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"Intended for the Better Government of Man": The Political History of African American Freemasonry in the Era of Emancipation
Stephen Kantrowitz
| In 1848 Frederick Douglass chastised black northerners for showing more devotion to fraternal orders than to political organization against slavery and caste. "If we put forth a call for a National Convention, for the purpose of considering our wrongs, and asserting our rights," he complained, "we shall bring together about fifty, but if we call a grand celebration of odd-fellowship, or free-masonry, we shall assemble ... from four to five thousand." The time and money men invested in these "glittering follies of artificial display," he asserted, would be better spent "holding public meetings, putting forth addresses, passing resolutions, and in various other ways making their wishes known to the world." Worse, Douglass explained, the fraternal orders attracted "some of the best and brightest among us," "contenting" them, "swallowing up their energies ... and indisposing them to seek for solid and important realities." These groups' exclusion of women cast further doubt on their adherents' commitment to "doing that which is right." Freemasons donned elaborate regalia, performed secret rites of passage, and emerged from their increasingly elaborate lodge buildings to parade, celebrate, and bury their dead. But they did not, in Douglass's view, contribute to the political work of establishing rights and redressing wrongs.1 |
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Most historians of the mid-nineteenth-century United States have concurred with Douglass's depiction of fraternal organizations as, at best, peripheral to movements for emancipation, civil rights, and political equality. Instead, black fraternal associations figure in the scholarship as one among many forms of association in the Civil War era, indistinct from the work of burial, benevolent, and literary societies. A few studies have noted the symbolic significance of Masonic participation in early emancipation celebrations and other public assemblies, and several scholars use the methodologies of literary and cultural studies to explore the symbolic meanings of black men's engagement in Freemasonry during the era. But although scholars have explored the political dimensions of revolutionary-era Freemasonry and twentieth-century ritual associations, such groups are absent from most accounts of African American political life in the years from the antebellum era through Reconstruction.2 |
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Freemasonry was a key arena for black political thought and activity during the decades of crisis and radical transformation from the 1840s to the 1870s. Freemasonry provided an institutional framework, separate from state authority, where men forged political subjectivities, developed organizational expertise, fostered leadership at the community, state, and national levels, repaired schisms, and reconciled rivalries. It also encouraged them to think of those political processes as temporal means of achieving transcendent ends, depicting their lodges, bylaws, and representative bodies as part of a millennia-old project to perfect human society—a cosmopolitan project that welcomed men "of all nations, tongues, kindreds, and languages."3 Through Freemasonry, African Americans of the era turned inward and looked outward, building networks of deliberation and solidarity across lines of geography and denomination while simultaneously seeking openings that might foster future interracial confraternity. |
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