Equality and Liberty; all men are equals and brothers; all men are free.”[571] Surely it would not be difficult for the enemies of thrones and altars to reach the ears of men who cherished such a secret, and to convert their lodges into council-chambers and forums for the propagation of the doctrines of impiety and rebellion.

An alliance was speedily consummated,[572] and a fresh torrent of declamation and calumnies, all directed against the altar and the throne, began to pour through these newly discovered subterranean channels.[573] The Grand Orient constituted a central committee which as early as 1776 instructed the deputies of the lodges throughout France to prepare the brethren for insurrection.[574] Condorcet and Sieyès placed themselves at the head of another lodge, to which the Propaganda was to be traced.[575] In addition, a secret association bearing the title Amis des Noirs created a regulating committee, composed of such men as Condorcet, the elder Mirabeau, Sieyès, Brissot, Carra, the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Clavière, Lepelletier de Saint-Fargeau, Valade, La Fayette, and Bergasse.[576] This regulating committee was also in intimate correspondence with the French lodges of Freemasonry. Thus a powerful secret organization was at hand, composed of not less than six hundred thousand members all told, at least five hundred thousand of whom could be fully counted upon to do the bidding of the conspirators, “all zealous for the Revolution, all ready to rise at the first signal and to impart the shock to all other classes of the people.”[577]

However, all these machinations might have come to naught had it not been for the encouragement and direction supplied by the Illuminati. In the latter Barruel saw the apotheosis of infamy and corruption.[578] With diabolical ingenuity the chiefs of the Illuminati succeeded in evolving an organization which put into the hands of the conspirators, i. e., the philosophers and Freemasons, the very instrument they needed to give full effect to their plans. The superiority of that organization was to be seen in its principles of general subordination and the gradation of superiors, in the minute instructions given to adepts and officers covering every conceivable responsibility and suggesting infinite opportunities to promote the order’s welfare, and in the absolute power of its general.[579] Thus was built up a hierarchy of savants, an association held under a most rigid discipline, a formidable machine capable of employing its maximum power as its governing hand might direct.[580] With the close of the third volume Barruel considers that he has been able to present a “complete academy of Conspirators.”[581]

Barruel’s last volume, the most formidable of all, was devoted by its author to the forging of the final link in his chain: the coalescence of the conspiring philosophers, Freemasons, and Illuminati into the Jacobins. To establish a connection between the “illuminated” Masons and the immediate “authors and abettors of the French Revolution,”[582] i. e., the Jacobins, Barruel had recourse to the familiar inventions of the reappearance of the Bavarian Illuminati after its suppression,[583] the rise and corrupting influence of the German Union,[584] that treacherous “modification of Weishaupt’s Minerval schools,”[585] and, particularly, the pretended mission of Bode and von Busche to Paris.[586]

With respect to this last invention, no more worthy of our comment than the others except for the fact that it was supposed to supply the direct point of contact between the conspirators and the French Revolution, Barruel was obliged to admit that he was unable to place before his readers evidence of the precise character of the negotiations that took place between the deputation from Berlin and the French lodges:[587] “facts” would have to be permitted to speak for themselves.[588] These “facts” were such as the following: the lodges of Paris were rapidly converted into clubs, with regulating committees and political committees;[589] the resolutions of the regulating committees were communicated through the committee of correspondence of the Grand Orient to the heads of the Masonic lodges scattered throughout France;[590] the day of general insurrection was thus fixed for July 14, 1789;[591] on the fatal day the lodges were dissolved, and the Jacobins, suddenly throwing off their garments of secrecy and hypocrisy, stood forth in the clear light of day.[592]

His last two hundred pages were devoted by Barruel to arguments shaped chiefly to show that the principles of the Revolutionary leaders were identical with the principles of the illuminated lodges;[593] that the successes of the Revolutionary armies, of Custine beyond the Rhine,[594] of Dumouriez in Belgium,[595] of Pichegru in Holland,[596] and of Bonaparte in Italy, in Malta, and in Egypt,[597] were explicable only on the ground of treacherous intrigues carried on by the agents of Illuminism; and that no country, moreover, need flatter itself it would escape the seductions and plots of the conspirators. The dragon’s teeth of revolution were already sown in Switzerland, in Sweden, in Russia, in Poland, in Austria, in Prussia, and in America.[598] With Barruel’s comment upon America,[599] our discussion of the Memoirs of Jacobinism may well come to a close.

NOTE: The literary relationship between the works of Robison and Barruel is of sufficient interest and significance to warrant some comment. Robison’s volume was published before its author saw Barruel’s composition in its French text.[602] Later, Robison was moved to rejoice that Barruel had confirmed his main positions and contentions. A few things in the Memoirs of Jacobinism, however, impress him as startling. He confesses that he had never before heard the claim seriously made that “irreligion and unqualified Liberty and Equality are the genuine and original Secrets of Free Masonry, and the ultimatum of a regular progress through all its degrees.”[603] He is driven to assert that this is not the secret of Masonry as he has learned it from other sources. Robison also recognizes differences in the two works respecting the exposition of certain Masonic degrees. For his part he is not willing to admit that his sources are unreliable.[604]

Barruel, on the other hand, did not get sight of Robison’s volume until just as his third volume was going to press.[605] He comments in part as follows: “Without knowing it, we have fought for the same cause with the same arms, and pursued the same course; but the Public are on the eve of seeing our respective quotations, and will observe a remarkable difference between them.”[606] That difference Barruel attempts to explain on the ground that Robison had adopted the method of combining and condensing his quotations from his sources. Besides, he thinks his zealous confederate “in some passages … has even adopted as truth certain assertions which the correspondence of the Illuminées evidently demonstrate to have been invented by them against their adversaries, and which,” he continues, “in my Historical Volume I shall be obliged to treat in an opposite sense.”[607] Barruel also differs with Robison respecting the time of the origin of Masonry.[608] But all such matters are of slight consequence; all suggestions of opposition and disagreement between Robison and Barruel are brushed aside by him in the following summary fashion: “ … It will be perceived that we are not to be put in competition with each other; Mr. Robison taking a general view while I have attempted to descend into particulars: as to the substance we agree.”[609]

It was one of the most confident boasts of the supporters of the idea of a “conspiracy against thrones and altars” that these two writers, Robison and Barruel, had worked at the same problem without the knowledge of each other’s effort, and thus following independent lines of investigation, had reached the same conclusion. The merit of the claim may safely be left to the reader’s judgment.

THE ILLUMINATI AGITATION IN NEW ENGLAND

The fast day proclamation of President John Adams, issued March 23, 1798, expressed unusual solemnity and concern. Therein the United States was represented as “at present placed in a hazardous and afflictive position.”[610] The necessity of sounding a loud call to repentance and reformation was declared to be imperative, and the people were fervently urged to implore Heaven’s mercy and benediction on the imperiled nation.

On the day appointed, the 9th of May, among the multitude of pastors who appeared before their assembled flocks and addressed them on topics of national and personal self-examination, was the Reverend Jedediah Morse. The deliverance which he made to his people[611] was destined to have far more than a passing interest and effect. He took for his text fragments of the language that King Hezekiah addressed to the prophet Isaiah, as found in II Kings 19: 3, 4: “This is a day of trouble, and of rebuke (or reviling), and blasphemy…. Wherefore lift up thy prayer for the remnant that is left.” Then the well-known minister of Charlestown proceeded to suggest a parallel between the desperate state of affairs within the little kingdom of Judah when the Assyrians, fresh from their triumph over the armies of Egypt, renewed their insolent and terrifying campaign against the city of Jerusalem, and the unhappy and perilous condition of affairs within the United States.[612]

From this general observation Morse proceeded to take specific account of the circumstances that made the period through which the nation was passing “a day of trouble, of reviling and blasphemy.” The main source from which the day of trouble had arisen, as the President’s fast day proclamation had indicated, was the very serious aspect of our relations with France, owing to the unfriendly disposition and conduct of that nation. Here, and not elsewhere, was to be found the occasion of the unhappy divisions that existed among the citizens of the United States, disturbing their peace, and threatening the overthrow of the government itself.[613] The settled policy of the French government, that of attempting the subjugation of other countries by injecting discord and division among their citizens before having recourse to arms, had been faithfully adhered to with respect to America.

Emboldened by its knowledge of the power which the French party in America has acquired, Morse continued, the government of France has shown itself disposed to adopt an increasingly insolent tone toward the government of this nation. The insurrections which the government of France has fomented here, its efforts to plunge the United States into a ruinous war, its spoliation of our commerce upon the high seas, its insufferable treatment of our ministers and commissioners as shown in the lately published state papers[616]—these all tend to show how resolute and confident in its determination to triumph over us the French government has become.[617]

If, said Morse, a contributory cause for the present “hazardous and afflictive position” of the country is sought, it will readily be found in “the astonishing increase of irreligion.”[618] The evidence of this, in turn, is to be found, not only in the prevailing atheism and materialism of the day, and all the vicious fruits which such impious sentiments have borne, but as well in the slanders with which newspapers are filled and the personal invective and abuse with which private discussion is laden, all directed against the representatives of government, against men, many of whom have grown gray in their country’s service and whose integrity has been proved incorruptible. It is likewise to be discovered in the reviling and abuse which, coming from the same quarter, has been directed against the clergy, who, according to their influence and ability, have done what they could to support and vindicate the government. Nothing that the clergy has done has been of such a character as to provoke this treatment. And how “can they be your friends who are continually declaiming against the Clergy, and endeavouring by all means—by falsehood and misrepresentation, to asperse their characters, and to bring them and their profession into disrepute?”[619]

When the question is raised respecting the design and tendency of these things, their inherent and appalling impiety is immediately disclosed. They give “reason to suspect that there is some secret plan in operation, hostile to true liberty and religion, which requires to be aided by these vile slanders.”[620] They cannot be regarded as mere excrescences of the life of the times; they are not detached happenings; they go straight down to the roots of things; they are deadly attacks upon the civil and religious institutions whose foundations were laid by our venerable forefathers. They mean that all those principles and habits which were formed under those institutions are to be brought into contempt and eventually swept aside, in order to give a clear field “for the spread of those disorganizing opinions, and that atheistical philosophy, which are deluging the Old World in misery and blood.”[621]

That this preparatory work has begun, that progress in the direction of its fatal completion has been made, that what is now going on in America is part of the same deep-laid and extensive plan which has been in operation in Europe for many years—these, Morse continued, are reasonable and just fears in the light of the disclosures made “in a work written by a gentleman of literary eminence in Scotland, within the last year, and just reprinted in this country, entitled, ‘Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe’.”[622] The following facts are brought to the light of day in this volume: For more than twenty years past a society called THE ILLUMINATED has been in existence in Germany; its express aim is “to root out and abolish Christianity, and overthrow all civil government”;[623] it approves of such atrocious principles as the right to commit self-murder and the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, while it condemns the principles of patriotism and the right to accumulate private property;[624] in the prosecution of its infamous propaganda it aims to enlist the discontented, to get control of all such cultural agencies as the schools, literary societies, newspapers, writers, booksellers, and postmasters;[625] it is bent upon insinuating its members into all positions of distinction and influence, whether literary, civil, or religious.[626]

Practically all of the civil and ecclesiastical establishments of Europe have already been shaken to their foundations by this terrible organization; the French Revolution itself is doubtless to be traced to its machinations; the successes of the French armies are to be explained on the same ground.[627] The Jacobins are nothing more nor less than the open manifestation of the hidden system of the Illuminati.[628] The order has its branches established and its emissaries at work in America.[629] Doubtless the “Age of Reason” and the other works of that unprincipled author are to be regarded as part of the general plan to accomplish universal demoralization: the fact that Paine’s infamous works have been so industriously and extensively circulated in this country would seem to justify fully this conclusion.[630] The affiliated Jacobin Societies in America have doubtless had as the object of their establishment the propagation of “the principles of the illuminated mother club in France.”[631]

Before making room for the admonitions which Morse based upon this exposition of the underlying significance of “this … day of trouble, … rebuke … and blasphemy,” his treatment of the Masonic bearings of the subject should be noticed. As delivered by Morse, the fast day sermon of May 9, 1798, contained no reference to the relations alleged to exist between the Order of the Illuminati and the lodges of Freemasonry. The Charlestown pastor’s silence upon this important phase of the matter is best explained in the light of the pains which he took, when the sermon was committed to type, to handle this delicate and embarrassing aspect of the case.[632]

Extended foot notes dealing with the omitted topic and expressive of great reserve and caution comprise a substantial part of the printed sermon. In these Morse repeated the charge which Robison had made before him that the Order of the Illuminati had had its origin among the Freemasons, but hastened to add that this was because of corruptions which had crept into Freemasonry, so that Illuminism must be viewed as “a vile and pestiferous scion grafted on the stock of simple Masonry.”[633] As if further to ward off the blows of incensed and resentful members of the craft, Morse proceeded to dilate upon the artifice which men of wicked purpose commonly resort to in attempting “to pervert and bend into a subserviency to their designs ancient and respectable institutions.”[634] The Illuminati, it is suggested, may thus have taken advantage of the schisms and corruptions with which European Masonry has been cursed, and have employed many members of the lodges to serve as “secret conductors of their poisonous principles”: the high estimation in which the order of Masonry is generally held may be construed as making such a presumption probable.[635] And in this country, if one may base his judgment upon the considerations that the immortal Washington stands at the head of the Masonic fraternity in America and that the Masons of New England “have ever shown themselves firm and decided supporters of civil and religious order,” then it may safely be assumed that the leaven of Illuminism has not found its way into the American lodges, at least not into the lodges of the Eastern States.[636] If it should be found true that some of the branches of Masonry have been corrupted and perverted from their original design, need that circumstance occasion more serious humiliation and embarrassment than Christians face as they contemplate the apostasies of which certain churches in Christendom have been guilty?[637] Finally, the readers are urged to keep in mind that Robison’s book has been commended, not because of its animadversions upon Freemasonry, but for the reason that “it unveils the dark conspiracies of the Illuminati against civil government and Christianity, … and because it is well calculated to excite in this country a just alarm for the safety and welfare of our civil and religious privileges, by discovering to us the machinations which are deployed to subvert them.”[638]

Thus having canvassed the situation abroad and at home, the sermon drew toward its close in the following manner:

With one heart, as citizens to cleave to the national government and as Christians to be alert to the open and secret dangers which threaten the church, these, according to the last word of the preacher, were the paramount concerns of the hour.

Such was Jedediah Morse’s fast day sermon of May 9, 1798. Such at least it was when it came from the press; surely not even by the widest stretch of the imagination an epoch-making sermon; not even notable, except when viewed from a single angle. Nothing could be clearer than that the sermon moved, for the most part, well within the circle of conventional ideas to which on state occasions the minds of the clergy of New England generally made response. But for the introduction of one element it is safe to say the deliverance of Charlestown’s minister would have passed for one of the ordinary “political sermons” of the day, and so have accomplished nothing perhaps beyond helping to swell the chorus of protests from disgusted Democrats against “political preaching.” That element, needless to say, was Illuminism.

The public sanction which Morse gave to the charge that the Illuminati were responsible for the afflictions of both the Old World and the New was a new note on this side of the Atlantic. Sounded in New England at a time when Europe was in convulsion and when the shift from traditional social, political, and religious positions in America was extremely rapid in its movement, this new alarm could not fail to arrest attention. We have seen that the air of New England was already surcharged with notions of implacable hostility to the forces in control of church and state,[640] and with gloomy forebodings born of surmises of intrigue and conspiracy.[641] The hour was electric. The hard-pressed forces of religious and political conservatism were bound to receive the new Shibboleth with unquestioning and eager joy. Henceforth their arsenal would be enlarged to include a new weapon. They would be able to point to the villainies, impieties, and blood-lettings in Europe, to the flauntings, contumelies, and crafty counter-manœuverings which the clergy and the heads of government had to suffer in America, and assert that back of all these and binding all together into a single vicious whole was a conspiracy whose object was nothing less than the complete overthrow of civil government and orthodox Christianity. To be able to brand political and religious radicalism with a word as detestable as this new word “Illuminism” which had just come across the Atlantic, should indeed prove sufficient to damn that cause.

The immediate effect produced by the sermon fell considerably short of a sensation. For one thing the subject of the Illuminati was new and unfamiliar in New England. Much more significant, however, is the fact that at the time the sermon came to public attention, the long-expected X. Y. Z. despatches were passing through the newspaper presses of the country and inflaming the national spirit to an incredible degree. In view of the fact that innumerable public assemblies were being held and innumerable patriotic addresses drawn up and presented to the President, all inspired by the prospect of and the demand for an immediate rupture with France, it is not surprising that the minister of Charlestown did not succeed in creating a more instant and widespread alarm than he did.

However, he had no reason to be disappointed. The spark which he had communicated to the tinder might seem to smoulder for a season,[642] but in due course it was bound to burst into flame. That Morse was himself well content with the degree of interest which the public manifested in his disclosure of the “conspiracy” is evident from the following letter that he addressed to Oliver Wolcott, within a fortnight of the date of the national fast:

Here and there Morse’s sermon promptly became the occasion of public comment. To illustrate: The Reverend John Thayer, beloved and trusted shepherd of the Catholic flock in Boston, following the patriotic example of the Protestant clergy, preached a sermon on the occasion of the national fast appropriate to the solemnity of the day.[644] In the published text of this sermon Thayer took occasion to commend Morse “for his interesting abridgement of the infernal society of the Illuminati.”[645] For the most part, however, the comment of the clergy was reserved for subsequent occasions when the clerical mind should have had opportunity to inform itself more fully concerning the matter.

As for the newspapers, they began to pay their respects to Morse’s sensational utterance soon after the latter’s fast day sermon came from the press. Thus “An American” contributed an article of generous length and of somewhat hostile tone to the Independent Chronicle of May 24 (1798), calling upon Morse to substantiate more fully the charge he had made. This pseudonymous contributor professed to have experienced great astonishment upon reading Morse’s sermon and finding that Robison’s Proofs alone had been relied upon as a source of information and authority. So serious a matter seemed to demand fuller evidence. Thinking that perhaps Dr. Morse had been imposed upon and that the work in question was possibly apocryphal, the writer had been constrained to search through foreign literary journals with a view to discovering how the “performance” attributed to Robison was regarded abroad. Thus employed he had come across an article in The Critical Review, or Annals of Literature, London, 1797, wherein he found severe strictures upon Robison’s volume. In view of this, “since the Doctors of Europe and America differ so widely in their estimation of its importance,” but a single course of honor and obligation would seem to be open to Dr. Morse. Having stood sponsor for the authenticity of such an extraordinary publication, he should now submit to the public decided proofs of the authority and correctness of the book in question.[646]

To this sharp challenge of “An American,” Morse was not indifferent. Replying to his critic in a subsequent issue of the Chronicle,[647] he expressed the hope that the public would not form its judgment respecting Robison’s volume before reading the same, or at least not until it shall have heard further from its “humble servant, Jedidiah Morse.” Meantime, if his readers shall be pleased to peruse the observations clipped from the New York Spectator by which his (Morse’s) letter to the Chronicle is accompanied they will learn that “there is at least one other person in the United States who has read this work, [and] whose opinion of it accords with” his own.[648]

A few days later, through the columns of the same paper,[649] Morse replied at greater length to the criticisms which “An American” had brought to public attention. That he had not “too hastily recommended Professor Robison’s late work” Morse regards as sufficiently demonstrated by the fact that he had had a copy of the book in his possession since the middle of the previous April. This he had examined with care, and he had satisfied himself that it was entitled to the recommendation he had given it in his fast day sermon. So far as the hostile criticism of the authors of The Critical Review is concerned, he has no doubt that their caricature of Robison’s book is to be construed as expressive of their determination to destroy its reputation and thus prevent its circulation, since it probably exposed and thwarted their favorite schemes. Besides, over against the contemptuous estimate that the authors of The Critical Review had seen fit to place upon Robison’s volume, Morse was able to oppose a very different judgment. The London Review of January, 1798, extracts from which he was glad to be permitted to offer in evidence,[650] placed an estimate upon Robison’s book which was both accurate and just. From this “An American” will be able to gather that “‘the Doctors in Europe and America’” do not “differ so widely in their estimation” of the importance of Robison’s volume as had been asserted. The observations that Morse is now offering to the public, it is his expectation, will serve to effect his personal justification; but if doubts still remain in the minds of any, he can only recommend as the best and perhaps the only sure means of dissolving them that such persons read Proofs of a Conspiracy for themselves.[651]

With respect to the inception of the Illuminati agitation in New England, the utterances of two other clergymen require attention. One of these, the Reverend David Tappan, professor of divinity at Harvard, in a discourse[652] delivered before the senior class of that institution on the 19th of June, 1798, cautioned the young people before him who were about to quit the life of the college to guard against the dangers of speculative principles, the pleasures of idleness and vicious indulgence, the degrading tendency of selfish sentiments, and “a more recent system, which … has for its ostensible object THE REGENERATION OF AN OPPRESSED WORLD TO THE BLISSFUL ENJOYMENT OF EQUAL LIBERTY.” This “more recent system,” Tappan explained, was the philosophy of the Order of the Illuminati.[653]

Drawing, as he professed, upon Morse’s fast day discourse and upon President Dwight’s sermons on infidel philosophy,[654] Tappan essayed a sketch of the objects and operations of the Illuminati, from the time of the founding of the order by Weishaupt to its supposed connections with the French Revolution, and the successes which it had enabled the French armies to accomplish through its intrigues “in various and distant parts of the world.” The conspiracy, it is true, might not be as extensive in its scope as had been claimed; but even so, the undoubted aspects of the situation were sufficient to afford ground for most grave apprehension. “If these and similar facts,” the clergyman continued, “do not evince so early and broad a system of wickedness as this writer[655] supposes (the truth of which in all its extent the speaker is not prepared to support), yet they indicate a real and most alarming plan of hostility against the dearest interests of man.”[656]

The question of the general credibility of the claims which Robison had made, as well as the implication of the Masons in the “conspiracy,” came in for special consideration by Tappan when his sermon was prepared for publication.[657] Concerning the former, the observation is made that the ridicule and incredulity which have opposed themselves to the report of a scheme so novel, extravagant, and diabolical, were to have been expected. At any rate, much of the opposition has come from men whose wishes and opinions have been offended, or from those who have shown themselves to be ardent friends of political and religious innovation. And with regard to the Masons, it is urged that the displeasure which certain worthy members of that fraternity have expressed against Robison ought not to be permitted to become so violent as to render impossible a candid and thorough examination of the proofs he has submitted. Robison’s opinion respecting the universal frivolity or mischievous tendency of the assemblies of the European Masons may be incorrect and injurious, and at the same time the leading facts upon which he founds that opinion may be true. To manifest a willingness to investigate with candor the proofs that have been presented, while continuing to hold in esteem “the approved characters of the principal Masons in this country, especially in the Eastern States,” this, Tappan advises, represents the middle course that his readers should attempt to steer.[658]

Thus it will appear that Tappan became an echo of Morse. As for Timothy Dwight, the contribution he made to the awakening of public interest in the subject of Illuminism requires somewhat stronger statement. In the person of the president of Yale this new idea of a definite and deep-laid conspiracy against religion and civil government encountered a highly sensitized mind. Upon the subjects of infidelity and the general irreligious tendencies of the times, Dwight had been speaking frequently and for years from his lecture-desk in the classroom and from his pulpit in the church. It is safe to say that among all the men of New England no man’s spirit was more persistently haunted by the fear that the forces of irreligion were in league to work general ruin to the institutions of society than his. When, therefore, on the occasion of the Fourth of July, 1798, the people of New Haven assembled to do honor to the day in listening to a sermon by the honored president of their college, it was to be expected that if the latter had any new information to impart or any new pronouncement to make respecting malign efforts that were making to plunge the world into irremediable scepticism and anarchy, he would seize the occasion that the day offered to arouse in his hearers a sense of the new perils which threatened. And President Dwight had new information and a new pronouncement to offer.

The subject which he chose to discuss on that Independence Day, and the text upon the elucidation of which he relied for the illumination of the subject, were in themselves calculated to excite concern. These were respectively, THE DUTY OF AMERICANS AT THE PRESENT CRISIS, and “Behold I come as a thief: Blessed is he that watcheth, and keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame.” (Revelation xvi: 16.)[659] Having first explained the setting of the text, President Dwight then proceeded to define the thesis of his sermon in the following manner: “From this explanation it is manifest that the prediction consists of two great and distinct parts: the preparation for the overthrow of the Antichristian empire; and the embarkation of men in a professed and unusual opposition to God, and to his kingdom, accomplished by means of false doctrines, and impious teachers.”[660]

The first of these predictions, it was asserted, had been fulfilled in the repressive and secularizing measures that during the century had operated to weaken greatly the Catholic hierarchy and its chief political supports among the states of Europe.[661] The second was experiencing a fulfilment not less remarkable in the open and professed war against God and his kingdom, in which Voltaire, Frederick II, the Encyclopedists, and the Societies of the Illuminati had confederated.[662]

This systematical design to destroy Christianity, which Voltaire and his accomplices formed, found its first expressions in the compilation of the Encyclopédie, the formation of a new sect of philosophers to engineer the assaults upon the church, the prostitution of the French Academy to the purposes of this sect, and the dissemination of infidel books and other publications, all of which were so prepared “as to catch the feelings, and steal upon the approbation, of every class of men.”[663] Eventually the labors of this group of men and their disciples were widened so as to include not only religion but morality and civil government as well, with the object in view of unhinging “gradually the minds of men, and destroying their reverence for everything heretofore esteemed sacred.”[664]

Simultaneously the Masonic Societies of France and Germany had been drawn away from the pursuit of the objects of friendly and convivial intercourse for which they were originally instituted, to the employment of their secret assemblies in the discussion of “every novel, licentious, and alarming opinion”[665] that innovators and other restless spirits might choose to advance. Thus,

The Society of the Illuminati, springing up at this time and professing itself to be a higher order of Freemasonry, availed itself of the secrecy, solemnity, and mysticism of Masonry, of its system of correspondence, to teach and propagate doctrines calculated to undermine and destroy all human happiness and virtue. Thus God’s being was derided, while government was pronounced a curse, civil society an apostasy of the race, the possession of private property a robbery, chastity and natural affection groundless prejudices, and adultery, assassination, poisoning and other infernal crimes not only lawful but even virtuous.[667] To crown all, the principle that the end justifies the means was made to define the sphere of action for the members of the order.

The triumphs of this system of falsehood and horror, Dwight continued, have already been momentous. In Germany “the public faith and morals have been unhinged; and the political and religious affairs of that empire have assumed an aspect which forebodes its total ruin.”[668] In France the affairs of the people have been controlled by the representatives of this hellish society. Not only this, but by means of the establishment of the order in those countries which France has opposed, the French government has been able to triumph in its military campaigns and to overthrow religion and governments in the countries which have been attacked. Neither England nor Scotland have escaped the foul contagion; and private papers of the order, seized in Germany, testify to the fact that several such societies had been erected in America prior to the year 1786.[669]

When the preacher passed to the head of improvement, it was therefore natural that he should prescribe as one of the “duties” that especially needed to be observed, the breaking off all connection with such enemies as had been mentioned. The language in which this particular duty was enforced certainly did not lack boldness and vigor.

With equally fiery speech, all doubting Thomases are urged to

From these excerpts and this extended survey of President Dwight’s sermon it will readily appear that his espousal of the notion that the Illuminati were immediately responsible for the riotous overturnings and bitter woes of the age was as unequivocal as it was vigorous. To this view of things he boldly committed himself, and that on a great national anniversary occasion when public interest was bound to be peculiarly alert. Moreover, the crisis through which his country was passing had seemed to him to require that his countrymen should especially be put on their guard respecting this new peril which threatened. Though he had been silent respecting personal observations and evidence of his own bearing on the operations of this infamous organization in the United States, nevertheless he had given his hearers to understand that he accepted at its face value Robison’s statement regarding the existence of the Order of the Illuminati in this country. Here, then, was a man high in the councils of the church,[672] of education, and the state, lending the full weight of his personality and his office to this fresh and startling explanation of the true cause of the agitations and disorders of the day.[673] The undoubted effect was to give more solid standing to the sensational charge that Jedediah Morse had made.

But preachers were not the only public characters who early caught up and echoed the new alarm. Orators, too, lent the aid of their voices in an effort to persuade the people that their liberties and institutions were in danger of a deadly thrust from this new quarter. A number of these, on the Fourth of July just referred to, delivered themselves of sentiments similar to those which President Dwight expressed. Thus at Sharon, Connecticut, the orator of the day, a certain John C. Smith, supplied a new thrill to his patriotic address by informing his hearers that the French Revolution was the result

At Hartford, Theodore Dwight, brother to Yale’s president, publicly averred it was a fact well ascertained that the French Revolution “was planned by a set of men whose avowed object was the overthrow of Altars and Thrones, that is, the destruction of all Religion and Government.”[675] At the midnight orgies of the “modern Illuminati” the plan had been conceived and nourished. For six years past, the orator declared, the government of France has been directed by men who have been schooled in that society of demons.[676] In the same city, and on the same occasion, another voice was raised to declaim against the reckless impiety of French partisans in the United States.[677] These conspiring men, so this orator somewhat vaguely declared, are said to have substituted the wild dogmas of infidel philosophy for the benevolent principles of Christianity. They have adopted “a philosophy originating in wickedness, founded in error, and subversive of the peace and happiness of society.”[678]

From this early handling of the subject by clergymen and orators, we are now called away to consider a significant exposition of the matter in the columns of a Boston newspaper. To the issue of the Massachusetts Mercury of July 27, 1798, “Censor” contributed an article that was destined to have important bearings on the course of public discussion. Professing a spirit of reasonable moderation, “Censor” offered the practical suggestion that the time had come to inquire what evidence Professor Robison possessed respecting the authenticity of his sources. “At this distance,” he urged, “it is impossible to decide on the truth of his assertions, or the respectability of his testimonies.” Yet the writer had had his attention drawn to certain evidences of prejudice, misrepresentation, and unrestrained imagination on the part of Robison which tended to destroy confidence in his judgment. Dr. Morse, too, he continued, on the unsupported assertion of an individual three thousand miles distant, to the effect that several lodges of the Illuminati had been established in America prior to ’86, in his fast sermon had seen fit to declare that the Illuminati were here, that they had made considerable progress among us, and that to them were to be traced the torrent of irreligion and the abuse of everything good and praiseworthy which threatens to overwhelm the world. For all these assertions, “Censor” inquired, where were the evidences?[679]

The tone of “Censor’s” article was decidedly hostile. The spirit of cynicism and distrust had lifted its head, not apologetically but boldly. The evidence in the case was called for. To Jedediah Morse, original and chief sponsor for the outcry against the Illuminati, it must have seemed clear that the obligation of meeting the issue thus joined rested squarely upon his own shoulders. Nor was he minded to evade responsibility. And thus it happened that the columns of the Massachusetts Mercury, for some weeks to come,[680] carried a succession of articles over Morse’s signature, all laboring to prove that the judgment their author had passed upon Robison’s volume had not been hasty, but was well grounded in reason. To these articles, rambling and inconclusive as they were, we must now devote attention.

Expressing first his gratitude that Professor Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy had attracted the attention of so large and respectable a portion of the community, Morse thereupon professed surprise that his own commendation of that work in his late fast day sermon should have exposed him to the necessity of vindicating both the author of the Proofs and his own composition.[681] He had assumed that every reader of Robison’s production would be impressed as he had been with the evidence of the author’s talents, views, candor, and integrity. The sensitiveness and irritation which members of the Masonic fraternity had shown had also astonished him. His hope had been that the notes by which his published fast day sermon had been accompanied would forestall censure from that quarter. However the necessity to vindicate Professor Robison and his book had been imposed upon him, and that he would proceed to do. He would first introduce extracts from his fast day sermon to show that he had recommended Robison’s book, not because of any observations unfavorable to the Masons which it contained, but for the sole reason that it exposed the dark conspiracies of the Illuminati against civil government and Christianity.[682]

The vindication of Professor Robison’s character and reputation as a man and writer was next undertaken. These points Morse considered to be fully established by the positions that Robison occupied as Secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Professor of Natural Philosophy in one of the best universities of the world. If further proof should be required, the contributions that Robison had made to the Encyclopædia Britannica certainly vouched for his respectability and prominence. Beyond this Morse could go no further than to add that private advices which had come to him from one of his foreign correspondents, the Reverend Dr. Erskine, of Edinburgh, fully confirmed the reputation of the Scotch professor.[683]

But since it was likely to be remarked in this instance that “great men are not always wise,” Morse proposed to deal next with the marks of the book’s credibility. As to external marks, the approbation and support of the book by very respectable men in England and Scotland, and its approval and recommendation by clergymen and laymen of discernment and ability in America, he argued, were to be weighed as impressive considerations.[684] If by way of rejoinder it should be urged that the English reviewers were not of one mind respecting the merits of the book, then his reply would be that having read on both sides of the controversy that had been waged in the English journals, he had been forced to the conclusion that “the balance of candor and truth are [sic] clearly on the side of those who are in favor of Professor Robison, and give credit to his work.”[685]

Respecting the favorable reception which the book had been accorded in America, he was glad to be privileged to point to the sentiments of Professor Tappan,[686] President Dwight,[687] and Theodore Dwight, Esq.[688] It is true that in America the book had excited warm, even virulent opposition; but certainly it had received respectable support, “such as ought to exempt any person from the charge of weakness or credulity who believes it authentic.”[689]

An effort to marshal the internal evidence of the book’s credibility is next promised by Morse.[690] This anticipation remained a promise, however, for the disingenuous reason that Morse offered that a book which has met such a flattering reception as Robison’s Proofs absolves its friends and supporters of the necessity of defending its contents as well as the authenticity of the documents from which it has been drawn. The burden of proof rests upon those who have nothing to offer against the work in question but bold assertions, contemptuous sneers, and vilifying epithets.[691] Professor Robison’s critics have failed to take sufficient account of the fact that he was engaged in a delicate and arduous undertaking. He was attempting to unveil a deep and dark conspiracy.[692] It is not pretended that all the links in the chain of evidence have been discovered; nor is it claimed that there has been an entire absence of confusion, disconnection, and imperfection in the work of ferreting out the conspiracy. But certainly enough has been accomplished to merit confidence in the effort, and to justify serious alarm on the part of the friends of the civil and religious interests of the country.[693]

This, it need scarcely be said, did not amount to a satisfactory handling of the case. In truth, from the standpoint of the main issue involved, viz., the reliability of Robison’s “proofs,” it was little more than so much dust thrown into the air. Evidence had been asked for. In its place arguments, and it must be confessed very inconclusive arguments at that, were submitted. The vital questions in the case had scarcely been touched. Were the Illuminati still in existence? If so, did they actually aim at the universal overthrow of religion and civil government? Was the French Revolution the result of their machinations? More momentous still to the interests of Americans, had the net of conspiracy been thrown over this country, with the result that nefarious secret organizations were at work among her people, corrupting them and plotting the downfall of their institutions? No definite, independent word had yet been spoken in America in answer to these questions. Thus far the issue was joined over the merits or demerits of a book,[694]—a book that had recently come across the Atlantic and whose readers in America, according as they were credulous or incredulous, boldly asserted or as vehemently denied that the questions which have just been propounded should be answered in the affirmative.

Thus matters stood in the early fall of 1798. The newspapers generally had begun to take hold of the subject, and the volume of public discussion steadily increased. But as to progress in the clarifying of the fundamental questions at issue, no advance was made. No additional facts were forthcoming; no new light was shed. The alarm that Morse and his allies had raised may be said to have been something like a ship which has been able to make its way out as far as the harbor mouth, but lingers there becalmed, waiting for a favoring gale to speed it on its way. Or was it that the winds were ample, but wholly unfavorable? In the late summer and the fall of 1798 practically every other public interest in New England was eclipsed by two surpassingly important concerns: the bitter agitation over the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the distress and terror of the people over the ravages of an epidemic of yellow fever which was sweeping the towns and cities of the Atlantic seaboard, extending well up along the New England coast.

With the approach of the anniversary thanksgiving in Massachusetts, late in November, 1798, public discussion of the Illuminati broke out afresh. Once more the columns of the Massachusetts Mercury became the chief medium of communication. Stirred, it appears, by the announcement from abroad that the first three volumes of the Abbé Barruel’s Memoirs of Jacobinism had been translated into English, a contributor to the Mercury took occasion to comment at length on the marvelous corroboratory evidence which that work was about to supply to the English reading public with respect to the great and terrible conspiracy which Professor Robison had laid bare.[695]

This advance commendation of Barruel’s composition was not destined to be received with unanimous approval. “A Friend to Truth” was unable to restrain the impulse to exclaim:

Time and space were claimed by this writer to call attention also to alleged discrepancies of a serious nature between Robison’s account of the rise of the Illuminati and its early relations with Freemasonry and the account of the same matters by Barruel, as reflected in English reviews of the latter’s work. Quite incidentally “A Friend to Truth” threw out the suggestion that Robison was not always in command of his reason.[697]

Such an indecisive passage at arms obviously called for further hostilities. The aspersion upon Robison’s sanity must immediately be branded as infamous, and the charge that Barruel had contradicted Robison boldly pronounced a lie.[698] “Trepidus” felt drawn to enter the combat at this juncture, with satire as his principal weapon. He knew of nothing so amazing and so wonderful as the discoveries which Mr. Robison and his commentators had made respecting the achievements of the Illuminati in America.[699] Surely there was nothing half so dreadful about the Catalinarian conspiracy, the Sicilian Vespers, the massacre of St. Bartholomew, or the Gunpowder Plot. But he, too, had a mysterious cabal to expose. The people who were vulgarly called “Quakers,” but who had assumed the suspicious name of “Friends,” were they not conspirators?

These, however, were the sentiments of mere scribblers. Such were able to handle the subject seriously or lightly according as their sympathies or their prejudices were most appealed to. It was evident that in either case such men charged themselves with no personal responsibility to get at the precise facts. What was needed was the testimony and counsel of one who, recognizing the gravity of the interests involved and having accumulated and weighed the evidence, should be able to speak the language of enlightened conviction, backed by the force of a position among his fellow citizens which would entitle his words to respect. An attempt to meet that need was about to be made, how successfully we shall soon be in a position to judge.

On the day of the anniversary thanksgiving referred to in the beginning of this chapter, the Reverend Jedediah Morse was again before his people in his Charlestown pulpit, to speak to them under the inspiration of another high occasion in the commonwealth’s life. Of what would he speak? The day had, of course, its own definite suggestions. Governor Increase Sumner, in appointing it, apparently had felt that Massachusetts’ measure of providential mercies had been well filled.[701] The earth had yielded a sufficient supply for the wants of the people, and the efforts of industrious husbandmen had been well rewarded. The state’s fisheries had been prospered, and its commerce, although much interrupted by the violence and rapacity of unreasonable men, had been generally attended with success. Order and tranquillity had continued to reign in the commonwealth, and although a mortal contagious disease had been permitted for a time to afflict the city of Boston, yet Providence had been pleased to set bounds to the progress of the plague, and once more the voice of health and plenty was generally heard. The constitutions of civil government were still enjoyed; the life and usefulness of the nation’s chief magistrate had been spared and continued; and despite the past impenitence of the people, they were still indulged with the Christian religion.[702]

Would these considerations engage the thought of the minister of Charlestown and inspire his tongue to speak the language of thanksgiving and praise? Only in part.[703] Morse’s mind was occupied, not so much with the thought of mercies bestowed as with that of perils to be faced. Passing lightly over the more favorable and reassuring aspects of the state of public affairs, he seized upon various items in the governor’s proclamation to point out those untoward elements in the situation which seemed to him to supply ample warrant for alarm.

The proclamation of the governor had referred to the uninterrupted order and tranquillity of the state. True; this was a mercy with which, under the favor of Providence, the people of Massachusetts had been blessed. Yet, unhappily, serious differences in political and religious opinions had been permitted to exist. Men might call these differences a mere war of words; but words are often calculated to bring on a more serious conflict. Such party zeal and animosities as had been raging would now somewhat abate, let it be hoped, and thus the heat of battle would be found to be past. But undeniably the crisis had been grave.[704]

The “Constitutions of Civil Government” were still enjoyed; but they had been, and still were seriously threatened. The main sources from which such dangers issue deserved to be pointed out. The vices and demoralizing principles of the people generally, their selfish spirit as conspicuously expressed in their insatiable ardor to become rich, the spread of infidel and atheistical principles in all parts of the country, the increase of luxury, extravagance, and dissipation, the spirit of insubordination to civil authority,—these constituted the perils against which the most powerful precautions must be taken.[705] The people of the United States were not sufficiently aroused to a sense of the high importance of the experiment of free government which they were making before the eyes of the world. Unless prompt reformation took place, they must make their choice between a voluntary increase in the power of government on the one hand, and revolution, anarchy, and military despotism on the other.[706]

The real nub of the matter, however, was yet to be considered. “The blessings of good government have been most imminently and immediately endangered by foreign intrigue.”[707] Enlarging upon this proposition, Morse argued that for twenty years and more foreign intrigue had been the bane of the country’s independence, peace, and prosperity. By it, insidious efforts had been made to diminish the nation’s limits, its importance, and its resources. By it, national prejudices had been kept alive. By it, efforts had been made to render efficient government impossible.[708] This spirit, which in other nations had brought about their downfall and left them, like the republics of Europe, prostrate at the feet of France,[709] had thus far been thwarted here only by means of the administration of government, wise, firm, dignified, and “supported by the enlightened and ardent patriotism of the people, seasonably manifested, with great unanimity, from all quarters of the Union, in patriotic addresses, in a voluntary tender of military services, and liberal means of naval defence.”[710]

As to the country’s continued indulgence with the Christian religion,[711] it should be said that this blessing was regularly recognized in the governor’s proclamation, and always called for loudest praise. However, at that particular hour there were extraordinary reasons why the praise of citizens should be unusually fervent; for were not those times

The foregoing abstract takes account of all the important points in the text of Morse’s anniversary thanksgiving sermon. The reader will not need instruction as to the commonplace character of Morse’s pulpit performance. The distinguishing character of the production, however, is not to be sought in the sermon proper, but in the astonishing array of supplementary material by which it was accompanied when it appeared in its printed form. This material consisted of numerous foot notes and a bulky appendix of some fifty pages. The foot notes frequently commented upon passages in the works of Robison and Barruel. Since they throw no light upon the fundamental questions at issue, we may pass them by. One, however, was unique; and because of its suggestiveness for the future trend of public discussion respecting the Illuminati, it must be cited in full.

This foot note speaks for itself. The Appendix, or supplement of Morse’s sermon, was made up of a curious mixture of heterogeneous documents, such as an original survey of the history of the United States from the time that the Federal government was established, extracts from the confidential correspondence which passed between French agents in this country and the French government,[714] and extracts from the correspondence of various public characters in the United States, all tending to enforce the point that from the beginning of the relations between our government and that of France, the controlling aim and spirit of the latter had been to work despicable and ruinous intrigue.[715]

All of this, it may be said, was fairly typical of the pabulum which Federalist leaders were regularly serving up to the people in 1798, and signified little or nothing concerning the existence of French conspirators wearing the Illuminati brand who may, or may not, have been at work in America at the time.

One section of the Appendix, however, supplied some evidence of a definite effort to leave generalities and deal intimately with the point at issue. In this section[716] Morse sought to connect the Illuminati with “the Jacobin Clubs instituted by Genet.”[717] Like their sister organizations in France they had been constituted after the manner and with the principles of the European Illuminati. The fact that the members of these American organizations have been the leading disseminators of the principles of Illuminism in this country, as well as the circulators of all those publications, like Paine’s Age of Reason, whose object is to discredit and throw contempt upon the Christian religion, clearly fixes their status as “the apostles of Illuminism.”[718] Frowned upon by the Federal government, these American organizations have ceased to act openly; “but, like their parent society in Bavaria which, when suppressed under one form, was soon revived again under the name of the German Union,”[719] so their offspring in the United States now hypocritically mask themselves under the name of The American Society of United Irishmen.[720]

Taken by itself, it would be impossible to state how favorably this presentation of the case against Illuminism impressed the public mind.[721] But as a matter of fact, on the occasion of the Massachusetts anniversary thanksgiving referred to, Morse was by no means compelled to bear his testimony alone. By the time that occasion came round, the subject of Illuminism had solicited the attention and concern of the Federalist clergy generally; on which account it happened that a considerable amount of clerical artillery was unlimbered and trained upon the new foe.

At Haverhill, the Reverend Abiel Abbott, in language emphatic, if somewhat high-flown, voiced his alarm:

At Deerfield, the Reverend John Taylor dwelt upon “the good effect … produced upon the public mind by the fortunate discovery of a secret conspiracy in Europe, against all the religions and governments on earth.”[723] One of the evidences of this salutary impression, he said, was to be found in the fact that even the confirmed infidels in America had been shocked.[724] At Andover, the Reverend Jonathan French did not consider his full duty discharged when he had uttered a general warning against men of treachery, slander, and falsehood in the nation, men who have spared no pains in fomenting difficulties and divisions.[725] He believed it to be incumbent upon him to strike out at that “envenomed serpent in the grass,” France, whose tools, said he, were here, according to two writers of eminence and credit, Professor Robison and the Abbé Barruel.[726] The works of these two authors, French’s hearers were informed, “ought to rouse the attention, awaken the vigilance, and excite the endeavors of every friend to religion, to develop the dark designs, and to guard against the baneful influence of all such dangerous secret machinations.”[727] Through the pulpit ministrations of the Reverend Joseph Eckley, auditors at the Old South Church in Boston had their attention drawn to the same topic, although the language employed by this clergyman was somewhat less specific than that which has just been noted.[728]

Other pastors, while refraining from definite reference to the Illuminati, took occasion to exploit the subject of French intrigue, with a view to awakening in their hearers a keen sense of instant alarm. Of such, the efforts of the Reverend Nathan Strong, pastor of the North Presbyterian Church in Hartford,[729] and the Reverend Henry Cumings, pastor of the church in Billerica, deserve mention. Strong contended that foreign influence, if not promptly checked, would work here the same havoc it had wrought in France, i. e., the demoralizing principles of infidelity and political engagements and alliances would chain the people of the United States to “a burning pile”;[730] and Cumings developed the idea that the war impending between this country and France possibly amounted to an act of intervention on the part of God to rescue the United States as a brand from the burning.[731] By the breaking out of war a providential check would be put

On the whole, the idea of secret and systematic plottings against the liberties and institutions of the people of the United States was extensively promoted by clerical agency during the autumn and winter of 1798–99. For it is not to be lost sight of that such pulpit utterances as have just been noticed were considerably more than mere pulpit pronouncements. Issued from the presses of New England, these sermons were scattered widely through the country[733] and, no doubt, were widely read. Some representatives of the clergy, as we have seen, spoke out with distinctness regarding the Illuminati, asserting that this organization would have to be reckoned with by their fellow citizens. Others committed themselves no farther than to emphasize foreign intrigue of the French stripe, and to characterize it as a vital thrust at the country’s peace and prosperity. The total effect was to invite a general airing of the issue which Jedediah Morse had raised in his fast day sermon of May 9, 1798, and to render imperative a sifting of evidence.

The part played by the newspapers is less easily interpreted, since it calls for the survey of a much less solid body of opinion. Some journals adopted an attitude of discreet silence, apparently waiting for the mists which enveloped the subject to clear. Others opened their columns impartially to champions and antagonists, willing to be used to let light in upon a dark and perplexing matter. The policy (the word seems strangely out of place in connection with the average New England newspaper of the period) of several of these journals can best be stated in terms of their own behavior.

The course pursued by the Columbian Centinel[734] left nothing to be desired as respects impartiality. As early as August 11, 1798, there appeared in this paper the following sarcastic “epistles”:

Epistle from Professor Robison, in Scotland, to Professor Morse, in America:

Another Epistle, from Professor Morse, in America, to Professor Robison, in Scotland:

A few weeks later there appeared in the same paper an article whose author professed that having read “The Cannibals’ Progress, the Freemason’s illuminati, and some other documents of the French nation,” he had been brought round to the conclusion that the depravity of the human race was astounding. He could no longer doubt that the conspiracy against religions and governments was not only deeply laid, but was likewise spreading far and wide. He was convinced that the proofs of its existence in America were to be observed generally throughout the country, “in every society where there is the least prospect of success, in misleading and dividing our citizens.”[735] To this another contributor was given opportunity to respond with an expression of sentiments intended to sweep the views of the former aside as inordinately nonsensical and silly.[736]

After the autumn crop of thanksgiving sermons had revived interest in the subject of the Illuminati, the Centinel published one article which really shed a modicum of light upon the subject. This consisted of a letter which had originally been received in England from Germany, together with certain observations from the pen of the anonymous contributor who offered it in evidence.[737] The letter bore the signature of one Augustus Böttiger, who identified himself as “Counsellor of the Upper Consistory, and Provost of the College of Weimar.”[738] It concerned itself with the amused astonishment with which, according to its author, Professor Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy had been received in Germany, in view of the fact that from 1790 on every interest in the Illuminati had ceased in that country. The Freemasons of Germany, Böttiger asserted, had had absolutely nothing to do with Illuminism from the date mentioned. In the observations which accompanied this letter the information was advanced that in England all public interest in Illuminism had likewise died out, owing to the contemptuous estimate which the people of that country had come to place upon the works of Robison and Barruel.[739]

In the heat which had arisen over the subject of Illuminism it was impossible that this bit of evidence should pass without being sharply challenged. A rough and scurrilous rejoinder to these productions appeared in the Centinel of January 19, 1799. Questions were boldly raised concerning the identity of the addressee of the Böttiger letter; how the letter had chanced to find its way to America; where it had been translated; what were the religious and political sentiments of the author; who was the person that penned the remarks by which it had been accompanied in the Centinel; how the latter had come into possession of his pretentious stock of information respecting the state of public opinion in England, et cetera, et cetera. Neither the writer nor his friends were favorably impressed. “The naked declaration of an unknown paragraphist, probably enough an emigrant illuminatist, will not be sufficient with enlightened Americans to convict Professor Robison or Abbé Barruel of criminality or even of error in their publications.”[740]

Another newspaper that sought to hold to a noncommittal course was the Massachusetts Mercury, as might have been anticipated in view of circumstances already related. After the generous hearing which this journal, in the summer and fall of 1798, accorded to both sides in the controversy, a marked diminution of its interest for a season is noticeable. A search through its files for the winter of 1798–99 discloses nothing more than an occasional article bearing on the subject. One of these came to light in the issue of December 7.[741] “Anti-Illuminism” solicited the public ear that he might testify to the change that had taken place in his personal convictions. An examination of Robison’s volume and reflection upon the amount of abuse which that author had been compelled to suffer had persuaded him that there was positive truth in the charge of conspiracy that had been made. He was now certain that the Masons were not the harmless persons he had formerly believed them to be. The vociferous attempt which had been made to vindicate American Freemasonry impressed him as decidedly premature. It was clear to him that all secret societies were dangerous.

It might have been expected that a Democratic sheet as violent and aggressive as the Independent Chronicle would range itself squarely against the alarmists, and seek, if not by argument at least by unlicensed vituperation, to distract the public interest. But as a matter of fact, the Chronicle elected to adopt a very different attitude.[742] Morse and his associates in the special cause which he and they were pleading should be treated with contemptuous indifference. The bête noire of the editors of the Chronicle was “political preaching.” This new agitation over Illuminism, for which the clergy were chiefly responsible, was but one other proof of their incorrigible impertinence in turning aside from their legitimate functions. In displaying “his over-heated zeal … in silly tales about the ‘illuminati’,”[743] Morse was but holding true to type.[744]

At Hartford, next to Boston the main center of the Illuminati agitation in New England, two papers, the American Mercury and the Connecticut Courant, assisted materially in giving publicity to the controversy. The former at first gave some evidence of a disposition to treat Morse’s presentation of the case with respect. Extracts from the latter’s fast day sermon of May 9, 1798, were given to this journal’s readers;[745] and the annual poem which at the beginning of the new year (1799) it furnished to its patrons, testified to the widespread interest that the general public in Connecticut had come to have in the subject of the Illuminati.[746] It was not long after this, however, that Elisha Babcock, editor of the Mercury, found reason to become rabidly hostile to Morse and his agitation.[747]

As for the Connecticut Courant, its behavior was precisely what one should expect from a journal breathing always a spirit of arrogant and unreasoning Federalism. Quick to take advantage of any new issue which gave promise of offering discomfiture to the Democrats, and all too often impatient to the point of exasperation over so slight a question as the essential soundness of the facts involved, from the first day that it was made aware of the agitation against the Illuminati, the Courant gave every encouragement to the men who were trying to awaken the people of the country to a sense of the gravity of the peril that threatened. The books, pamphlets, sermons, orations, and leading newspaper contributions that appeared upon the subject, these the Courant urged upon the attention of its readers, and gave such assistance as it was able in the exposition of their respective merits.[748]

The political possibilities in the situation supplied the chief, if not the only animus for this playing-up of the case by the Courant. On this point little room for doubt is left. One contributor who heard Theodore Dwight’s Fourth of July oration asserted that not till then had his eyes been opened to see in Mr. Jefferson “anything more than the foe of certain men, who were in possession of places to which he might think himself entitled;” but Dwight convinced him that Jefferson “is the real Jacobin, the very child of modern illumination, the foe of man, and the enemy of his country.”[749] Another argued that the zeal of the Democrats for office was to be treated as a part of the scheme of Illuminatism in America “to worm its votaries into all offices of trust, and importance, that the weapon of government, upon signal given, may be turned against itself.”[750] Still another contended that the one concern of the Democrats of Connecticut was to dispense “to the people of this state the precious doctrines of the Illuminati.”[751]

The contributions to the agitation made by two newspapers that were published outside of New England but which were extensively circulated and much quoted in that region, are entitled to consideration at this point. These were Porcupine’s Gazette and the Aurora General Advertiser, both Philadelphia publications and, it may be remarked in passing, both tremendously influential throughout the entire country.

William Cobbett, the editor of the former, participated in the publication of the first American edition of Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy. As soon as the book was ready for distribution he announced the fact in his paper, accompanying the advertisement with flattering testimonials gleaned from the London Review.[752] Later, he gave to his readers his personal estimate of the merits of Robison’s production.[753] In his judgment the Proofs was of such great value that it deserved to be read by every living man. For one thing, “it unravels everything that appears mysterious in the progress of the French Revolution.”[754]

In the issue of Porcupine’s Gazette for August 9, 1798, Cobbett expressed his deep interest in the reports which had come to him respecting Morse’s fast day sermon and the “Vindication” with which, he understood, Morse had followed his sermon. He would be grateful to any gentleman who would send him a copy of the “Vindication,” since there could be no doubt as to its great public utility. Very promptly his desire was gratified, and Morse’s articles in vindication of Robison, which in the summer of that year he contributed to the Massachusetts Mercury, began to be spread before the readers of Porcupine’s Gazette.[755]

Following their publication, other matters appear to have held the restless attention of Cobbett for a time and no further reference of an extended character to the affairs of the Illuminati appeared in this paper until February of the following year.

Upon the receipt of a copy of Morse’s thanksgiving sermon, Cobbett communicated to his readers the joy he experienced in being able to put them in possession of extracts from it.[756] Morse’s sermon, in his judgment, was an extraordinary performance. Of its Appendix he wrote:

“This Appendix is one of the most valuable political tracts that ever appeared in America, whether we view it as a collection of facts, or as an address to the reason and feelings of the people.”[757] Of the sermon as a whole he wrote:

This was very strong language, providing the personality of William Cobbett is left out of account! How soothingly it fell upon the ears of a certain clergyman in New England, which ears, it may be remarked, were growing accustomed to much less kindly comment, we may leave to conjecture.

As for Benjamin Franklin Bache, the editor of the Aurora[759] and as militant an advocate of Democratic principles as this country contained, all such views of the case were so much puerile fol de rol. Robison’s Proofs was a blending of “a most absurd collection of stories respecting the mystical societies in Germany with some fragments of histories of French Free Masonry, … [an] inconsistent Farrago.”[760] Weak indeed must be the cause of despotism “when its Satellites can imagine a dissemination of such contemptible mummery would calumniate the friends of Liberty or paralize their efforts to explore the divinity of kings, or the dogma of priests.”[761] The explanation of Morse’s faith in Robison’s book is to be sought in the fact that the minister of Charlestown received his doctor’s degree from the University of Glasgow; and therefore on the principle, “Tickle me and I’ll scratch you,” the Glasgow professor’s production was entitled to credit.[762]

The national skies had by no means cleared of threatening clouds when, in the early spring of 1799, the time arrived for President Adams to issue his annual fast day proclamation. In the view of the nations chief executive the questions of the hour were still of great urgency and it was a season of imminent danger.[763] Accordingly, in appointing Thursday, April 25, as the day for the people of the nation to perform acts of solemn humiliation, fasting and prayer, he justified in part the issuance of the proclamation on the following grounds:

Seldom, if ever, has a presidential proclamation breathed deeper concern for the moral and religious interests of the people.[765] Its challenge to citizens who were already of fearful heart was unmistakable.

To the observance of this fast day the Reverend Jedediah Morse must have turned in no ordinary frame of mind. A spirit of exultation possessed him. It is impossible to read the sermon which on that occasion he delivered before his people in the Charlestown meeting house and avoid the impression that to Morse personally the day had been anticipated as one of triumph rather than of humiliation.[766] Not that in any sense he was out of sympathy with the objects for which the day had been set apart, or with the President’s extremely solemn language in proclaiming the fast; but it was given him, as he believed, to make before his people a pronouncement of such a startling and convincing character as would perform for the country at large that great and needed service which for months he had been eager to accomplish. Incidentally, the scoffers who had sought to cry down the alarm which a year before he had sounded should be put to rout. Timid apologists for the outcry against the Illuminati were about to see their case tremendously strengthened. Honest doubters, by the overwhelming weight of the evidence which was about to be spread before them, would be forced to acknowledge the folly of their distrust.

The text that Morse employed for the occasion directly echoed a sentiment in the President’s proclamation, and besides was well suited to the purpose in view. From the Hebrew Psalms he selected the following passage: “If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?”—Psalm xi:3. With this text he proposed to make an effective appeal. The Psalm from which it was taken was composed by David while he was in great peril and distress from the persecuting hand of Saul; while, too, he was hard pressed to find a way of escape out of the destructive snares set by his enemies, whose secret machinations involved both his character and his life, and not only this, but the foundations of his country.[767] What word would better fit the circumstances of the present hour? Have not the enemies of David, of Christ his Antitype, and of the Church … ever possessed similar dispositions, … had in view similar designs, and in like circumstances, … adopted and pursued the same means of gratifying the former, and of accomplishing the latter?”[768] Might it not be said that “the present situation is uncommonly critical and perilous?” Do not all persons of reflection agree upon that judgment, even though their opinions regarding the sources and degrees of the dangers may vary greatly?[769]

The “foundations” alluded to in the text were, of course, the foundations of religion and government.[770] This exegesis paved the way for the following statement:

Having thus prepared the minds of his auditors for the portentous revelation, Morse quickly descended to particulars.

It may as well be said plainly, he continued, that the passage in the President’s fast day proclamation respecting the hostile designs, insidious arts, and demoralizing principles of a certain foreign nation, referred to France.[772] Did any one ask for proofs that the President’s statement was true? The proofs were so abundant and so evident that the difficulty was to know where to begin. The war upon the defenceless commerce of the United States; the inhuman and savage treatment of those citizens of this country who have been so unfortunate as to fall into the hands of France’s minions by whom they have been so grossly insulted, beaten, wounded and thrust into loathsome prisons and dungeons, even murdered; the recent plot of the French Directory to invade the southern states from St. Domingo, using an army of blacks to effect an invasion, and by these attempting to excite to insurrection the blacks of this country;[773] here, surely, were ample proofs of the hostile and detestable designs of the French government against our own.[774]

But there was another matter. The disclosure that had recently been made regarding the secret machinations of the French on the Island of St. Domingo, focused attention upon a matter of the most serious moment. The most vigorous, active, and united measures must immediately be adopted to arouse from their slumber the citizens of this country, that they may give due attention to a particular aspect of the insidious and seductive activities of the French in the United States, of which, Morse averred, he stood prepared to speak with the utmost definiteness.[775] Continuing:

The remainder of the sermon is void of originality and interest. Its utterances pale into insignificance alongside of the sensational and emphatic statements just recorded.[777]

When the sermon came from the printer’s hands it contained the “complete and indubitable proof” that Morse had proudly told his hearers was in his possession. This “proof” was in the form of documents, conspicuous among which was the following letter:

Following this letter and its translation appeared a list of the officers and members, resident and non-resident, of Wisdom Lodge, Portsmouth, Virginia, with explanatory data in each instance, covering such points as age, place of birth, profession, etc., the whole concluding with a representation of the seal of Wisdom Lodge and the following motto: Amplius Homines oculis quam auribus credunt. Iter longum est per precepta, breve et efficax per exempla.[779]

Upon these documents Morse saw fit to make and publish certain “Explanatory Remarks,”[780] of which the following is the gist.

The Lodge Wisdom in Portsmouth, Virginia, is seen to be a branch of the Grand Orient of France. Its members consist chiefly of foreigners, that is to say, Frenchmen,—Frenchmen who come either from France or from the West India possessions of that country. From the seal it appears that Wisdom Lodge was established as early as 1786. It is also, as its number shows, “the TWO THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED AND SIXTIETH branch from the original stock.”[781] It further appears that there is a sister lodge in the city of New York, styled the Grand Orient of New York. The latter, from the name and number of the lodges it has instituted, is quite likely the first and principal branch that the Mother Club in France has established in America. This New York lodge has established the French lodge, Union, to which the letter from the lodge Wisdom was addressed. As to the other thirteen branches from the parent stock, for the present there could be nothing more than conjecture as to their location.[782]

The documents also show that an intimate correspondence is maintained between the lodges in America and those in St. Domingo; also between the American lodges and the Grand Orient in France. It further appears that Wisdom Lodge has a regular deputy in the membership of the Grand Orient of France. Lists of names are exchanged between the two societies, so that their members may be fully known to each other.[783]

Masons to whom these documents issuing from Wisdom Lodge have been shown declare that the organization is not truly Masonic. The titles of its officers, its seal and motto, they affirm, are not regular. Thus the lodge in Portsmouth has been pronounced spurious by well-informed Masons.[784]

Wisdom Lodge, it appears, has one hundred members. Counting all the others referred to in the documents, there are seventeen lodges in all. Assuming that these have an equal number of members, it may be said that there are at least seventeen hundred Illuminati in the United States, all bound together by oath and intimate correspondence.[785] Beyond these there are to be considered, of course, the many thousands of Frenchmen scattered through the United States, all perhaps “combined and organized (with other foreigners and some disaffected and unprincipled Americans) in these societies, … regularly instructed and directed by their masters in France, and … systematically conducting the plan of revolutionizing this country.”[786]

The principles and objects of this organization may be partly deduced from the motto and seal of Wisdom Lodge. The literal rendering of the former is not so significant as its spirit, which is best expressed in the following liberal translation: “Men more readily believe what they see than what they hear. They are taught slowly by precept, but the effect of example is sudden and powerful.”[787] From this it may be inferred that the organization was formed, “not for speculation, but for activity.” Precepts are scorned; actions are accepted as the only quick method of teaching mankind and of producing a change in their opinions. The change in opinions which the organization contemplates must have to do with government and religion. It cannot have to do with the minds of its members, for the society is secret and designs to work secretly. “The changes which they can produce by secret influence and intrigue, the novel arts which they can thus exhibit before the eyes of men, are doubtless to be the efficaceous means of teaching men the new system of philosophy, which sets at defiance, and contemns all old and settled opinions, by which the government of nations and the conduct of individuals have heretofore been directed.”[788]

As to the organization’s seal, no description can do it justice.[789] A view of its square and compass, pillars, and skull and cross-bones best indicates its horrid nature.[790]

Fortified by these documents, and flanked by the testimonies of Robison and Barruel,[791] Morse concluded his presentment in the following energetic manner:

Here, at last, was something reasonably concrete. After a full year, devoted mostly to the reiteration of vague suspicions and generalities, of reckless affirmations and denials, here was something which had the value of a definite point at which a rational investigation of the subject could begin, should any course so practical as this be thought of. The hour for the introduction of something tangible in the way of evidence had fully come, in any event. This was evidenced by the fact that in connection with the celebration of the national fast other clergymen, for the most part, had held back, apparently unwilling to commit themselves further on the subject of the Illuminati until clearer proof should be at hand.[793] This did not signify that public interest in the subject had abated; it was rather in suspense.[794]

With the appearance of Morse’s third and last sermon dealing with the Illuminati,[795] the public discussion of the subject became immediately possessed of a new energy. In a letter to Wolcott, bearing date of June 5, 1799, Morse observed to his friend, “I expect that I have disturbed a hornet’s nest.”[796] There can be no doubt that, diction conceded, this was an apt estimate of the situation. In view of the experiences which were ahead of him, it was well that Morse found his serenity of mind such as to enable him to complete the remark just recorded, by adding, “Happily, I am fearless of their stings.”[797]

The breaking-out of a heated newspaper discussion supplied the principal evidence that Morse’s fast day sermon of 1799 inaugurated a new stage in the Illuminati agitation.

The Independent Chronicle, aware of the fact that something tangible was now before the public, something which might perhaps seriously influence the popular judgment, promptly abandoned its contemptuous and indiscriminative policy[798] and violently assailed Morse for his latest performance. The author of the fast sermon was sharply taken to task for handling the Illuminati matter as he did. If, in his judgment, there was substantial justification for the charges he had made, why then did he not submit the evidence to President Adams, or lay it before some other proper official of the government, instead of retailing “the alarming narrative in a nine-penny sermon?”[799] If it was true that there was a society plotting the overthrow of our government and Morse could throw any light whatever on the persons involved, what sense was there in treating the subject “in so loose a manner as to render it only subservient to a second or third edition of a political fulmination?”[800] Morse could have only political ends in view. His “plot” was another Federalist scheme. He wished to excite jealousies against a certain class of citizens,[801] i. e., the Democrats. Or, was it to be inferred from the way he handled “the trifling story of the Illuminati,” that he desired to incense and greatly anger the people of this country against France?[802] This suspicion would seem to be justified by the fact that Morse had preached and published a number of sermons, in all of which he had anathematized the French nation as the authors of the diabolical system of Illuminatism.[803] But whatever were the motives which animated him, his statements were not to be trusted. He had forfeited the right to be taken seriously.[804]

During the two or three months that followed the celebration of the national fast, a copious flood of contributed articles poured through the columns of the Chronicle.[805] “A Friend to a Real Clergyman, and an Enemy to Bigotry,” “Bunker Hill,” “Credulity,” “Daniel,” et al., all made their offerings to the airing of what the opposition unanimously agreed should be styled “the preposterous documents of Morse.” If a friend and supporter of the Charlestown pastor ventured to express his respect for the arguments of that gentleman, he had little to hope for in the face of the withering fire of sarcasm, ridicule, denial, and defiance that the opposition steadily maintained. Thus, for example, when “Senex,” an old contributor to the Chronicle, made public profession of the fact that Morse’s evidence had seriously shaken his earlier distrust of the “Illuminati conspiracy,”[806] “Credulity” hastened to “pooh-pooh” such anxious fears, and to insist that they were unworthy of a sensible man. Morse’s declarations on the subject of Illuminism deserved only to be laughed at. They were certainly utterly out of reason.[807]

The American Mercury was another newspaper that rallied to the effort to break down any favorable impressions which Morse’s latest deliverance upon the subject of Illuminism may have made upon the public mind. The respectfully attentive and receptive attitude of this journal during the earlier stages of the agitation has already been noted.[808] The appearance of the fast day sermon converted this into a spirit of violent antagonism. Morse’s latest sermon was pronounced absurd. “His history of the Lodge of Wisdom is equally fabulous with his story of the ship Ocean,”[809] was the judgment of Editor Babcock.[810] A few weeks later the Mercury gave to its readers an article that had first seen the light in the Farmer’s Weekly Museum,[811] a New Hampshire publication. How roughly Morse and the documentary proofs which he had recently laid before the public were handled in this article, the following excerpts will suggest:

Meanwhile the supporters of Morse were not idle, although it must be admitted that as far as the press was concerned the amount of sympathy and support that Morse received from that quarter was by no means commensurate to the weight of criticism with which his opponents sought to crush him. Extracts from his recent fast sermon appeared in such papers as the Massachusetts Mercury[813] and the Salem Gazette;[814] and with characteristic loyalty to every interest which in any way might be able to serve the cause of Federalism, the Connecticut Courant proclaimed its complete satisfaction with Morse’s production in the following reckless fashion:

A larger measure of support of Morse and his cause came from the public declaimers, who, on the occasion of the Fourth of July following, regaled their audiences with discursive observations on the state of national affairs. All over New England citizens were solemnly urged to take serious account of the conspiracy that recently had been partially dragged into the light.

At Ridgefield, Connecticut, the declaration was made that America had been caught in the meshes of the net which the Illuminati had attempted to cast over all the nations.[816] At New Haven it was asserted that the societies of Illuminism, having wrought fearful havoc and ruin in Europe, were now known to be extensively engaged in communicating infection and death to the citizens and institutions of this nation.[817] At Hartford the society of the Illuminati and the occult lodges of Freemasonry were represented as having “exhausted the powers of the human mind, in inventing and combining a series of dread mysteries, unhallowed machinations, and disastrous plots,” with the dissemination of the principles of Voltaire and his school as the main objective in view.[818] At Boston direct connections were made between the secret affiliated societies which the virtuous frown of Washington drove into their lurking-places and the newly discovered organizations which had just been found to be “busily engaged in sapping the foundations of society, and may ere long spring a mine, which shall blow up our Constitution and Liberties.”[819] At Portland, Maine, the unwilling prostitution of the Masonic lodges in Europe to the purposes of the Illuminati was pointed out as amounting to a threat against the institutions of America.[820] At Byfield[821] and Roxbury,[822] Massachusetts, similar warnings were heard.

To a certain extent, the general employment of this anniversary of national independence to arouse the country against the machinations of the Illuminati was due to an event, long anticipated, that had occurred shortly before. Less than a month prior to July 4, 1799, Barruel’s Memoirs of Jacobinism made its first appearance in New England.[823] The hopes of the supporters of the agitation were immediately raised.

Before the publication of the documents which Morse gave to the world in his fast sermon of 1799, Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy constituted the chief if not the sole resource of the friends of the agitation. Barruel had been appealed to, but only in the form of such scanty excerpts from his writings as percolated to America through the fingers of his English reviewers and, as we have seen, in settings which provided ammunition for both sides in the controversy. Now the hour had come when the supporters of the Illuminati alarm in New England were to be privileged to make a full and free appeal to their second great ally from abroad.[824]

The facts regarding the nature of the reception accorded Barruel’s composition in New England are meagre in the extreme. In this very circumstance, one may suppose, is found the best of all evidences that the book failed to fulfil the hopes of its friends. It is true that within seven weeks after the public announcement of the fact that the Memoirs of Jacobinism were ready for distribution at Hartford, one of Morse’s correspondents at that place was able to assure him that “the facts … in Du Pan, Robison, and Barruel have got into every farm house” in that section of the country.[825] It is also true that in order to insure a wide reading of what were supposed to be the more significant portions of Barruel’s voluminous work, an abridgment of it was undertaken and published in the columns of such leading papers as the Connecticut Courant[826] and the Massachusetts Mercury.[827] Nevertheless, the inference is unavoidable that at the most the cause of the agitators received only a momentary quickening from this quarter. If anything, the very flatness of the reception accorded Barruel’s work served to quiet the public mind in New England on the subject of Illuminism. The precious conceit which the supporters of the charge of an American conspiracy of the Illuminati had imported from abroad, viz., that the two “great” European writers on the subject of Illuminism, Robison and Barruel, while working independently had unearthed the same set of facts and arrived at the same conclusion as to their import, fell quickly enough to the ground. Whatever the facts might be regarding the situation in Europe, it speedily became clear that Barruel had no clear and steady light to throw upon the situation in America, and even those who hoped most from the publication of the Memoirs of Jacobinism were soon forced to admit that the American reading public had little taste for the prolix romancings of the French abbé.[828]

Early in the fall of 1799 a new twist was given to the controversy. This developed out of an episode that for the time at least seriously embarrassed the personal integrity of Morse, and enveloped the issue generally in such a cloud of pettiness and disagreeable suspicions that the entire subject of Illuminism assumed an unsavory aspect, with the result that the public was all the more easily persuaded to turn to other and more fruitful topics. Compressed as much as the interests of clarity will allow, the facts were as follows.

The American Mercury of September 26, 1799, published an article asserting that in his efforts to substantiate his charges against the Illuminati, Morse had addressed a letter of inquiry to Professor Ebeling[829] of Hamburg, Germany, to which the latter made response that Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy had no standing in Europe; that it was regarded there as a farrago of falsehoods, written by its author to obtain bread rather than in the hope that it would be believed.[830] It was further asserted that Ebeling’s letter to Morse gave Robison an unsavory character; he was said to have lived too fast for his income, to be in trouble with the civil authorities in his native country, and to have been expelled from a Masonic lodge in Edinburgh on account of unworthy conduct.[831] This being the true state of affairs, why, it was urged, ought not “the terrible subject of illumination” to be dismissed forthwith as a wretched mass of absurdities? Let Morse publish the letter that he had received from Ebeling and the public would express itself quickly enough as to the silliness of the Illuminati conspiracy.[832]

Morse’s rejoinder was spirited. He demanded the name of the author of the article in the Mercury and vigorously protested that the Ebeling letter referred to was a fabrication.[833] Denied the comfort of immediate attention and satisfaction,[834] he addressed the editor again and with even greater vehemence, insisting that the editor publicly brand the article referred to as “without foundation and a tissue of the most vile and calumnious falsehoods.” But for the one consideration that the letter which he had actually received from Professor Ebeling was private, he averred that he stood ready to spread it before the public gaze.[835] As a guarantee of its character, however, he stood prepared to furnish the affidavits of Professors David Tappan and Eliphalet Pearson of Harvard, to whom he had submitted the letter of Ebeling for their inspection, and who were ready to depose that it was in no sense like the letter whose contents had been given to the public by the American Mercury.[836]

By the time these noisy verbal hostilities had taken place, the leading newspaper partisans on both sides of the controversy had accepted the responsibility of advising the public regarding the new issue. The Connecticut Courant roundly denounced the unprincipled editor of the American Mercury for having printed such a monstrous fabrication as its account of the Ebeling-Morse letter,[837] and later, on Morse’s behalf, undertook to say that while the communication which Morse had received from Ebeling contained denials of the authenticity of many of the facts alleged in the Proofs of a Conspiracy, at the same time it was destitute of even the most distant suggestion of moral or other delinquencies on the part of Robison.[838] The Columbian Centinel regarded itself in duty bound to spread before its readers the indignant communication that Morse had sent to the editor of the American Mercury, for the reason that it believed Morse had been most shamefully treated in the matter.[839] As for the Massachusetts Mercury, one of its contributors felt moved to observe that the account of the Ebeling-Morse letter which the American Mercury had published was nothing less than a consummate piece of pure villainy, intended to ruin Mr. Robison’s character; certainly no candid American would pay the slightest attention to it until the person who was responsible for the publication came forward and gave the public his name.[840]

On the other side, such rampant Democratic journals as the Bee and the Aurora came ardently to the support of the American Mercury and directed a searching cross-fire against Morse and his friends. Since the days of Salem witchcraft, the former observed, no subject had so much affected the minds of a certain class of people in New England as this pretended Illuminati conspiracy.[841] Because of the way in which preachers, orators, essayists, and newsmongers generally had declaimed upon the subject, a mist had overspread the public mind. Ebeling’s letter to Morse, however, had given a fatal blow to the strife. It was now to be expected that the impressions made upon the minds of numerous over-credulous citizens by an insidious and designing set of men would be fully eradicated.[842] To give full force to these observations, the Bee published the text of the letter which, it averred, Morse had received from Ebeling.[843] This characterized Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy as ridiculous and filled with statements many of which were faulty and others totally erroneous. Its author had composed the book in the interests of party and with a special animus against all men who asserted the use of reason in the sphere of theology. The authorities to which Robison appealed were declared to be questionable, and Robison’s own standing as a historian was pronounced to be such that it was impossible to take his work seriously.[844]

The Aurora steered a similar course. Drawing upon the Bee, the text of the alleged Ebeling-Morse letter was printed[845] and the accompanying comment made that this effectually disposed of the Illuminati.[846] It was now fully apparent that Morse had seized upon the idea of a conspiracy against religion and the state in order to further selfish and partisan ends. He and Dr. Dwight, who were at the head of the clerical systems in Massachusetts and Connecticut respectively, were exhausting all the means in their power to exalt Federalism and to obtain a religious establishment which would deliver the consciences and purses of the nation into the hands of their party.[847] The rancor that these two men had recently stirred up against the respectable fraternity of Freemasons was due solely to their bigotry.[848]

Meantime a certain shrewd and none too scrupulous Democratic clergyman in Massachusetts was deriving such satisfaction as he could out of Morse’s discomfiture and bitter resentment. The letter that the Bee and the Aurora published as a letter from Ebeling to Morse was in fact a letter from Ebeling to William Bentley,[849] inveterate hater of Morse.[850]

Ebeling, it appears, had written the letters to Bentley and to Morse at about the same time.[851] A little after the receipt of his letter, Bentley had learned from Ebeling that Doctors Pearson, Tappan, and Morse all were inquiring of Ebeling concerning Robison’s standing as a historian, and that the Hamburg professor had addressed Morse at length upon the subject.[852] Further, he received clear hints from Ebeling as to the precise nature of the communications to Morse.[853] Bentley, therefore, had substantial reasons for believing that he was in full possession of the information that Ebeling had furnished Morse regarding the subsidence of the Illuminati craze in Europe and the unfavorable opinions of Robison that were entertained on the other side of the Atlantic. It certainly was not to his credit, however, that he should permit a letter which he himself had received from Ebeling to be published as a communication from Ebeling to Morse.[854]

Under the circumstances, Morse was placed in a position of embarrassment and humiliation from which he found it impossible wholly to extricate himself.[855] What is more to the point, the cause which in his misguided zeal he had been promoting was thus made to suffer an irreparable blow. With his personal integrity under grave suspicion and his main European ally held up to public ridicule and scorn, even Morse’s obdurate spirit must have foreseen that the collapse of the agitation which he had fostered could not long be deferred. Even without this tumble into the slough of suspicion and contempt, time must soon have brushed aside as groundless the alarm that Morse had sounded. It is not difficult to imagine, however, that time might have found ways less vindictive and scurvy to dispose of the excited clamor of Morse.

Driven to undertake some further effort at self-justification,[856] the belated idea came to Morse to investigate the lodge Wisdom at Portsmouth, Virginia. Accordingly he addressed a letter to Josiah Parker, member of Congress for Virginia, soliciting information from Parker respecting the Portsmouth lodge. Parker responded to the effect that he had lived in Portsmouth until he went to Congress in 1789; that the lodge Wisdom was regarded in that city as a reputable Masonic society, made up of a few worthy people, mostly French; that some of its members were personally known to the writer to be men warmly attached to the cause of the government; that a good many Frenchmen had been admitted to the lodge about the time of the insurrection on the island of St. Domingo, but that the most of these were not now in America; that some of the Frenchmen whose names Morse had incorporated in his fast sermon of April 25, 1799, as members of Wisdom Lodge, were known to Parker to be honest and industrious men; in a word, that he, Parker, considered the lodge in question as entirely harmless as far as fomenting hostility to the institutions of the country was concerned.[857]

The receipt of Parker’s letter left Morse without further resource. Promptly he wrote his friend and adviser, Oliver Wolcott, soliciting his counsel as to whether it would be better for him to remain silent and let matters take their course or whether he would better offer to the public such explanations and observations as he could.[858] The nature of Wolcott’s counsel is unknown; but Morse, in any event, came to the conclusion that there was no further action he could take in the case, and his advocacy of the idea of an Illuminati conspiracy against religion and the government ceased. Henceforth, the reverberations of the controversy, with a single exception, were to be of the nature of jibes and flings on the part of irritated and disgusted Democrats who adopted the position that the controversy over the Illuminati had been introduced into American politics to serve purely partisan ends.

In 1802, the Reverend Seth Payson,[859] minister of the Congregational church at Rindge, New Hampshire, made an effort to revive the agitation. In a volume[860] characterized by dismal mediocrity Payson fulminated against the public stupor that, he admitted, had taken the place of the sense of alarm that the discovery of the Illuminati conspiracy had originally caused.[861] Payson’s book was nothing more than a revamping of the earlier literature, European and American, on the subject. There is no evidence that it made the slightest impression on the country.

Freemasonry in New England, as throughout the United States in general, was very far from being in a favorable condition when the Illuminati controversy broke out. Like every other institution in the country, it had suffered greatly on account of the American Revolution. The membership of its lodges was depleted, and its affairs generally left in a chaotic condition. In the period of reconstruction which followed the Revolution, Masonry experienced the same difficulty in rebuilding its organizations and investing them with a fair degree of importance in the public eye as other social institutions of the times. To no little extent, this was due to internal dissensions and disintegrating tendencies generally. In the main these dissensions developed out of efforts which were made to create grand lodges of native origin, endowed with powers of sovereignty, to take the place in the system of American Masonry that formerly had been accorded to the grand lodges of England and Scotland. The spirit of independence communicated by the revolutionary struggle had to be reckoned with by Masonic leaders in their efforts to give unity and solidity to the system.[862]

But other concerns than those of organization engaged the attention of those who sought the rehabilitation of the institution. In the literature of the times appears more than one stinging reference to the reproach under which Freemasonry rested on account of the low standards of conduct by which the private lives of its members and its assemblies were marked. Coarseness, profligacy, boisterousness, and conviviality, which in the latter case did not stop short of drunken revels, were common indictments brought against the lodges by friend and foe alike.[863] It cannot be doubted that a considerable amount of the kind of rude and unlicensed behavior that displayed itself about many a New England tavern of the period was likewise to be observed in connection with the private and public performances of the craft.

To this must be added another and, from our special point of view, more serious criticism. The spirit of democracy, it should not be forgotten, was working itself out in the common life of the times in manifold ways. The idea of human equality had become the very touchstone of life. New applications of this conception were constantly being made. In such a day it was inevitable that the secret and exclusive character of the assemblies and practices of Freemasonry should make that institution widely suspected. Members of the fraternity were freely accused of supporting an institution that failed to respond to the spirit of the times.[864] As a result of the stir occasioned by Washington’s bold denunciation of “self-created societies,” in 1794, this charge of dangerous and unjustifiable secrecy became a more powerful weapon in the hands of Freemasonry’s enemies, whose blows were by no means easy to avoid.

That a retrograde movement was on in the ranks of American Masonry at the time the Illuminati controversy broke out is, however, by no means to be inferred. In most particulars, the faults and weaknesses which have been noted represented common faults and weaknesses of the times. On the whole, as the eighteenth century drew to its close, Freemasonry in this country appeared to be slowly working its way up out of the state of disorganization and weakness by which its progress had been retarded during the two decades that followed the Revolutionary War. It was in a day characterized by earnest and worthy striving, though not without its tokens of popular suspicion, that the accusation of an alliance with the odious Illuminati fell as a black shadow across its path.

The response which Massachusetts Masonry made to the aspersions of Robison and his supporters[865] on this side of the ocean was promptly forthcoming. On June 11, 1798, the Grand Lodge of that state drew up an address to President Adams, from which the following generous extract is taken:

In addition to this formal action taken by the Grand Lodge, prominent Massachusetts Masons began at once to employ such public occasions as the calendar and special events of the order supplied, to refute the charge that Masonry was in league with Illuminism. Preëminent among these apologists were the Reverend William Bentley and the Reverend Thaddeus Mason Harris.[868]

On the occasion of the Masonic festival of St. John the Baptist, June 25, 1798, Bentley delivered a charge before Morning Star Lodge, at Worcester, Massachusetts.[869] The clergy, he maintained,—not all the clergy, to be sure, but particularly those representatives of the clergy “who ply the shuttle-cock of faith, with the dexterity of expert gamesters, and have the art of making the multitude fly with its feathers,”—are responsible for this new out-cry against the order.[870] It is the state of affairs in Europe that has caused general attention to be drawn to the order. During the century Masonry has flourished there in a remarkable way. In the midst of an age full of apprehension respecting everything that suggests political association, this rapid progress of Freemasonry, the character of its members, the coincidence of its designs, and its secrecy, have quite naturally conspired to give some appearance of danger. Yet no discoveries have been made which can fairly impeach the fraternity.[871] As for the principles and work of Weishaupt, these ought not to be condemned outright, solely on the testimony of Robison.[872] “We must leave Robison to an inquisitive public,” Bentley concluded, and “forgive a worthy divine who has noticed the book, and has made our order ridiculous.”[873]

Somewhat later in the year Harris delivered a number of addresses, in connection with the consecration of various lodges, in which he paid sufficient attention to the new issue that had been raised to make it clear that Masonic circles were greatly disturbed.[874] To Harris, this last assault upon the good name of Masonry was a most unreasonable performance; yet all he felt prepared to do was to enter a general denial, couched in a bombastic, windy style of utterance, of which the following is typical:

Much more of like character issued from this source.[876] We shall see, however, that the keen invective and unrestrained sarcasm of Bentley, rather than the platitudes of the amiable Harris, were needed to put Masonry’s case before the public in an effective manner.

On the same occasion that the “Author of the Worcester Charge”[877] made his first formal answer to Robison and Morse, at least two other addresses were delivered, each of which require a word. One of these, mirabile dictu! was by Jedediah Morse.[878] Morse’s “sermon” was dull and insipid enough. There was much talk about the cultivation and diffusion of the love of country, the duty of essaying the rôle of the peacemaker, and the wickedness of spreading base slanders and exciting unreasonable prejudices among one’s fellows; but no discussion of the subject of Illuminism was attempted. All that was said was in entire good spirit, and but one consideration entitles Morse’s performance to mention: the fact that its setting as well as its substance gave evidence of its author’s earnest desire not to see the gulf widen between him and his Masonic neighbors.

The other address was different. Masonic Brother Charles Jackson, addressing the members and friends of St. Peter’s Lodge, Newburyport, Massachusetts, showed no disposition to mince words with respect to the detractors of Freemasonry.[879] Robison was reprobated by him for launching “illiberal sarcasms” against the fraternity,[880] and particularly for making out the Masonic lodges to be “hot-beds of sedition and impiety,” which the orator indignantly averred they were not.[881] It was granted that certain profligate and abandoned characters, as Robison claimed, had assumed the cloak of Masonry, with a view of shrouding their infernal plans under pretences of philanthropy and benevolence; but these men soon threw off this cloak, and there was no reason why Masonry should be sacrificed on their account.[882] The charges of atheism and unpatriotic spirit among the members of the fraternity were repelled with equal warmth by Jackson. As with Harris, these calumnies were countered, the charge of atheism by the fact that many of the clergy were members of the order, and the charge of unpatriotic spirit by the fact that Washington was the “illustrious brother” of American Masons.[883]

To a very limited extent the press was resorted to, in order that New England Masonry might have a chance to square itself before the public. The call for specific evidence that was made upon Morse, as voiced in the Massachusetts Mercury of July 27, 1798, and Morse’s prolix but ineffective effort to meet the situation this created, have already been noticed.[884] In the course of the newspaper discussion referred to, the name of another prominent Mason of Massachusetts, the Reverend Josiah Bartlett, was drawn into the controversy.[885] To Morse’s somewhat unmanly plaint that “by necessary implication” he had been accused by the Massachusetts Masons before the President as being under the influence of unfounded prejudices, Bartlett made the conciliatory, though artful, response that the address of the Grand Lodge, to which Morse referred, was designed merely as a manly avowal of the true principles of Freemasonry. It was not necessary to believe, he continued, that they were influenced by irritation or resentment in making the Address, nor that Dr. Morse had hostile designs in the delivery and publication of his fast sermon.[886]

Such language, however, was much too mild and unduly exonerative for the “Author of the Worcester Charge.” His aroused spirit required that censure should be imposed. Morse had been guilty of a base injustice; it was right that this fact should frankly be published to the world. Accordingly, the Massachusetts Mercury of August 10, 1798, contained a vigorous statement of the case of Masonry against Morse, from Bentley’s pen. The following will suffice to indicate the author’s spirit:

Still refusing to depart from the pathway of amiability and clerical courtesy, Bartlett returned to the discussion of the subject of Illuminism in its relation to American Freemasonry, in the Mercury of September 7, 1798. In cumbrous sentences the appearance of Robison’s book in this country was reviewed; the best of motives were imputed to its author and his supporters in America; but stress, very gentle stress, to be sure, was laid upon the question whether the Illuminati, in any form or other, had branches in this country. “If,” Bartlett urged, “there is any citizen in the United States who can prove this, it is a duty which he really owes to God and his country, to come forward, ‘as a faithful watchman,’ with his documents.” As for himself, he was fully persuaded that if the Masonic institution could be implicated fairly in the conspiracy, then the doors of every lodge ought to be flung wide open, and Masonry henceforth held in just derision and contempt.[889]

This seemed to open the way for such a polite and harmless handling of the subject as Morse coveted. In like spirit he replied to the foregoing.[890] He rejoiced in the candid utterances of his worthy friend. Bartlett’s acceptance of the existence of the Illuminati persuaded him to hope that opposition to Robison would now soon cease. Had the latter’s work not been opposed in the first place, he entertained no doubt that Freemasonry in the United States would not have been injured. While disclaiming all intention of pursuing a controversial course, he would, however, undertake an investigation to determine whether or not there were societies of the Illuminati in this country.[891]

A belated promise, to say the least, and one that found a certain belated fulfilment in Morse’s fast sermon of the following spring.[892] Before turning to consider the effect of that sermon on Masonic thought, one other Masonic disclaimer of 1798 requires attention.

On October 23, the Grand Lodge of Vermont drew up an address to the President somewhat similar to the one which earlier in the year their Massachusetts brethren had presented.[893] Beginning with the familiar observation that Masonic principles forbade the introduction of political subjects into the discussions of the order, but that the serious cast of national affairs was such as to justify the present action, the address proceeded to notice the “slanders” that were in circulation respecting the order and to profess the ardent attachment of Vermont Masons to the cause of the government. The idea that Masons were capable of faction was repudiated with energy. An individual Mason here and there might possibly sell his birthright for a mess of pottage, or betray his country for paltry pelf; but as a body the Masonic fraternity stood committed to support the government. All should be risked in its maintenance and defence.[894]

The language of the address could hardly have been warmer. On the other hand, the President’s response was cold, or, if not that, at least puzzling.[895] Asserting first that he had ever esteemed the societies of Freemasons in this country as not only innocent of base designs but actually useful, he seemed to dispel all the comfort which the reading of that assurance was calculated to impart by adding the following:

Was the President ironical or frank? He had intimated that the Masons were capable of corruption: did he, or did he not think they were guiltless of the charge of conspiracy that had recently been lodged against them? One could not be absolutely sure from what he had written. What the Masons of Vermont may have felt when the ambiguous response of the President was before them, we have no means of knowing; but there was one Mason in Massachusetts who read the response of the President to the address of the Vermont Masons, and who was displeased. In the view of William Bentley, the President had done anything but assist the cause of Masonry in the hour of its embarrassment. He has left us the record of his impressions in the following form:

We have seen that the most appreciable and positive of all the evidence that the champions of the charge of Illuminism brought against the Masons was that which Morse embodied in his fast sermon in the spring of 1799. For once the tiresome reiterations of the theorist and the reporter of other men’s suspicions were laid aside. For once a straight thrust was made at a definite point in the armor of American Masonry. The effect which Morse’s sermon produced on the minds of New England Masons naturally stimulates inquiry.

Contrary to what might very properly be supposed, the literature of contemporary New England Freemasonry fails to yield full and convincing evidence as to the precise character of this reaction. A few formal public statements were made on the part of representatives of the craft, or in one or two instances by men who were sufficiently close to the institution to be used on occasions when Masonry threw wide its doors of seclusion that the profane might draw near. Some of these must be noticed.

Far removed from the chief centers of the agitation, at Portland, Maine, Masonic Brother Amos Stoddard addressed the craft, on the occasion of the festival of St. John the Baptist, June 24, 1799.[901] Stoddard did not balk at the admission that the fraternity “have, unfortunately, tolerated the Illuminati.”[902] But there was this to be said by way of exculpation: the Illuminati were not legitimate Masons.[903] “To propagate their revolutionary poison, and to protract the period of detection” (sic), they attached themselves to Freemasonry and called themselves by its name. In this way the world had been deceived. But the main citadel of Masonry had not capitulated; only a section of the fraternity had been taken by treachery.[904] A temporary wound, undeniably, had been inflicted; but no lasting hurt would come to the craft.[905]

At Reading, Massachusetts, on the same occasion, Caleb Prentiss, a non-Mason, told the members and friends of Mt. Moriah Lodge that the lodges were under suspicion as they had never been before.[906] The eyes of the world were now turned upon Masonry. The suspicion that nefarious conspiracies had been formed or countenanced within the lodges was well fixed in the public mind. Masons would need to walk with more than ordinary circumspection. They must sedulously keep themselves spotless from the imputation of such designs, that the craft be not blamed. By striving to show themselves to be lovers of God and mankind, friends of religion, friends of their country, and firm and study supporters of the latter’s civil constitution, government, and laws, they would be able to vindicate the principles, professions, and constitutions of true ancient Masonry.[907]

At Ashby, New Hampshire, on the same festival day, an assembly of Masons and their friends listened to a discourse which by way of concessions to the opponents of Masonry outstripped anything that went before or followed after.[908] The Reverend Seth Payson, that fatuous aspirant to literary fame who elected to be a tardy echo of the speculations of Robison, Barruel, and Morse,[909] informed his auditors that while Masonry in its essential principles and constitution had shown itself to be useful to society, unhappily its name, veil of secrecy, symbols, and associative principles had been seized by a body of men in Europe, in order to mask their hellish purposes of eradicating from the human mind “all belief of a God, of a governing providence, of the immortality of the soul, and a future state,—to extinguish every principle of natural and revealed religion and moral sentiments, and to demolish every government but its own.”[910] In all its horrid appendages, the French Revolution was the result of this conspiracy. This “vine of Sodom” was transplanted to the United States: witness the opposition which in this country developed against those “eminent benefactors to mankind in general,” Drs. Robison, Morse, et al.[911] Without the faithful researches of Morse, in particular, a very much more serious infection of the Masonic body assuredly would have occurred.[912]

Such isolated and generally indefinite utterances, it may be urged, are scarcely to be trusted as offering an accurate reflection of the state of the Masonic mind. They do not, however, stand altogether alone. From various and perhaps more solid sources, the evidence is forthcoming that the year 1799 was a year of deep anxiety and concern on the part of the Masons of New England.

The diary of William Bentley supplies some evidence to this effect.[913] His disgust was great that the clergy continued to agitate concerning the pernicious principles and influence of Weishaupt, and that with equal pertinacity the press kept the affairs of that individual and his minions before the public.[914] The equally candid acknowledgments of other Masons are even more to the point. One spokesman for Rhode Island Masonry made public admission that the fraternity was suffering keenly from “a temporary odium.”[915] Another in Massachusetts uttered the complaint that the industrious zeal of the unprincipled defamer had involved the craft in most serious embarrassment.[916] Some were driven to take refuge in the consolation that the lodges of the Illuminati were bastard organizations, and therefore Freemasonry could not justly be anathematized on their account.[917]

When the skies had cleared, as we have seen they soon did, and Masons began to take stock of the experience through which their institution had passed, their admissions of what the agitation had cost the order were even more significant. One confessed that Masonry had started back affrighted at the hideous spectre of Illuminism, and that the joy that filled the lodges because they were no longer suspected as “hot-beds of sedition” and “nurseries of infidelity” was very great.[918] Another likewise rejoiced in spirit that the dark period of suspicion and calumny through which the order has been passing was now over, and that political agitation against the institution was at an end.[919] Another admitted that after the lapse of a half dozen years it was difficult to plant a new lodge in one of the most cultured of New England’s communities, on account of the influence exerted by the works of Robison and Barruel.[920] Still another confessed that the Illuminati controversy had cost the fraternity dearly in the matter of membership; a serious defection had resulted, representing many desertions.[921]

The various causes that contributed to bring about a collapse of the agitation over Illuminism have elsewhere received attention and for the most part require no special comment in this connection. One of these, however, was of such a nature that it has been reserved for brief exposition at this point.

The death of Washington, while confessedly an event of national significance, and, as such, shared as the common bereavement of all the citizens of the country, nevertheless assumed a very special importance in the eyes of Masons and exerted an immediate and weighty influence upon the fortunes of the order.

One who turns the pages of the black-bordered newspapers of the day, all sharing in the universal lamentation and doing their utmost to set before their readers the last detail regarding the closing hours in the great man’s life and the arrangement and disposition of affairs in connection with his obsequies, is likely to find himself amazed because the Masons found it possible to figure in the circumstances as conspicuously and largely as they did. The Masons were in evidence, in very conspicuous evidence, it must be said, in all that pertained to the funeral rites of the nation’s first chief. Not only was this true of the funeral ceremonies proper; in innumerable places where mourning assemblies gathered to pay respect to the memory of Washington, Masons claimed and were accorded the places of honor in the processions and concourses that marked these outpourings of popular sorrow.

It cannot be doubted that American Freemasons, while sincere in their expressions of sorrow on account of Washington’s death, none the less found a peculiar comfort of soul in being able at such a time to point to the fallen hero as their “brother.” At an hour when the tongue of scandal and the finger of suspicion were still active they esteemed it an opportunity not to be despised to be able to stand before the country and proudly say, “Washington was of us.”

That this is not idle fancy the following utterances will help to make clear. At Middletown, Connecticut, a few days after Washington’s death, a Masonic oration was pronounced in connection with the observance of the festival of St. John the Evangelist.[922] The orator, who recognized the season as one of unremitting calumny of Freemasonry,[923] sought refuge from the strife of tongues for himself and his brethren by urging the following sentiment:

To this must be added the somewhat different apologetic of a prominent Massachusetts Mason. Speaking at Dorchester, at a Masonic service in Washington’s memory, the Reverend Thaddeus Mason Harris acknowledged the value of Washington’s connection with American Freemasonry in these words:

Washington’s Masonic career, Masonry’s uncontested claim to the right to be first among those who mourned at his burial,—these constituted a part, and a very substantial part of the demurrer which Freemasonry offered at the bar of public judgment in answer to its accusers. It is very certain that after the reinstatement in public favor which American Masonry was accorded when Washington was buried, the voice of censure was less and less disposed to be heard.[926]

By 1798 and 1799 the alignment of political parties in New England had arrived at such a stage that the suspicion of political jockeying to obtain party advantage was well grounded in the minds of leaders in both camps. This self-conscious and determined party spirit had been greatly promoted by the employment of electioneering methods.[927] The general public had not yet become accustomed to the precise significance of the broadside, the political pamphlet, and the newspaper canard; and these all, in a copious stream, had begun to flow from the country’s presses. Party leaders, however, who knew the purposes of their own minds if not those of the opposition, were quick to scent anything that savored of political buncombe.

Coincident with the breaking out of the controversy over the Illuminati, a number of tales of plots or conspiracies were foisted upon the public.[928] One of these concerned a band of conspirators who were alleged to be agents of the French Directory, and who, with their secret documents concealed in the false bottom of two tubs, had taken ship from Hamburg to work sedition in this country.[929] Another concerned the operations of a tailor in the city of Philadelphia, of whom the report spread that he was engaged in making immense quantities of uniforms for French soldiers; and if for French soldiers, for whom could they be intended but for some French army which must be planning an invasion of the United States? A third tale had to do with the massacre which, rumor had it, had taken place on the good American ship Ocean, involving the brutal butchery of her entire crew by the French.[930]

All these preposterous “plots” were promptly exploded, and in due course all were traced to Federalist sources. The general effect upon the opposition scarcely needs to be stated. Such silly tales, said one Democrat, discredit everything that the Federalists affirm to be true.[931] They all had been artfully concocted and employed, said another, “to excite an indignation which might be played off for the purposes of party.”[932] They were so many alarm-bells, a third said,[933] rung, we may add, to frighten the people into running to prop up the bowing walls and tottering pillars of the doomed temple of Federalism.

This mood of scepticism, imbedded as it was in a more serious mood of indignation arising from the rebuffs and discomfitures that citizens of democratic tastes and principles had long suffered at the hands of Federalist bigotry and intolerance, rendered it inevitable that the charge of Illuminism should be suspect from the first. One has but to recall that the year in which the controversy over the Illuminati broke out has still its characterization in political annals as “the reign of terror,” to appreciate fully the statement that has just been made.

Beginning with 1799 a small group of pamphlets appeared, dedicated by their authors to an effort to convert the charge of Illuminism into a political boomerang, to be employed as a weapon against the Federalists. Conspicuous among these, and perhaps first in point of time, was A View of the New England Illuminati,[934] an anonymous composition, but one whose authorship was soon traced to the Reverend John Cosens Ogden,[935] an Episcopal clergyman.

Ogden wielded the pen of a ready and discursive writer, the latter more especially. To follow him step by step as he ranged from Barruel and Robison to meetings of New England ministers, from meetings of New England ministers to ecclesiastical usurpations, from ecclesiastical usurpations to the French Revolution, from the French Revolution to high-handed measures taken by New England college presidents, and so on ad infinitum, and the while to take equal account of all he touched upon, would be a formidable and, we may believe, largely unprofitable exercise. And yet, through a good deal of Ogden’s pamphlet the spirit of ecclesiastical and political dissent finds a certain earnest and even vivid expression.

It is true, said Ogden at the outset, that New England had its Illuminati. They were not, however, such as Robison and Barruel would represent them to be. The New England societies of the Illuminati were the monthly meetings of the clergy.[936] The work they did and the influence they exerted were so like the work and influence of the societies of which Robison and Barruel wrote that they deserved to be styled the New England Illuminati: readers could judge for themselves as to the appositeness of the title thus bestowed.[937] Their confederacy had been so successful that certain opulent and leading laymen, who supremely desired to perpetuate the union of church and state in New England, had lent to these clerical organizations their fostering care and support.[938] At these monthly clubs, the political issues of the times were discussed and prayers and orations filled with invectives against those who had not adopted the creeds and politics of the members were delivered.[939]

That which first gave offence to these clubs was the establishment of universal religious toleration in Canada and the petition of the Episcopalians inhabiting the colonies—now the United States—to their brethren in England, that a Protestant bishop might be granted them who would live in their midst.[940] To defeat these measures, the New England Illuminati were indefatigably busy; and when they discovered that they were foiled in their efforts, they languished for a season,[941] until the French Revolution stirred them to new life.

When the Revolution began in France, these New England Illuminated Clubs redoubled their energies. They prayed, they exhorted, they wrote and printed numerous dissertations and prophecies, all emphasizing the import of the Revolution as signalizing the overthrow of the Church of Rome, which was Antichrist, and of the Pope, who was the Beast of the Apocalypse, preparatory to the fulfilment of the eternal decree respecting the Millennium.[942] Everything that the clergy did at this time smacked loudly of their excessive interest in French affairs. In order more fully to influence public opinion they took the colleges into their confederacy, and soon teachers and pupils were busy disseminating throughout the land principles and prejudices favorable to the Revolution in France.[943] Nothing was omitted that might have been done to cement an attachment to the cause of the Revolution.

The fluctuating events of the European wars and the uncertain issue of French affairs soon cooled the ardor of these clerico-political societies.[944] For these men were not sincere in their devotion to France. They were not genuine supporters of the rights of man. They repudiated their former interest in French politics and turned fiercely upon those who maintained their interest in the principles of the Revolution. These men had but one interest. What they desired was power, a millennium in which the money and liberties of all men should be laid at the feet of the colleges and of the Illuminati Clubs.[945]

Such was the general indictment that Ogden drew. This attended to, he proceeded to file a bill of particulars.

The clergy, who constituted the predominating element in these New England Illuminati Clubs, from the first had occupied a position of commanding influence in New England. But the clergy from the first had steadily kept the people at a distance.[946] They courted the rich and schemed to obtain political influence. They united to themselves a formidable body from among the laity, who looked to them for votes and preferments. They freely wielded the weapons of ecclesiastical censure and discipline in efforts to coerce those who would not sell their consciences for gold or political honors.[947] In the army and the navy their sons and favorites received promotion; and in the distribution of college diplomas, because of the same influence, men were honored who could not construe the Latin parchments they received.[948]

Nominations to magistracies had been handed about by the arrogant members of these Illuminated Clubs, and good men of the opposition had been denounced by them at the polls.[949] By the same forces the public press had been deprived of its freedom and the channels of public communication diverted to serve unworthy ends.[950] Missionaries had been sent to frontier communities in the various states, not to propagate religion, but to extend the influence and to increase the power of the societies whose agents they were.[951] The destruction of dissenting bodies had been aimed at and the cause of universal liberty of conscience spurned as an odious thing.[952]

In their efforts to control the instruments of education, the representatives of these Illuminated Clubs had manifested the same illiberal and contracted policy. Public attention had artfully been withdrawn from the schools of the yeomanry and centered upon the colleges which the Illuminati controlled.[953] Some of these institutions had shown themselves subservient in the extreme. The clergy and corporation of Yale had been so narrow as to cause philanthropists to turn the gifts they intended for that institution into other channels, to Harvard particularly.[954] At Dartmouth a spirit quite as contemptible had prevailed.[955] Fortunately the school at Cambridge had escaped from the clutches of these bigoted men. Columbia, too, had recently been placed upon a more liberal foundation, but not without having incurred the hostility of the Illuminati.[956] Everywhere, indeed, that the Edwardean theology was not permitted to flourish unmolested, there the hostility of the New England Illuminati was felt.[957] Venerable, learned, and experienced Catholic, Episcopal, and Baptist clergymen were roughly thrust aside at the seats of learning where these men had control, and dapper young parsons “with neat gowns and bands, and degrees of Doctor of Divinity, bought and obtained by the influence of rich merchants”[958] were permitted to supersede them.

There was no place into which the influence of these men had gone where contentions and persecutions had not followed.[959] But few interruptions of the public tranquility had occurred that could not be traced directly to their door. No hand of sympathy or conciliation had ever been held out by them to the opposition.[960] Should some political despot enlist these men under his banner, disaster would overtake our religion, government, liberty, and property; anarchy and destruction would overspread a land saved by the valor of freemen, by the blood of the fathers.[961]

What, therefore, was to be done with such contumacious and intolerable men? Ogden’s answer sounds surprisingly moderate, in view of the extent to which the iron of bitterness had entered his soul:

Such was Ogden’s effort to brand the Standing Order of New England with the hateful mark of the Illuminati.[963] His endeavor was supplemented by the oratorical and literary effusions of Connecticut’s most shrewd and impudent Democrat, Abraham Bishop, of New Haven. In the course of a year, beginning with September, 1800, Bishop delivered, and later expanded and printed, three orations,[964] in each of which he drew heavily upon his by no means meagre resources of logic, wit, irony, and boldness, to arraign Connecticut Federalism as a hideous conspiracy against the peace of the state and the liberties of the people.

The first of these orations had something of a history, not very extraordinary to be sure, and yet unique enough to throw some light upon the mettle of the man and the nature of the opposition that inflamed his passion. The Phi Beta Kappa Society of Yale College appointed Bishop its orator for the year 1800, in connection with the commencement exercises of the college, then held in the month of September. Exercising the traditional right of selecting his own subject, Bishop elected to prepare an oration on “The Extent and Power of Political Delusion,” instead of writing on “broken glass, dried insects, petrifactions, or any such literary themes,” as he afterwards intimated the Federalists doubtless had expected.[965] The labor of composition completed, Bishop showed his manuscript to the secretary of the society, only to be informed later that on account of the political character of his effort his appointment as orator had been rescinded by the society. Not to be routed by any such expert generalship on the part of the enemy, Bishop rallied his Democratic friends, procured a hall, and on the evening of the Phi Beta Kappa exercises, held forth in the presence of an audience of very gratifying proportions.[966]

And what had Abraham Bishop to say on “The Extent and Power of Political Delusion” which in the view of the Phi Beta Kappas amounted to an abuse of “the confidence of the Society, … involving the members in that political turmoil which disgraces our country”?[967] Much in every way. He devoted several scores of pages to an exposition of the delusive arts of the “friends of order,” which, being interpreted, meant the knavery of the Federalists throughout the country in general and in Connecticut in particular. The major portion of his “argument” need not detain us, since Bishop ran the full gamut of political crimination, charging upon the Federalists an amount of deception and chicanery truly appalling. One item only is of interest to us. Among the endless “delusions” that he cited as evidence of the hypocrisy of the Federalists was the clergy’s habit of waiving the sacerdotal functions, descending from their high seats made venerable by the respect of the people for religion, and imposing upon their auditories political sermons based upon texts drawn from Robison and Barruel.[968] Happily, he continued, the people were able to penetrate this stratagem, along with the rest.

But Bishop’s thought upon the subject of the Illuminati had not yet fully ripened.[970] The circumstances under which this virgin effort of his was executed added considerably to his reputation; so much so that when at the end of the following winter the Democrats of Wallingford adopted the irreverent suggestion of holding a public thanksgiving to celebrate the election of Thomas Jefferson to the presidency, Bishop was asked to be one of the mouthpieces of their joy on that occasion. The ground over which Bishop traveled in the Wallingford oration was much the same as before. Again the “friends of order” were arraigned for their impostures and their oppressions. Such were “blind guides,” “a generation of vipers,” dispensers of hypocrisy to children in their cradles, “arch impostors and prime movers” of iniquitous works.[971] They were great sticklers for “steady habits”; but what meant their cry of “steady habits” but mortal hostility to republicanism in every form?[972]

These self-styled “friends of order,” it should not be forgotten, were not the people. They were the commercial aristocrats who insisted that ours was a blessed government because they were all becoming rich, plus the clergy, the bench, the bar, and the office-seeking and office-holding” class in general.[973] They united church and state, made religion play a game against civil rights, and strove to make the object of the American Revolution appear impossible of full realization.[974] Affecting to respect and serve the rights of man, they imposed upon the people the funding system, the alien and sedition acts, and the unwarranted enlargement of the navy.[975] They stirred up the animosity of the people against the French, excited the X. Y. Z. mania, and scattered over the country the “arabian tales of Robison and Barruel.”[976] With respect to religion, they had developed more hypocrisy in New England than existed in any other equal portion of the globe.[977] They had cried aloud that atheism prevailed in New England and infidel books were plentiful; but neither atheists nor infidel publications were actually to be found, unless in the latter case the writings of Robison and Barruel and the sermons preached against infidelity were to be called such.[978] The grave fault of the clerical “friends of order” was that they had not preached the Gospel. Instead, they had insulted the intelligence of the people by revamping the fables of a Scotch monarchist and a Catholic abbé. They imputed infidelity to the Democrats, while they themselves caused infidelity to abound. They directed all their darts of “democratic infidels” and “infidel philosophy” against one man, Thomas Jefferson, and in this way caused their enemies to blaspheme and say, “Where is your God?”[979]

And so on through a hundred pages less one. In a tirade of such interminable length the idea of a Federalist conspiracy against the best interests of the people of New England was worked out in more than ample detail. All that was needed was to apply the term “Illuminati,” and the catalogue of incriminations would be complete. This application Bishop proceeded to make in his third oration, which appeared sometime within the year 1802.

Bishop’s last effort surpassed all that he had previously achieved in the way of boldfaced and reckless assertion. Constant reiteration and an awkward effort to fashion his composition on the form that Robison and Barruel supplied him, gave to the pamphlet abundant suggestions of insincerity and political rant. The union of church and state in New England was presented as a constant, powerful, and efficient enemy against Christianity and the government of the United States.[980] Thus the true Illuminatists were the political clergy and the Federalist leaders.[981] The charge of infidel conspiracy brought against the Democrats a few years previous constituted nothing more nor less than a specious accusation brought forward “to prostrate the public mind.”[982] Robison and Barruel were miserable mixtures of falsehood and folly.[983] The Federalists were well aware of this when they launched their charge of infidel philosophy against Thomas Jefferson and the party that supported him. The Federalists were simply desperate. They were determined to go to any lengths to keep Jefferson out of the presidency. All their works were saturated with sacrilege and impiety. Their public fasts were kept for political purposes.[984] Their cry, “The church is in danger!” was hollow and insincere.[985] Their praise of the Federal administration had no other object than to effect the abasement of the Democrats.[986] Their “Church and State Union” freely sacrificed the highest interests of religion and government to the cause of party.[987]

A more extended report of Bishop’s waspish and bitter harangue would neither strengthen his indictment nor elucidate his “proofs.” His pamphlet has significance only as an outburst of triumphant but still indignant New England Democracy as it reflected upon the exasperating obstacles which the opposition had thrust in its way as it had pressed forward to power. Nothing could be clearer than that the word “Illuminati” had lost all serious and exact significance and had become a term for politicians to conjure with;[988] or if not that, to give point to the general charge of calloused villainy which Democrats lodged against Federalists at the turn of the eighteenth century.

In addition to the principal works made use of in this investigation and listed below, special bibliographies may be found on pages 75–76, dealing with answers to Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, and on pages 185–186, dealing with the European Illuminati. The sections devoted to sermons, orations and addresses, and pamphlets contain only such titles as indicate significant sources; titles of less important compositions of this character will be found in the text or in the foot notes.

MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS

Bentley MSS., American Antiquarian Society Collection.

Ebeling MSS., Harvard University Collection.

Ford Collection, New York Public Library.

Pickering Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society Collection.

Wolcott Papers, Connecticut Historical Society Collection.

NEWSPAPERS

American Mercury, Hartford.

Aurora General Advertiser, Philadelphia.

Columbian Centinel, Boston.

Commercial Advertiser, New York.

Connecticut Courant, Hartford.

Connecticut Journal, New Haven.

Constitutional Telegraph, Boston.

Independent Chronicle, Boston.

Massachusetts Mercury, Boston.

Massachusetts Spy, Worcester.

Newburyport Herald, Newburyport, Mass.

Porcupine’s Gazette, Philadelphia.

Russell’s Gazette, Boston.

Salem Gazette, Salem, Mass.

The Bee, New London, Conn.

Western Star, Stockbridge, Mass.

COLLECTED WORKS

Adams, John, Works … with a life of the author, notes and illustrations, (ed. by Charles Francis Adams). 10 vols. Boston, 1850–56.

Ames, Fisher, Works, with a selection from his speeches and correspondence, (ed. by Seth Ames). 2 vols. Boston, 1854.

Hamilton, Alexander, Works, (ed. by Henry Cabot Lodge). 9 vols. New York and London, 1886–7.

Jefferson, Thomas, Writings, (col. and ed. by Paul Leicester Ford). 10 vols. New York and London, 1892–99.

Paine, Thomas, Writings, (col. and ed. by Moncure Daniel Conway). 4 vols. New York, 1902–8.

Washington, George, Writings, (ed. by Jared Sparks). 12 vols. Boston, 1837.

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES, BIOGRAPHIES, AND DIARIES

Beecher, Lyman, Autobiography, Correspondence, etc., (ed. by Charles Beecher). 2 vols. New York, 1864–5.

Bentley, William, Diary. 4 vols. Salem, 1905–11.

Bernard, John, Retrospections of America, 1797–1811. New York, 1887.

Breck, Samuel, Recollections, with Passages from his Note-Books, 1771–1862, (ed. by Horace Elisha Scudder). Philadelphia, 1877.

Channing, William Ellery, Memoir, with Extracts from his Correspondence and Manuscripts. 3 vols. Boston, 1848.

Christie, Francis A., The Diary of an Old New England Minister. In Harvard Theological Review, January, 1916, pp. 84–107.

Conway, Moncure Daniel, The Life of Thomas Paine. 2 vols. New York and London, 1893.

Dexter, Franklin Bowditch, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, with Annals of the College History. 6 vols. New York (vol. vi, New Haven), 1885–1912.

Field, David Dudley, Brief Memoirs of the Members of the Class Graduated at Yale College in September, 1802. Printed for private distribution, 1863.

Gibbs, George, Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and John Adams. 2 vols. New York, 1846.

Green, Ashbel, Life, (ed. by Joseph J. Jones). New York, 1849.

Hovey, Alvah, A Memoir of the Life and Times of the Rev. Isaac Backus. Boston, 1858.

Morison, Samuel Eliot, The Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, Federalist. 2 vols. Boston and New York, 1913.

Morse, Edward Lind, Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals. Boston and New York, 1914.

Morse, John Torrey, John Quincy Adams. Boston, 1882.

Sprague, William Buel, Annals of the American Pulpit. 9 vols. New York, 1857–69.

Sprague, William Buel, The Life of Jedidiah Morse. New York, 1874.

Stiles, Ezra, Literary Diary, (ed. by Franklin Bowditch Dexter). 3 vols. New York, 1901.

Willard, Sidney, Memories of Youth and Manhood. 2 vols. Cambridge, 1855.

TRAVELS

Brissot de Warville, J. P., New Travels in the United States of America, performed in 1788. Second edition, corrected. London, 1794.

Dwight, Timothy, Travels: In New-England and New-York. 4 vols. New-Haven, 1821–2.

La Rochefoucauld Liancourt, François Alexandre Frédéric, duc de, Travels through the United States of North America, the Country of the Iroquois, and Upper Canada, in the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797. (Tr.) 4 vols. London, 1799.

Weld, Isaac, Jun., Travels through the States of North America, and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, during the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797. London, 1799.

HISTORIES

A. General

Channing, Edward, A History of the United States. Volumes i-iv published. New York, 1905–17.

Hildreth, Richard, The History of the United States of America. 6 vols. New York, 1856.

Macdonald, William, Documentary Source Book of American History, 1608–1898. New York, 1908.

McMaster, John Bach, A History of the People of the United States. 8 vols. New York, 1883–1913.

Palfrey, John G., A Compendious History of New England, etc. 4 vols. Boston, 1873.

B. Special

Aulard, A., Le culte de la Raison et de l’Être suprême. Paris, 1904.

Aulard, A., The French Revolution: a Political History, 1789–1804. (Tr. from the French). 4 vols. New York, 1910.

Baldwin, Ebenezer, Annals of Yale College, in New Haven, Connecticut, from its foundation, to the year 1831, etc. New Haven, 1831.

Bassett, John Spencer, The Federalist System, 1789–1801. New York and London, 1906.

Bishop, James Leander, A History of American Manufactures from 1608 to 1860. 3 vols. Philadelphia, 1861–66.

Byington, Ezra Hoyt, The Puritan in England and New England. Boston, 1896.

Clark, Victor Selden, History of Manufactures in the United States, 1607–1860. Washington, 1916.

Duhr, Bernhard, Geschichte der Jesuiten in den Ländern deutscher Zunge im 16. Jahrhundert. Freiburg, 1907.

Duniway, Clyde Augustus, The Development of Freedom of the Press in Massachusetts. New York, 1906.

Dunlap, William, History of the American Theatre. 2 vols. London, 1833.

Dutton, Samuel W. S., The History of the North Church in New Haven. New Haven, 1842.

Earl, Alice Morse, Stage-Coach and Tavern Days. New York, 1900.

Engel, Leopold, Geschichte des Illuminaten-Ordens. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte Bayerns. Berlin, 1906.

Fiske, John, A Century of Science and Other Essays. Boston, 1899.

Forestier, R. Le, Les Illuminés de Bavière et la Franc-Maçonnerie allemande. Paris, 1915.

Hatch, Louis Clinton, The Administration of the American Revolutionary Army. New York, 1904.

Hazen, Charles Downer, Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution. Baltimore, 1897.

Johnson, Allen, Union and Democracy. Boston, New York, and Chicago, 1915.

Johnston, Alexander, American Political History, 1763–1876. 2 vols. New York and London, 1905.

Johnston, Alexander, Connecticut: A Study of a Commonwealth-Democracy. Boston and New York, 1891.

Lipowsky, Felix Joseph, Geschichte der Jesuiten in Baiern. 2 vols. München, 1816.

Love, William DeLoss, The Colonial History of Hartford, gathered from the original records. Hartford, 1914.

Love, William DeLoss, The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England. Boston and New York, 1895.

Luetscher, George Daniel, Early Political Machinery in the United States. Philadelphia, 1903.

Madden, Richard Robert, The United Irishmen, Their Lives and Their Times. 12 vols. New York, 1910.

Morse, Anson Ely, The Federalist Party in Massachusetts to the Year 1800. Princeton, 1909.

Mounier, Jean-Jacques, De l’influence attribuée aux Philosophes, aux Francs-Maçons et aux Illuminés sur la Révolution Française. Paris, 1822.

One Hundred Years of Temperance. New York, 1886.

Parker, Edwin Pond, History of the Second Church of Christ in Hartford, 1670–1892. Hartford, 1892.

Quincy, Josiah, The History of Harvard University. 2 vols. Cambridge, 1840.

Riley, Isaac Woodbridge, American Philosophy: The Early Schools. New York, 1907.

Riley, Isaac Woodbridge, American Thought from Puritanism to Pragmatism. New York, 1915.

Robinson, William Alexander, Jeffersonian Democracy in New England. New Haven, 1916.

Ruttenber, E. M., History of the County of Orange, with a History of the Town and City of Newburgh … Newburgh, N. Y., 1875.

Sawyer, Timothy Thompson, Old Charlestown: Historical, Biographical, Reminiscent. Boston, 1902.

Seilhamer, George O., History of the American Theatre. 3 vols. Philadelphia, 1888–91.

Sierke, Eug., Schwärmer und Schwindler zu Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts. Leipzig, 1874.

Sketches of Yale College, with numerous anecdotes … New York, 1843.

Sloane, William Milligan, The French Revolution and Religious Reform. New York, 1901.

Snow, Caleb H., A History of Boston, the Metropolis of Massachusetts, from its origin to the present period … Boston, 1825.

The Proceedings of the Society of United Irishmen of Dublin. Philadelphia, 1795.

Treudley, Mary, The United States and Santo Domingo, 1789–1866. (Doctoral dissertation, Clark University). Reprinted from The Journal of Race Development, vol. vii, No. 1, July, 1916.

Weeden, William Babcock, Early Rhode Island: A Social History of the People. New York, 1910.

Weeden, William Babcock, Economic and Social History of New England, 1620–1789. 2 vols. Boston and New York, 1890.

Winsor, Justin (editor), The Memorial History of Boston, including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630–1880. 4 vols. Boston, 1880–1.

C. Ecclesiastical.

Acts and Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, May 17, 1798. Philadelphia, 1798.

Backus, Isaac, A History of New England. With Particular Reference to the Denomination of Christians called Baptists. (2nd edition). 2 vols. Newton, Mass., 1871.

Beardsley, Eben Edwards, The History of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut. 2 vols. New York, 1866.

Blake, S. Leroy, The Separates or Strict Congregationalists of New England. Boston, 1902.

Burrage, Henry Sweetser, A History of the Baptists in New England. Philadelphia, 1894.

Buck, Edward, Massachusetts Ecclesiastical Law. Boston, 1866.

Christie, Francis A., The Beginnings of Arminianism in New England. In Papers of the American Society of Church History, Second Series, vol. iii, New York and London, 1912, pp. 151–172.

Cobb, Sanford Hoadley, The Rise of Religious Liberty in America. New York, 1902.

Cooke, George Willis, Unitarianism in America: A History of its Origin and Development. Boston, 1902.

Dexter, Henry Martyn, The Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years, as seen in its literature. New York, 1880.

Dorchester, Daniel, Christianity in the United States from the First Settlement down to the Present Time. Revised edition. New York, 1895.

Ford, David Barnes, New England’s Struggles for Religious Liberty. Philadelphia, 1896.

Foster, Frank Hugh, A Genetic History of the New England Theology. Chicago, 1907.

Goddard, Harold Clarke, Studies in New England Transcendentalism. New York, 1908.

Greene, Maria Louise, The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut. Boston and New York, 1905.

Hayward, John, The Religious Creeds and Statistics of Every Christian Denomination in the United States and British Provinces. Boston, 1836.

Herzog, J. J. and Plitt, G. L., Real-Encyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche. 2. Aufl. 18 vols. Leipzig, 1877–1888.

Herzog, J. J. and Hauck, A., Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche. 3 Aufl. 24 vols. Leipzig, 1896–1913.

Lauer, Paul E., Church and State in New England. In Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, Tenth Series, ii-iii, Baltimore, 1892, pp. 83–188.

Reed, Susan Martha, Church and State in Massachusetts, 1691–1740. Urbana, Ill., 1914. In University of Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, iii, 4.

Swift, Lindsay, The Massachusetts Election Sermons. In Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, i, Transactions, 1892–94, pp. 388–451. Reprinted as Swift, Lindsay, The Massachusetts Election Sermons: An Essay in Descriptive Bibliography. Cambridge, 1897.

Walker, Williston, The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism. New York, 1893.

Walker, Williston, A History of the Congregational Churches in the United States. New York, 1894. (American Church History Series).

D. Masonic

(See also Masonic material listed under Sermons, Orations and Addresses, and Miscellaneous Works)

An Abstract of the Proceedings of the Anti-Masonic State Convention of Massachusetts, held in Faneuil Hall, Boston, Dec. 30 and 31, 1829, and Jan. 1, 1830. Boston, 1830.

By-Laws of King Solomon’s Lodge, Charlestown, etc. Boston, 1885.

By-Laws of St. John’s Lodge, adopted May 15, A. L. 5843. Boston, 1844.

By-Laws of Tyrian Lodge of Ancient, Free, and Accepted Masons, Gloucester. Salem, 1874.

Hayden, Sidney, Washington and His Masonic Compeers. New York, 1867.

Heard, J. A., A Historical Account of Columbian Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons, of Boston, Mass. Boston, 1856.

Historical Sketch and Centennial Anniversary of Washington Lodge A. F. & A. M., Roxbury, Mass. Roxbury, 1896.

Mackey, Albert Gallatin, The History of Free Masonry. 7 vols. New York, 1898.

McCarthy, Charles, The Anti-Masonic Party, 1827–1840. In Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1902, pp. 365–574.

Myers, E. M., History of Free Masonry and Its Progress in the United States. Petersburg, Va., 1887.

Proceedings of the Anti-Masonic State Convention [Vermont], holden at Montpelier, June 23, 24 & 25, 1830. Reports and Addresses. Middlebury, 1830.

Sachse, Julius Friederich, Washington’s Masonic Correspondence. Philadelphia, 1915.

Storer, E. G., (compiler), The Records of Free Masonry in the State of Connecticut, etc. 2 vols. New Haven, 1859–61.

Surette, L. A., By-Laws of Corinthian Lodge, of Ancient, Free, and Accepted Masons, of Concord, Mass. Concord, 1859.

Waterman, T., (compiler), By-Laws of St. Andrew’s Royal Arch Chapter, Boston. Boston, 1859.

PUBLIC AND OTHER RECORDS

American State Papers, Class I: Foreign Relations, 1789–1828. 6 vols. Washington, 1832–1859.

Annual Reports of American Historical Association, for 1894, 1896, 1902, and 1912. Washington.

Acts and Laws of the State of Connecticut in America. Hartford, 1786.

Acts and Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. 13 vols. Boston, 1890–1898.

Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay. 5 vols. Boston, 1869–1886.

Benton, Thomas Hart, Abridgement of the Debates of Congress, from 1789 to 1856. 16 vols. New York, 1857–61.

Charter Granted by Their Majesties King William and Queen Mary, to the Inhabitants of Massachusetts-Bay in New-England. Boston, 1726.

Charters and “Acts and Laws” of the Province of Massachusetts-Bay, with Appended Acts and Laws. Boston, 1726–35.

Connecticut, Colonial Records of, (ed. by C. J. Hoadly and J. Hammond Trumbull). 15 vols. Hartford, 1894–5.

Connecticut Historical Society Collections. 8 vols. Hartford, 1860–1902.

Dedham Historical Register. 14 vols. Dedham, Mass., 1890–1902.

Essex Institute [Salem, Mass.], Historical Collections. 53 vols. Salem, 1859–1917.

Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, from November 28th, 1780, to February 28th, 1807, etc. 3 vols. Boston, 1801–7.

Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 1792–1918. 74 vols. Boston.

New Haven Colony Historical Society Papers. 6 vols. New Haven, 1865–1900.

The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, etc. (Gales and Seaton). 42 vols. Washington, 1834–56.

United States Statutes at Large.

SERMONS

Abbot, Abiel, A Memorial of Divine Benefits. In a sermon, delivered at Exeter, on the 15th, and at Haverhill, on the 29th of November, 1798, days of public thanksgiving, in New-Hampshire and Massachusetts. Haverhill, Massachusetts, 1798.

Bartlett, Josiah, A Discourse on the Origin, Progress and Design of Free Masonry. Delivered at the meeting-house in Charlestown, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, on the Anniversary of St. John the Baptist, June 24, A. D. 1793. Boston, 1793.

Belknap, Jeremy, A Sermon, delivered before the convention of the clergy of Massachusetts, in Boston, May 26, 1796. Boston, 1796.

Bradford, Ebenezer, The Nature and Manner of Giving Thanks to God, Illustrated. A sermon, delivered on the day of the national thanksgiving, February 19, 1795. Boston, 1795.

Clark, Abraham L., The Secrets of Masonry Illustrated and Explained; in a discourse, preached at South-Kingston, before the Grand Lodge of the State of Rhode-Island, etc., September 3d, A. L. 5799. Providence, 1799.

Cumings, Henry, A Sermon preached at Billerica, November 29, 1798, being the day of the anniversary thanksgiving throughout the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Boston, 1798.

Cummings, Abraham, The Present Times Perilous. A sermon, preached at Sullivan, on the national fast, April 25, 1799. (n. d.).

Dana, Daniel, Two Sermons, delivered April 25, 1799; the day recommended by the President of the United States for national humiliation, fasting and prayer. Newburyport, 1799.

Dana, Joseph, A Sermon, delivered February 19, 1795, being a day of general thanksgiving throughout the United States of America. Newburyport, 1795.

Dwight, Timothy, The Duty of Americans in the Present Crisis. Illustrated in a discourse, preached on the Fourth of July, 1798 … at the request of the citizens of New-Haven. New-Haven, 1798.

Dwight, Timothy, A Discourse on some events of the last century, delivered in the Brick Church in New Haven, on Wednesday, January 7, 1801. New Haven, 1801.

Eckley, Joseph, A Discourse, delivered on the public thanksgiving day, November 29, 1798. Boston, 1798.

Emmons, Nathaniel, A Discourse, delivered on the national fast, April 25, 1799. Wrentham, Mass., 1799.

French, Jonathan, A Sermon, delivered on the anniversary thanksgiving, November 29, 1798, with some additions in the historical part. Andover, 1799.

Harris, William, A Sermon delivered at Trinity Church in Boston, before the annual convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Massachusetts, on Tuesday, the 28th of May, 1799. Boston, 1799.

Kirkland, John Thornton, A Sermon, delivered on the 9th of May, 1798. Being the day of a national fast, recommended by the President of the United States. Boston, 1798.

Lathrop, Joseph, A Sermon, on the Dangers of the Times, from Infidelity and Immorality; and especially from a lately discovered Conspiracy against Religion and Government, delivered at West-Springfield and afterward at Springfield. Springfield, September, 1798.

Miller, Samuel, A Discourse delivered in the New Presbyterian Church, New York: before the Grand Lodge of the State of New York…. June 24th, 1795. 1795.

Morse, Jedidiah, The Present Situation of Other Nations of the World, Contrasted with our Own. A sermon, delivered at Charlestown, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, February 19, 1795; being the day recommended by George Washington, President of the United States of America, for publick thanksgiving and prayer. Boston, 1795.

Morse, Jedidiah, A Sermon, delivered at the New North Church in Boston, in the morning, and in the afternoon at Charlestown, May 9th, 1798, being the day recommended by John Adams, President of the United States of America, for solemn humiliation, fasting and prayer. Boston, 1798.

Morse, Jedediah, A Sermon delivered before the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, at a public installation of the officers of Corinthian Lodge, at Concord … June 25, 1798. (n. d.)

Morse, Jedediah, A Sermon, preached at Charlestown, November 29, 1798, on the anniversary thanksgiving in Massachusetts. With an Appendix, designed to illustrate some parts of the discourse; exhibiting proofs of the early existence, progress, and deleterious effects of French intrigue and influence in the United States. Boston, 1798.

Morse, Jedediah, A Sermon, Exhibiting the Present Dangers, and Consequent Duties of the Citizens of the United States of America. Delivered at Charlestown, April 25, 1799, the day of the national fast. Charlestown, 1799.

[Osgood, David], The Wonderful Works of God are to be remembered. A sermon delivered on the day of the annual thanksgiving, November 20, 1794. Boston, 1794.

Osgood, David, A Discourse, delivered February 19, 1795. The day set apart by the President for a general thanksgiving throughout the United States. Boston, 1795.

Osgood, David, Some facts evincive of the atheistical, anarchical, and in other respects, immoral principles of the French republicans, stated in a sermon delivered on the 9th of May, 1798. Boston, 1798.

Osgood, David, The Devil let loose; or the Wo occasioned to the inhabitants of the earth by his wrathful appearance among them. Delivered on the day of the national fast, April 25, 1799. Boston, 1799.

Packard, Hezekiah, Federal Republicanism, displayed in two discourses, preached on the day of the state fast at Chelmsford, and on the day of the national fast at Concord, in April, 1799. Boston, 1799.

Payson, Seth, A Sermon, at the consecration of the Social Lodge in Ashby, and at the installation of its officers, June 24, A. D. 1799. Amherst, N. H., 1800.

Prentiss, Caleb, A Sermon delivered before Mount Moriah Lodge; at Reading in the County of Middlesex; at the celebration of St. John; June 24th, A. D. 1799. Leominster (Mass.) … Anno Lucis 5799.

[Sherman, Josiah], A Sermon to Swine: From Luke xv: 16 … Containing a concise, but sufficient answer to General Allen’s Oracles of Reason. Litchfield, 1787.

Strong, Nathan, A Sermon, preached on the state fast, April 6th, 1798. Published at the request of the hearers. Hartford, 1798.

Strong, Nathan, Political Instruction from the Prophecies of God’s Word,—a sermon preached on the state thanksgiving, Nov. 29, 1798. Hartford, 1798.

Tappan, David, A Sermon delivered to the first congregation in Cambridge, and a religious society in Charlestown, April 11, 1793. Boston, 1793.

Tappan, David, Christian Thankfulness explained and enforced. A sermon delivered at Charlestown, in the afternoon of February 19, 1795. Boston, 1795.

Tappan, David, A Discourse delivered in the Chapel of Harvard College, June 19, 1798, occasioned by the approaching departure of the Senior Class from the University. Boston, 1798.

Taylor, John, A Sermon, delivered on the day of public thanksgiving, at Deerfield; Nov. 29, ’98. Greenfield, (n. d.).

Thayer, John, A Discourse, delivered at the Roman Catholic Church in Boston on the 9th of May, 1798, a day recommended by the President for humiliation and prayer throughout the United States. Boston, 1798.

Weld, Ezra, A Discourse, delivered April 25, 1799; being the day of fasting and prayer throughout the United States of America. Boston, 1799.

ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES

Beedé, Thomas, An Oration, delivered at Roxbury, July 4, 1799. In commemoration of American Independence. Boston, 1799.

Bentley, William, A Charge delivered before the Morning Star Lodge, in Worcester, Massachusetts, upon the festival of Saint John the Baptist, June 25, A. L. 1798. Worcester, June A. L. 1798.

Bishop, Abraham, Connecticut Republicanism. An Oration on the Extent and Power of Political Delusion. Delivered in New-Haven, on the evening preceding the public commencement, September, 1800. Philadelphia, 1800.

Bishop, Abraham, Oration delivered at Wallingford, on the 11th of March, 1801, before the Republicans of the State of Connecticut, and their general thanksgiving for the election of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency and of Aaron Burr to the Vice Presidency of the United States of America. New-Haven, 1801.

Bishop, Abraham, Proofs of a Conspiracy, against Christianity, and the Government of the United States; exhibited in several views of the union of church and state in New-England. Hartford, 1802.

Brown, William, An Oration spoken at Hartford … on the anniversary of American Independence, July 4th, A. D. 1799. Hartford, 1799.

Collins, Alexander, A Masonic Oration, pronounced on the festival of St. John the Evangelist, December 26, 1799…. In Middletown. Middletown, 1800.

Crawford, John, An Address, delivered at the Grand Convention of the Free Masons of the State of Maryland; held on the 10th May, 1802,—in which the observance of secrecy is vindicated, and the principal objections of Professor Robison against the institution, are candidly considered. Baltimore, 1802.

Dwight, Theodore, An Oration spoken at Hartford, in the State of Connecticut, on the anniversary of American Independence, July 4th, 1798. Hartford, 1798.

Edmond, David, An Oration delivered at Ridg[e]field on the Fourth of July, 1799, before a large concourse of people, assembled to commemorate their National Independence. Danbury, MDCCXCIX.

Gardiner, John, Esq., The Speech of, delivered in the House of Representatives. On Thursday, the 26th of January, 1792…. Boston, 1792.

[Harris, Thaddeus Mason], The Fraternal Tribute of Respect paid to the Masonic Character of Washington, in the Union Lodge, in Dorchester, January 7th, A. L. 1800. Charlestown, 1800.

Hodge, Michael, An Oration pronounced before the Right Worshipful Master & Brethren of St. Peter’s Lodge, at the Episcopal Church in Newburyport, on the festival of St. John the Baptist, June 24th, 1802. Newburyport, … 1802.

Lewis, Zechariah, An oration, on the Apparent and the Real Political Situation of the United States, pronounced before the Connecticut Society of the Cincinnati, assembled at New-Haven, … July 4th, 1799. New-Haven, 1799.

Lisle, Henry Maurice, An Address, delivered before the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, on the festival of St. John the Evangelist, Dec. 27th, A. L. 1805…. Boston, 1805.

Jackson, Charles, An Oration, delivered before the Right Worshipful Master and Brethren of St. Peter’s Lodge, at the Episcopal Church in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on the festival of St. John the Baptist; celebrated June 25, 1798. Newburyport, March A. L. 1799.

Lowell, John, Junior, An Oration, pronounced July 4th, 1799, at the request of the inhabitants of the town of Boston, in commemoration of the anniversary of American Independence. Boston, 1799.

Mann, James, An Address, delivered December 18, 1799. Before the Brethren of Montgomery Lodge; at their Masonic Hall in Franklin…. Wrentham, 1800.

Parish, Elijah, An Oration, delivered at Byfield, July 4, 1799. Newburyport, (n. d.).

Smith, John C., An Oration, pronounced at Sharon, on the anniversary of American Independence, 4th of July, 1798. Litchfield, (n. d.).

Stoddard, Amos, An Oration, delivered in the meeting house of the First Parish in Portland, Monday, June 24th, 1799 … in celebration of the anniversary festival of St. John the Baptist…. Portland, 1799.

Stoddard, A[mos], An Oration, delivered before the citizens of Portland … on the Fourth of July, 1799…. Portland, 1799.

PAMPHLETS

Backus, Isaac, An Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty. Against the Oppressions of the Present Day. Boston, 1773.

Backus. Isaac, Government and Liberty Described: and Ecclesiastical Tyranny Exposed. Boston, 1778.

[Cheetham, James], An Answer to Alexander Hamilton’s letter, concerning the public conduct and character of John Adams, Esq., President of the United States. By a Citizen of New York. New York, 1800.

Cobbett, William, A Bone to Gnaw, for the Democrats; or Observations on a Pamphlet entitled “The Political Progress of Britain”. Philadelphia, 1795.

[Ogden, John Cosens], A View of the New England Illuminati: who are indefatigably engaged in destroying the religion and government of the United States; under a feigned regard for their safety—and under an impious abuse of true religion. (2nd edition). Philadelphia, 1799.

Pseud: Effects of the Stage on the Manners of a People: and the Propriety of Encouraging and Establishing a Virtuous Theatre. By a Bostonian. Boston, 1792.

[Russell, Jonathan], To the Freemen of Rhode-Island, etc. (n. d.).

[Sullivan, James], The Altar of Baal thrown down: or, the French Nation defended, against the pulpit slander of David Osgood, A. M., pastor of the church in Medford. Par Citoyen de Novion. Boston, 1795.

The Pretensions of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency examined and the charges against John Adams refuted. 1796.

The Rights of the Drama: or, an Inquiry into the Origin, Principles, and Consequences of Theatrical Entertainments. By Philo Dramatis. 1792.

[Wood, John], A Full Exposition of the Clintonian Faction, and the Society of the Columbian Illuminati; with an account of the writer of the narrative, and the characters of his certificate men, as also remarks on Warren’s Pamphlet. By J—— W——. Newark, 1802.

MISCELLANEOUS WORKS

Allen, Ethan, Reason the Only Oracle of Man, etc. Bennington, State of Vermont, 1784.

Aufrere, Anthony, The Cannibal’s Progress; or the Dreadful Horrors of the French Invasion, etc. (Tr. from the German.) Portsmouth, New-Hampshire, 1798.

Barruel, Augustin, Memoirs of Jacobinism. 4 vols. London, 1797.

Chauncy, Charles, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England. Boston, 1743.

Chauncy, Charles, The Salvation of All Men the Grand Thing aimed at in the Scheme of God. London, 1784.

Cunningham, Abner, Practical Infidelity Portrayed and the Judgments of God made Manifest. (3rd edition). New York, 1836.

Du Pan, J. Mallet, The History of the Destruction of the Helvetic Union and Liberty. Boston, 1799.

Dwight, Timothy, Theology: Explained and Defended. 5 vols. Middletown, Conn., 1818.

Eulogium and Vindication of Masonry. Selected (and Improved) from Various Writers. Philadelphia, 1792.

Evans, Charles, American Bibliography. Vols. i-viii published. Chicago, 1903–15.

Harris, Thaddeus Mason, Discourses, delivered on public occasions, illustrating the principles, displaying the tendency, and vindicating the design of Freemasonry. Charlestown, 1801.

Payson, Seth, Proofs of the Real Existence, and Dangerous Tendency, of Illuminism, etc. Charlestown, 1802.

Robison, John, Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the Secret Meetings of the Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. (3rd edition). London, 1798.

Stedman (Edmund Clarence) and Mackay (Ellen Hutchinson), A Library of American Literature. 11 vols. New York, 1888–1890.

The Freemason’s Monitor; or Illustrations of Masonry. In Two Parts. By a Royal Arch Mason. Albany, 1797.

The Maryland Ahiman Rezon of Free and Accepted Masons …. Baltimore, 1797.

The Vocal Companion, and Masonic Register. Boston, 1802.

Trumbull, James Hamond, List of Books Printed in Connecticut, 1709–1800. Hartford, 1904.

Webster, Noah, The Revolution in France considered in respect to its progress and effects. New York, 1794.

Wise, John, A Vindication of the Government of New-England Churches, and The Churches Quarrel Espoused. Boston, 1860.

Wolfstieg, August, Bibliographie der freimaurerischen Literatur. 2 vols. and Register. 1911–13.