Fratricide & Freemasonry

Although never really dormant, historical interest in the American Civil War has waxed and waned over the last thirty years, reaching perhaps its highest level of popularity in the aftermath of Ken Burn’s television documentary The Civil War. For many readers, historians, amateurs and buffs, the most interesting facet of the war are the battles, armies, uniforms or rifles. For others it is the great constitutional questions - slavery or state’s rights - that command attention. But for some scholars, the war is about more than that. Interviewed as part of Burn’s documentary, the eminent Civil War historian Shelby Foote put it bluntly: the War transcended all of those issues and that as a national experience it was greater than the sum of its parts:

Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly, it defined us. The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement in European wars beginning with the first World War did what it did, but the Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became -- good and bad things. And it is very necessary if you're going to understand the American character in the 20th Century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe in the mid-19th Century. It was the crossroads of our being and it was a hell of a crossroads.

So too it is with the Civil War and Masonry in the United States: American Freemasonry awoke because of the War Between the States. Some might argue that the Morgan Affair and Anti-Masonry constitutes the crucible of the fraternity on these shores. Others might claim that the Baltimore Convention of 1843, which propelled American Masonry into its present orbit was the single-most important American Masonic moment; still others would point to the fraternal impulses in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, or perhaps even the post- WWII boom in membership as representing the most significant Masonic moments in the USA, but those views overlook the great conflagration of 1861-65.

American Freemasonry was in the midst of a resurgence when the Civil War broke out – as a consequence there were a great many Freemasons in both armies. An estimated 4% of the eligible male population nationwide were members. Although that sounds negligible, at the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3, 1863) nearly 93,000 Union troops faced roughly 70,000 Confederates. If 4% of those men were Masons, then the raw numbers suggest more than 6,500 Masons were present in that little corner of Pennsylvania during those three days – certainly a greater number than we might expect at the largest Masonic conference, with or without a parade It was inevitable that these men would meet, and what they did, and how they reacted to one another upon their meeting is what shaped the fraternity into what we know today, both good, and as Shelby Foote would have said, bad things.

The late Allen E. Roberts recognized the central role the war played in American Masonry, and his early work laid much of the groundwork for Masonic Civil War historians that have followed him. But his two seminal works, House Undivided (Macoy, 1976) and House Reunited (Anchor communications, 1996), while answering many questions, prompted many others.

A new scholarly work, currently in publisher's editorial review, aims to answer those questions. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Freemasonry in the American Civil War expands on my previous work on this subject as published in Heredom, the Scottish Rite Journal, and in the up-coming issue of Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, and will provide the reader with carefully researched and thoroughly attributable incidents of Masonic intercourse in camp and bivouac, on the high seas, the battlefield and in the POW pens. Hopefully available in print by 2009, Better Angels will be a comprehensive look at the effect of war upon an army of Masons, and the effect of Masonry on a nation at war with itself. The results, I hope to convince you, were absolutely extraordinary.

Further posts on this subject will be made as new information warrants, or whenever I get nervous about the publishing process – whichever occurs first.