THE ARCANE SCHOOLS - Fort Myers Beach Masonic Lodge No. 362

growth and influence of Masonry in America; and a great story it is,
needing many volumes to tell it aright. As we have seen, it came early
to the shores of the New World, long before the name of our great
republic had been uttered, and with its gospel of Liberty, Equality,
and Fraternity it helped to shape the institutions of this Continent.
Down the Atlantic Coast, along the Great Lakes, into the wilderness of
the Middle West and the forests of the far South--westward it marched
as "the star of empire" led, setting up its altar on remote frontiers,
a symbol of civilization, of loyalty to law and order, of friendship
with school-house and church. If history recorded the unseen
influences which go to the making of a nation, those forces for good
which never stop, never tarry, never tire, and of which our social
order is the outward and visible sign, then might the real story of
Masonry in America be told.
Instead of a dry chronicle,[153] let us make effort to capture and
portray the spirit of Masonry in American history, if so that all may
see how this great order actually presided over the birth of the
republic, with whose growth it has had so much to do. For example, no
one need be told what patriotic memories cluster about the old Green
Dragon Tavern, in Boston, which Webster, speaking at Andover in 1823,
called "_the headquarters of the Revolution_." Even so, but it was
also a _Masonic Hall_, in the "Long Room" of which the Grand Lodge of
Massachusetts--an off-shoot of St. Andrew's Lodge--was organized on
St. John's Day, 1767, with Joseph Warren, who afterwards fell at
Bunker Hill, as Grand Master. There Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, Warren,
Hancock, Otis and others met and passed resolutions, and then laid
schemes to make them come true. There the Boston Tea Party was
planned, and executed by Masons disguised as Mohawk Indians--not by
the Lodge as such, but by a club formed within the Lodge, calling
itself the _Caucus Pro Bono Publico_, of which Warren was the leading
spirit, and in which, says Elliott, "the plans of the Sons of Liberty
were matured." As Henry Purkett used to say, he was present at the
famous Tea Party as a spectator, and in disobedience to the order of
the Master of the Lodge, who was _actively_ present.[154]
As in Massachusetts, so throughout the Colonies--the Masons were
everywhere active in behalf of a nation "conceived in liberty and
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Of the
men who signed the Declaration of Independence, the following are
known to have been members of the order: William Hooper, Benjamin
Franklin, Matthew Thornton, William Whipple, John Hancock, Philip
Livingston, Thomas Nelson; and no doubt others, if we had the Masonic
records destroyed during the war. Indeed, it has been said that, with
four men out of the room, the assembly could have been opened in form
as a Masonic Lodge, on the Third Degree. Not only Washington,[155] but
nearly all of his generals, were Masons; such at least as Greene, Lee,
Marion, Sullivan, Rufus and Israel Putnam, Edwards, Jackson, Gist,
Baron Steuben, Baron De Kalb, and the Marquis de Lafayette who was
made a Mason in one of the many military Lodges held in the
Continental Army.[156] If the history of those old camp-lodges could
be written, what a story it would tell. Not only did they initiate
such men as Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall, the immortal Chief
Justice, but they made the spirit of Masonry felt in "times that try
men's souls"[157]--a spirit passing through picket-lines, eluding
sentinels, and softening the horrors of war.