How a Freemason mystery triggered a wave of conspiracies 200 years ago
'They kidnapped somebody, at the very least, if not killed him.'
In 1826, a former bricklayer who had threatened to expose the secrets of the Freemasons disappeared from near Fort Niagara, a military outpost on the shores of Lake Ontario.
William Morgan had become a visible presence in Western New York as a community outsider who managed to join the Freemasons, a secretive fraternal society that counted George Washington and other prominent Americans among its ranks.
A generation after the Revolutionary War anti-Mason sentiment brewed throughout rural areas of the country based on the idea that, as a group with access to the levers of power, the Masons functioned as a kind of elitist collective that conspired to undermine American values.
Morgan was a Virginia native who fought in the War of 1812 and spent time living in Canada before relocating to the area near Batavia, NY, according to Heaven’s Ditch: God, Gold, and Murder on the Erie Canal, a chronicle of the period by Jack Kelly.
With a wife and young family, Morgan moved to the Rochester area and likely would have joined the freemasons with an eye on making local connections that would help him make a living. That the local rubes actually believed in the sanctity of secular texts and tracing boards was just part of the process, he would have reasoned, according to Kelly.
Morgan seemed to view the traditions and rites of passage, in which masons swore a blood-oath to keep things like a handshake secret, as a box to check on the way toward tapping into the local business community. After some months as a Freemason, though, Morgan was cast out by the same people he both viewed as naive.
Blacklisted for reasons that are lost to history, Morgan signed a deal with a local publisher, David Cade Miller, to author an exposé called Illustrations of Freemasonry, detailing the secret rites and ceremonies of a group that seems foreign to so many people.
And then he vanished.
One leading theory is that local freemason chapter captured Morgan, took him to the middle of the Niagara River and then threw him overboard. That idea could explain why a bloated corpse washed up weeks later, or why, 55 years later, workers found a skeleton resembling Morgan in a nearby quarry. (Neither body was conclusively identified.)
“You have to remember this was the frontier at the time,” Ryan Duffy, executive director of the Holland Land Office Museum in Batavia told me recently. “The whole incident almost validated people’s suspicions about the Freemasons.”
This excerpt from the June 22, 1881 edition of the New York Times helps explain what might have happened.
For their part, the Freemasons say they paid Morgan $500 (roughly $14,000 today) to leave the country, though Morgan never seemed to resurface anywhere after his kidnapping.
And Niagara County Sheriff Eli Bruce, a Mason, was eventually arrested and served 28 months in prison when it became clear he had “transgressed in this matter,” as one history book described it.
“They kidnapped somebody, at the very least, if not killed him, so it almost made the conspiracy myth into a reality that they were trying to stop,” Duffy went on. “They would have been better suited to let him publish what he was going to publish.”
Politicians immediately seized on the outrage over Morgan’s death to form the Anti-Masonic Party, the first third party in the U.S.
The right-wing ideology promoted the notion that Freemasons, a class that included many lawmakers and much of the business class, represented a hostile threat to Christianity. Within a few years, the Anti-Masons had nominated their own presidential candidate to run against Democratic incumbent Andrew Jackson.
The incident accelerated a kind of political factionalism that was already underway, according to Mark Cheathem, a history professor at Cumberland University and author of The Coming of Democracy: Presidential Campaigning in the Age of Jackson.
The Anti-Masons were one of many conspiracy-tinged movements in the U.S. at the time that were born out of changing social norms and a fractured media environment. That the Anti-Masons had their roots in Western New York is no coincidence, as much of the area known as the Burned-over district was “fully aflame” because of changes brought by the construction of the Erie Canal, Cheathem said.
Abolition, women’s rights and utopian social movements also sprouted in western and central areas of New York around the same time. The Mormon movement also started in upstate New York in 1828, two years after the Shakers established a communal farm nearby.
“There was a significant amount of turmoil that began bubbling up in the 1820s,” Cheathem told me in an email. (Cheathem published a detailed account of political conspiracies of the era in Smithsonian.)
“Part of it stemmed from the changing voter demographic, as most states eliminated or lessened tax-paying and property-owning requirements for white male voters,” he went on.
It was a political democratization that would have been upsetting to people in the political establishment, and the Freemasons might have acted out of fear of losing that influence. It happened anyway, as the number of Freemason lodges in New York dropped from 400 to roughly 40 after Morgan’s disappearance, said Ryan Duffy of the Holland Land Museum.
“The mystery of the unknown is something that people will latch onto,” he said. “The Morgan case was an early microcosm of American politics.”
watching juggling from above
It’s hypnotizing.
recommended reading
Thieves Nationwide Are Slithering Under Cars, Swiping Catalytic Converters: Exhaust filtration technology included in a huge amount of American-made cars includes metal that's worth more than gold. Thefts are skyrocketing, and perhaps accelerating the shift to electric vehicles. [@HirokoTabuchi]
A group of Orca outcasts is now dominating an entire sea: "Killer whales that feast on seals and hunt in small packs are thriving while their widely beloved siblings are dying out." [@kategammon]
This Is the Story of a Man Who Jumped Into Lake Michigan Every Day for Nearly a Year: “After interviewing people who lost spouses, relatives and friends, emotional conversations that could stretch for hours, sometimes I would decompress by lying on the rug in my home office, taking a few minutes with my spine pressed to the floor. Other times I would log on to Twitter and watch a man I had never met flop into Lake Michigan.” [@juliebosman]
Don’t Pay Gambling Debts By Insider Trading: A high school teacher who moonlighted as a bookie is accused of obtaining inside information about a telecommunications equipment company, then sending that info to people who owed him gambling debts. [@matt_levine]
A Tanker and a Maze of Companies - One Way Illicit Oil Reaches North Korea: A team of New York Times reporters spent months reviewing ship-tracking data, corporate records and satellite imagery to figure out how North Korea subverts sanctions to obtain fuel supplies. The result is an amazing, easy-to-understand multimedia project. [@NYTimes]
No More Normal is an every-so-often newsletter by me, Jeff Stone. You can support by subscribing, sharing or suggesting ways to improve.