Unit 10 · America Fears the Secret Societies

Batavia was a small town in western New York in 1826. The Erie Canal had opened the year before, and towns across the region were growing fast. William Morgan lived in Batavia with his wife and young children. He had taken part in Masonic lodge meetings. Now he had a different plan.

Morgan teamed up with a Batavia printer named David C. Miller. Together they planned a book called Illustrations of Masonry. On August 14, 1826, the title was filed for copyright. The book promised to print the secret words, signs and ceremonies that Masons used in their lodges.

A book like this is called an exposé. An exposé reveals something a group wanted kept hidden. Exposés of Masonry were not new. One had been printed in London almost a hundred years earlier. But in a small town where everyone knew each other, this one felt personal.

Each Masonic ceremony followed a ritual. A ritual is a set of words and actions done the same way each time. For Masons, rituals marked each step a member took in the brotherhood. Many members felt that printing them was a betrayal.

Imagine joining a club where members help each other’s families when times are hard. To join, you make a serious promise to keep the club’s words and signs private. In the 1820s, many thousands of American men belonged to clubs like this. The best known was the Freemasons.

Masons met in a lodge. The word means both the local group and the room where it meets. Members were farmers, shopkeepers, lawyers and judges. They said the lodge taught good character and charity. They said the secret signs helped them trust a brother Mason from another town.

To join, a man took an oath. An oath is a solemn promise, often made before God. Masonic oaths promised to keep the lodge’s secrets. Some oaths named harsh penalties for breaking the promise. Masons said these penalties were symbols of how serious the promise was.

Critics saw the same oaths differently. They asked: what if a Mason’s promise to his lodge came before his duty to the law? What if a judge or a juror favored a brother Mason? After Morgan vanished, that question swept across the country.

On September 11, 1826, officers arrested William Morgan. The charge was petty theft, over a shirt and a tie. A charge is a formal claim that a person broke the law. A charge is not proof. It still has to be shown in court.

Morgan was taken about fifty miles east to the jail at Canandaigua. There the theft charge was dropped. For a moment he was free. Then he was arrested again. This time it was for a debt of about $2.69 that he owed an innkeeper.

Why does this matter? A debt of less than three dollars was a small sum, even in 1826. Many people later believed the charges were a trick. They thought someone wanted Morgan locked up far from home, away from his friends and his printer.

The arrests themselves are well recorded. Whether they were planned as a trap is a harder question. It fits what happened next. People who study the case still weigh how much was planned ahead, and by whom.

On the night of September 12, a group of men came to the Canandaigua jail. They paid Morgan’s small debt, so the jail let him go. Outside, he was put into a carriage. Witnesses later said he struggled and called for help.

Taking a person away by force is called abduction. The carriage traveled west across New York. Its goal was Fort Niagara, an old fort where the Niagara River flows into Lake Ontario. Canada lies just across the river.

Reports later said Morgan was held at the fort for a short time. After that, the trail goes cold. No one has ever produced a confirmed record of where he went or what happened to him.

Several parts of that night are documented, which means written records support them. The arrest, the jail, the paid debt and the carriage ride are all documented. His fate is not. That gap between the known and the unknown is where rumors grew.

Soon after Morgan vanished, people started to guess. Some said he was drowned in the Niagara River. Others said he was paid to leave the country and start a new life. Over the years, stories claimed he had been seen alive in faraway places.

Each guess is a theory, an idea that tries to explain what happened. A strong theory fits the evidence. A weak theory asks you to ignore some facts or to trust a rumor. A rumor is a story passed from person to person without proof.

The strongest evidence shows that Morgan was taken against his will by men linked to local lodges. It does not show what happened after Fort Niagara. No body was ever confirmed as his. No court ever found anyone guilty of killing him.

Many people believed, then and now, that he was killed. Many Masons argued that a few angry men had done the crime, not the whole order. Historians still treat his fate as an open question.

In October 1827, more than a year after Morgan vanished, a body was found near Oak Orchard Creek, by Lake Ontario. People who blamed the Masons quickly said it was Morgan. At last, they said, here was proof of murder.

Then a widow came forward. She said the body was her husband, Timothy Munroe, who had drowned. In the end, the body was named as Munroe, not Morgan. The proof that people had hoped for was gone.

A newspaper editor named Thurlow Weed was a leader of the Anti-Masons, people who opposed the Masonic order. His critics said he used the body to win votes. Two versions of what Weed said about the body survive, and they paint him very differently.

This is a lesson about evidence, the facts that help show whether a claim is true. When people badly want a story to be true, they may grab any clue that seems to fit. A careful reader asks: who is making the claim, what do they gain, and what does other evidence show?

In January 1827, a court at Canandaigua tried four men named Lawson, Chesebro, Sawyer and Sheldon for their part in taking Morgan. All four were convicted, which means found guilty. The crime was kidnapping, taking and holding a person by force. Without a body, no one could prove Morgan was dead.

Their sentences were short. A sentence is the punishment a court gives. Lawson got two years. Chesebro got one year. Sheldon got three months. Sawyer got one month. None of them was sent away for long.

Later, Eli Bruce, the sheriff of Niagara County, was also convicted. He served 28 months in the Canandaigua jail. New York’s governor, DeWitt Clinton, removed him from office. Other men were tried in the years that followed.

To many people, the punishments seemed far too small. A man had vanished, and the longest sentence was just over two years. That feeling of unfairness turned shock into public anger.

Picture a farmer in western New York in 1828. He hears that a man was taken from a jail. He hears that a sheriff helped. He hears that the punishments were small. He starts to wonder who else knew. Many of his neighbors wonder too.

Critics pointed to a pattern. Some officials in the Morgan cases were Masons. Some trials ended with men acquitted, or found not guilty. To critics, this looked like a cover-up, an effort to hide the truth and protect the guilty.

Masons answered that a small group of men had done the crime. Most Masons had nothing to do with it. They pointed out that Governor Clinton, himself a well-known Mason, removed the sheriff who took part.

Both sides had a point. There was a real crime and there were real reasons for doubt. There was also real unfairness in blaming every member for what a few had done. When a group is secret, it is hard for its members to show outsiders they are innocent. That made the anger last.

In February 1828, Thurlow Weed and Samuel Heron started a newspaper in Rochester, New York. It was called the Anti-Masonic Enquirer. Papers like it told the Morgan story again and again. They helped turn local anger into a political movement.

A political party is a group that works to elect its members to office. In those years, most voters chose one of two big parties. The Anti-Masons became a third party, a party outside the two main ones. It is often called the first third party in American history.

The party was strongest in New York, Vermont and other northeastern states. Its members wanted Masons kept out of public office. They believed secret oaths did not belong in a free country where the people rule.

Well-known people joined the cause. Former president John Quincy Adams wrote public letters against Masonic oaths from 1831 to 1833. They were later collected in a book, Letters on the Masonic Institution, printed in 1847.

Today, every four years, the big parties hold national conventions. Crowds cheer. Delegates from every state choose the party’s candidate for president. That custom started with the Anti-Masons.

From September 26 to 28, 1831, about 110 delegates from 13 states met in Baltimore, Maryland. A delegate is a person sent to speak and vote for others. It was the first national nominating convention, a meeting where a party picks its candidate. Before this, small groups of leaders in Congress often chose candidates.

The delegates chose William Wirt for president. Wirt was a lawyer who had served as U.S. attorney general. Surprisingly, he had once been a Mason himself. The convention also issued an Address to the People. Many historians count it as an early party platform, a public list of a party’s beliefs and plans.

Other parties soon copied the idea and held national conventions of their own. In the 1832 election, Wirt won only one state, Vermont, with its 7 electoral votes. The party lost, but its way of choosing candidates lasted.

Anti-Masonic anger hit lodges hard. Some neighbors stopped speaking to members. Churches and families argued about the lodge. Many men quietly quit. Others kept their membership but stopped meeting.

New York had about 480 lodges in 1826. By the 1830s, only about 75 were still working, by common counts. Sources give different numbers, so historians use the word ’about.’ Every lodge in Vermont gave up its charter, the official paper that lets a lodge meet. In Kentucky, lodges fell from 66 to 37.

The wave reached Illinois too. The first Grand Lodge of Illinois, formed in 1823, stopped meeting around 1827. It was formed again at Jacksonville in 1840. The Panic of 1837, a money crisis, also made it hard for clubs to survive in these years.

The Anti-Masonic Party faded in the later 1830s. Many of its members joined the new Whig Party. Masonry slowly recovered and grew large again later in the century. Its sharp decline after 1826 shows how fast public trust can be lost.

In September 1882, a stone monument to William Morgan was dedicated in the cemetery at Batavia. The National Christian Association, a group against secret societies, paid for it. Its words say, as a fact, that Masons murdered him.

A monument is a lasting marker that honors a person or event. Monuments can also make a claim, a statement that something is true. This monument states something no court ever proved. It tells us what its builders believed 56 years after Morgan vanished.

Here is what records do prove. Morgan was arrested, jailed and taken away by force. Men connected to local lodges were convicted of kidnapping. A national party grew out of the anger. Hundreds of lodges closed.

Here is what was never proven: that Morgan was killed, who killed him, or that the Masonic order as a whole planned it. Keeping these two lists apart is a skill. You can use it every time you read a strong claim about a secret group.

In the late 1840s, a terrible famine struck Ireland. The potato crop failed year after year. Hundreds of thousands of Irish people sailed to America. At the same time, many Germans left home after failed revolutions and hard times. Most came to work, raise families and build new lives.

Most Irish immigrants and many German immigrants were Catholic. At that time, most American-born citizens were Protestant. Many Protestants distrusted the Catholic Church. Some claimed, without evidence, that Catholics would obey the pope instead of American laws.

An immigrant is a person who moves to a new country to live. The belief that people born in a country deserve more rights than newcomers is called nativism. Nativists saw immigrants as a threat to jobs, to elections and to the nation’s religion.

In real life, most Irish and German Catholics were ordinary neighbors. They dug canals, built railroads, opened shops and joined churches. The fear did not come from what they did. It came from what others imagined they might do.

In 1849, a man named Charles B. Allen started a new society in New York City. He called it the Order of the Star Spangled Banner. The name honored the flag. But the order was not open to everyone. Members had to be native-born Protestant men.

The order was oath-bound. Members swore solemn promises to keep its business secret. It had passwords, secret handshakes and levels of membership. When outsiders asked about it, members replied, ’I know nothing.’

The newspaper editor Horace Greeley gave them a nickname: the Know-Nothings. The name stuck. Soon the order had lodges in many states. Its members met in secret, but they aimed to win public elections.

There is a sharp irony here. Irony is when something turns out the opposite of what you would expect. The Know-Nothings accused Catholics of a secret plot. Yet they were a secret society themselves, with hidden rules and oaths.

In November 1854, Know-Nothing candidates swept Massachusetts. Henry J. Gardner became governor. All but two members of the state legislature, the group that makes a state’s laws, were Know-Nothings too. The older parties were shocked.

In public, the movement called itself the American Party. It wanted immigrants to wait many more years before they could become citizens and vote. It wanted only native-born men to hold office.

Election days could turn violent. On August 6, 1855, in Louisville, Kentucky, mobs of Know-Nothing supporters attacked German and Irish Catholic neighborhoods. About 22 people died. People called it Bloody Monday. The victims were ordinary families, blamed for a plot that did not exist.

In 1856, former president Millard Fillmore ran as the American Party’s candidate. He won only one state, Maryland. Soon the movement split over slavery, and it faded away. Its members scattered into other parties within a few years.

On March 6, 1855, Chicago voters chose Levi Boone as mayor. His side was a coalition, a group of different people who join together for a shared goal. It joined nativists with the temperance movement. Temperance means cutting back on alcohol or banning it.

Under Boone, the city raised the yearly saloon license from $50 to $300. A license is official permission to do something, like run a business. These licenses had to be renewed every three months. The city also moved to close saloons on Sundays. Supporters said the rules would bring law and order.

Who paid the price? Many saloons and beer halls were run by German and Irish immigrants. Sunday was often the only day working people had free. A fee six times higher could shut down a small family business.

Critics saw the rules as a way to punish immigrants without saying so. Supporters said they only wanted safer, quieter streets. Either way, the rules fell hardest on the city’s newest neighbors.

Some saloon keepers would not pay the new fee. Police arrested them. Their cases came before a judge on April 21, 1855. Their friends and neighbors decided to show support. They planned a protest, a public action to show that people disagree.

Crowds gathered at the courthouse. Then more marchers came from the North Side, where many Germans lived. They crossed the Clark Street bridge toward the courthouse. Police were waiting. The two sides clashed, and shots were fired.

When it ended, one protester was dead. About 60 people were arrested. The event is called the Lager Beer Riot. A riot is a violent disturbance by a crowd. Lager was the German-style beer served in many beer halls.

Boone served only one year as mayor. In the next election, in 1856, Chicago voters chose a different leader, and the Know-Nothings lost power in the city. Immigrant voters had shown they would stand up for their rights.

In August 1855, Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer in Springfield, Illinois. He was not yet famous across the nation. On August 24, he wrote a long letter to his close friend Joshua Speed in Kentucky. In it, he said plainly that he was not a Know-Nothing.

Lincoln explained why. He had long said that slavery was wrong. He asked how a person who hated the oppression of Black people could support treating other groups as lesser people. To him, the two kinds of unfairness were connected.

He also imagined how the Know-Nothings would change the Declaration of Independence. It says all men are created equal. Lincoln warned that they would add exceptions: Black people, foreigners and Catholics. He meant that nativism broke the nation’s founding principle.

Lincoln kept these words in a private letter. Historians note that he avoided attacking the Know-Nothings in public. He needed their voters in the fight to stop slavery from spreading. The letter shows what he believed when he was not speaking to a crowd.

Jonathan Blanchard was a minister, a teacher and an abolitionist, a person who worked to end slavery. Before coming to Wheaton, he led Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. In 1860 he became the first president of Wheaton College, west of Chicago.

Blanchard believed secret societies did harm. He opposed the Masons, the Odd Fellows and every other secret order. His reasons were religious and political. He believed Christians should not swear secret oaths. He also believed a free country needed open, public dealing.

Blanchard was different from the Know-Nothings. They targeted Catholic immigrants. He aimed at all secret lodges, whatever their members’ faith or birthplace. His fight was against secrecy itself.

Lodge members strongly disagreed with him. They said their orders raised money for widows, cared for the sick and taught good character. They saw Blanchard as attacking good neighbors. You can weigh both views.

In 1868, Blanchard helped found the National Christian Association. Its headquarters were in Chicago. Its goal was to warn Americans against secret societies of every kind. A campaign like this is an organized effort to reach a goal over time.

The association published a newspaper called the Christian Cynosure, and Blanchard edited it. A cynosure is a guiding light, like the star that sailors steer by. For decades, the paper printed arguments, letters and reports against lodges.

The association also kept the Morgan story alive. In 1882 it paid for the Morgan Monument in Batavia, New York. More than fifty years after Morgan vanished, the monument named Masons as his killers, a claim no court had proved.

All this made Illinois a center of the movement against secret societies. Blanchard’s papers and the association’s records are kept today in the Wheaton College Archives. Students and researchers can still study them.

In the early 1880s, Father Michael J. McGivney was an assistant pastor at St. Mary’s Church in New Haven, Connecticut. He saw families fall into poverty when a working father died. He wanted to help.

In October 1881, he and a group of Catholic men formed a new society. On March 29, 1882, the Connecticut legislature granted it a charter. They named it the Knights of Columbus. It was a fraternal order, a brotherhood whose members help one another. It also offered life insurance, so a family would get money if the father died.

The Catholic Church did not allow Catholics to join the Masons. Many other lodges had a Protestant feel. The Knights gave Catholic men a lodge of their own, with ceremonies, charity and friendship. The order spread fast. Chicago Council No. 182, the first in Illinois, began in 1896.

Like other lodges, the Knights had private ceremonies. That privacy made them a target. Some people who already feared Catholics imagined the Knights were hiding a plot. The next lesson shows how that fear was used.

In 1912, Eugene Bonniwell ran for Congress in Pennsylvania and lost to Thomas Butler. Bonniwell challenged the result. His papers pointed to a false document that had been spread during the race.

That document was a forgery, a fake made to look real. It claimed to be the secret oath of the Knights of Columbus. It falsely said members swore to harm Protestants. No such oath was real.

A House committee studied the case. Its report was printed in the Congressional Record, the official record of what happens in Congress, on February 15, 1913. The fake oath was printed there too, but only as an exhibit, a piece of evidence in the case.

The committee did not stop there. It said it could not condemn the fake oath strongly enough. It called the document libel, false writing that harms someone’s good name. A committee of Congress had named the oath a fake.

After 1913, anti-Catholic pamphlets, or short printed booklets, began to reprint the fake oath. Many carried a proud label: Copied from the Congressional Record, Feb. 15, 1913. In a narrow way the label was true. The words really had appeared there.

What the label left out was the context, the facts around something that give it meaning. The pamphlets did not say the oath was printed as evidence of a lie. They did not say the committee condemned it. Readers were meant to think Congress stood behind it.

This is a misleading use of a source. Each word on the label may be true, but the reader walks away with a false idea. Even today, people quote real documents out of context to spread fear.

Think back over this unit. Morgan’s disappearance made neighbors suspect every Mason. The Know-Nothings made neighbors suspect every Catholic immigrant. The fake oath did the same to Catholic Knights. Each time, fear of a secret group landed on real people who had done nothing wrong.