Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (22 page)

Perhaps more significantly, the nominally Episcopalian Washington was also a Freemason, along with numerous other Founders, including John Hancock, Paul Revere, and Franklin. (While he was in France, Franklin met the philosopher Voltaire, also a Freemason.) When Washington laid the cornerstone of the Capitol in 1793, the local Masonic lodge organized the ceremony, and Washington wore a Masonic apron made for him by the wife of the Marquis de Lafayette, who belonged to the Masons as well. Washington took his oath of office as president with a Masonic Bible.

One of the oldest and largest fraternal organizations in the world, Freemasonry was invented in London in 1717, a semisecret society that has inspired substantial mythology ever since. It was formed by a group of intellectuals who took over a craft guild and fostered what they called “enlightened uplift,” dedicated to the ideals of charity, equality, morality, and service to God, whom the Masons describe as the Great Architect of the Universe. The order spread quickly through Enlightenment Europe and included men as diverse as Voltaire, King Frederick II of Prussia, and the Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. (First performed in Vienna, Austria, in 1791, Mozart’s opera
The Magic Flute
deals symbolically with Masonic beliefs and rituals.)

As it developed, Freemasonry was viewed as anticlerical and was later thought to be antireligious by conservative Congregationalists in the United States. An anti-Mason movement took hold in the nineteenth century, and the Antimasonic Party became the first significant third party in American politics. (In 1831, the Antimasonic Party became the first party to hold a nominating convention to choose candidates for president and vice president. Its candidate, William Wirt, won a respectable seven electoral votes in 1832.) The controversy grew when a disgruntled ex-Mason announced he would publish the group’s secret rituals. He was abducted and disappeared. Twenty-six Masons were indicted on murder and six came to trial, with four of them convicted on lesser charges. But the fact is that Masonry was a voluntary fraternal order—a kind of eighteenth-century spiritual Rotary Club—and not a sinister cult intent on world domination as it has often been portrayed, including more recently by Reverend Pat Robertson, leader of the Christian right.

Some people believed—and many still do—that this powerful Masonic influence can be seen in symbols on the American dollar bill, and that they were put there by the “Masonic president,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to show that the country had been taken over by Masons. The objects in question on the dollar bill are actually the two sides of the Great Seal of the United States, which dates from the late 1700s (see page 126). It is Mason Benjamin Franklin who is often credited—or blamed—for them. But even that may be a myth. The symbols in question are the representation of an eye and an unfinished pyramid. The All-Seeing Eye of Deity is mentioned in Freemasonry, but the concept behind the image dates back to the Bible. An unfinished pyramid symbolizes that the work of nation building is not completed, but the pyramid is not a particularly Masonic symbol. The eye in the pyramid, still featured on America’s money, was a common symbol of an omniscient Deity that dated to Renaissance art. In other words, the Masons may have adopted the design as a symbol later on and not the other way around.

As a footnote to Masonry in America, it should be pointed out that the Enlightenment spirit went only so far. In spite of its idealism, American Masonry was neither color-blind nor sexually enlightened. Just as blacks and women were kept out of the Constitution, they were barred from Masonry’s chummy club as well. In 1765, Prince Hall, a free black Methodist minister who settled in the Boston area, founded a Masons for blacks. (They would later be called Prince Hall Masons.) In 1775, a British army lodge admitted Hall and fourteen other free blacks who formed African Lodge 1, but white American Masons refused to grant the lodge a charter. The group finally received its charter from the Grand Lodge of England in 1787, as African Lodge 459. Prince Hall and other early black Masons protested slavery and sought to improve the status of free blacks. Later Prince Hall members included W. E. B. DuBois, the historian, writer, and one of the founders of the NAACP, and Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

• Thomas Jefferson: More radical in his beliefs than either Franklin or Washington was Thomas Jefferson, who inveighed against “every form of tyranny over the mind of man,” by which he meant organized Christianity. In 1782, Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom was approved by the Virginia legislature. This landmark legislation guaranteed every citizen the freedom to worship in the church of his or her choice and ended state support for the Episcopal church in Virginia. The statute passed thanks to the efforts of James Madison.

Jefferson had also once produced an edited version of the Gospels (still available in book form as
The Jefferson Bible
) in which he highlighted the moral and ethical teachings of Jesus while editing out any reference to his divinity or miracles. The reference to Providence at the close of the Declaration was an addition made by the Continental Congress while the document was debated.

• Aaron Burr: The libertinish Burr, usually regarded as one of the scoundrels in America’s past, is not usually discussed in the same breath with American religious tradition. But he was the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, the greatest name in New England church history and another leader of the Great Awakening (see Chapter 2). Burr had spent a year studying for the ministry before deciding that he lacked sufficient faith. According to historian Thomas Fleming’s
Duel
, Burr’s decision was “typical of a general decline in theological fervor throughout America. The French Revolution’s assault on religion as the bulwark of the ruling class accelerated this trend. In the Yale class of 1796, a poll revealed that only one graduate believed in God—a glimpse of why the Federalists’ attacks on Thomas Jefferson’s supposed atheism went nowhere.”

Ultimately, what is far more important than what any of the so-called Founding Fathers personally believed is the larger concept that most of them embraced passionately: the freedom to practice religion, as well as not to. And certainly, to a man, they emphatically opposed the idea of a government-sponsored religion. Franklin shuddered at the intrusion of religion into politics. Washington denounced spiritual tyranny and felt that religion was a private matter with which government had no business meddling. To him, government existed to protect people’s rights, not save their souls.

In a famous letter to members of the Newport Hebrew Congregation, the oldest synagogue in America, Washington wrote in 1790: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily
the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction
—
to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens
” (emphasis added).

As for Jefferson, he famously wrote that it made no difference to him whether his neighbor affirmed one god or twenty, since “it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” It was this concept—that the government should neither enforce, encourage, nor otherwise intrude on religion—that would find its way into the Constitution in the form of the First Amendment.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

“A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom,” enacted by the Virginia General Assembly in 1786:

We the General Assembly of Virginia do enact that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

Jefferson introduced this bill in 1779, and passage was secured while he was in Paris with the collaboration of James Madison. Along with his authorship of the Declaration of Independence and his establishment of the University of Virginia, Jefferson had his authorship of this bill included on his tombstone.

What does
e pluribus unum mean?

E pluribus unum
is the Latin motto on the face of the Great Seal of the United States and the phrase means “out of many, one.” It can be traced back to Horace’s
Epistles
. It refers to the creation of one nation, the United States, out of thirteen colonies. Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, members of the first committee for the selection of the seal, suggested the motto in 1776. Since 1873, the law requires that this motto appear on one side of every United States coin that is minted.

The Great Seal of the United States is the symbol of the sovereignty of the United States, adopted on June 20, 1782. European countries had long used seals, and the new nation signified its equal rank by adopting its own seal. William Barton, a specialist in heraldry, advised the committee responsible for creating the seal, and designed most of the seal’s reverse side. Charles Thomson, secretary of the Congress, prepared the images used on the face, which is used on official documents. The American eagle, with an escutcheon, or shield, on its breast, symbolizes self-reliance. The shield’s thirteen vertical stripes came from the flag of 1777, but seven are white, while in the 1777 flag seven are red. The eagle holds an olive branch of thirteen leaves and thirteen olives in its right talon, and thirteen arrows in its left, symbolizing the desire for peace but the ability to wage war. In its beak is a scroll inscribed
e pluribus unum
. Above its head is the thirteen-star “new constellation” of the 1777 flag, enclosed in golden radiance, breaking through a cloud.

The reverse side of the seal is familiar from the back of the one-dollar bill, but it has never been used as a seal. A pyramid of thirteen courses of stone, representing the Union, is watched over by the Eye of Providence enclosed in a traditional triangle. The upper motto,
Annuit coeptis
, means “He [God] has favored our undertakings.” The lower motto,
Novus ordo seclorum
, means “the new order of the ages” that began in 1776, the date on the base of the pyramid.

Who were the Federalists, and what were the Federalist Papers?

Two hundred years of miseducation have left an image of the Constitution as a sort of American Ten Commandments, divinely inspired and carved in stone. So it is hard to imagine that its ratification was not assured. Like an unsuccessful organ transplant, it was nearly rejected by the body politic. When the Constitution left Philadelphia, the country was almost evenly split between those favoring the strong central government it promised, who came to be known as Federalists, and those for a weaker central government with stronger states’ rights, a.k.a. the anti-Federalists.

Loyal Americans and staunch patriots—many of them were Revolutionary leaders and veterans—the anti-Federalists feared a new brand of elected monarchy at the expense of individual liberties. They were led by such major contemporary figures as Virginia’s governor, Patrick Henry; Boston’s Samuel Adams of Revolution fame; and New York’s longtime governor, George Clinton. Their disdain for the Constitution might best be summed up in the words of Thomas Paine: “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.” The anti-Federalists believed that men like Alexander Hamilton were trying to reintroduce an American form of monarchy.

But no small part of their resistance was personal; many anti-Federalists simply didn’t
like
their opposites among the Federalists. No better examples of this could be found than in Virginia, where Patrick Henry kept James Madison, the chief architect of the Constitution, from being elected to the Senate, and New York. where the anti-Federalists were led by New York’s governor, George Clinton. Alexander Hamilton and Clinton were philosophical rivals, but their mutual disdain went far beyond policy into personality and rivalries. Clinton and his allies were more or less credited with creating the spoils system—in which patronage jobs were doled out to friends, family, and financial supporters. In 1792, Clinton had stolen the governor’s race in New York from Hamilton’s handpicked candidate, John Jay, simply by declaring the votes of three counties invalid and declaring himself the winner. (From “The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same” Department comes this wisdom from William “Boss” Tweed, the notorious nineteenth-century “fixer” of all things political in New York City, who said on Election Day in 1871, “As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?”)

Championing the Federalist cause, Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay—then serving as the head of the Confederation’s state department—attempted to influence the ratification debate with a series of pseudonymous newspaper letters signed “Publius” and later collected as the Federalist Papers. Eighty-five of these essays were published, and while they are considered among the most significant political documents in American history, after the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, their direct impact on the debate of the day is dubious. Probably most of the people who counted had already made up their minds.