Freemasons in the American Civil War

A Conspiracy of Preferential Treatment

Copyright©2024 by Independent History and Research • www.revisionisthistory.org

Today’s essay is one chapter in a new study to be published in Substack in installments, comprising “A History of American Resistance to Freemasonry and Secret Societies.”

Due to the demands of ongoing research, some chapters will not appear in chronological order. For example, today we begin in the mid-19th century.

Another chapter will focus on Mormonism and Masonry.

Some critics on the Right believe that early America was synonymous with Freemasonry. This is the tale told by the Freemasons themselves. In point of fact, no country, including Catholic nations, experienced an anti-masonic movement equal in militancy and scope to the one that developed in the United States.

Not all the chapters in this study will focus on the resistance itself. For example, today we are examining the masonic sphere of influence during the Civil War.

A future chapter will elucidate, “Mr. Lincoln’s Anti-Masonic Circle.”

There will be additional chapters studying the resistance, including during the lifetime of George Washington and in the early Republic, led by John Quincy Adams.

Were it not for the paid subscribers to this column—Michael Hoffman’s Revelation of the Method,—I would not have the means to undertake this work. Thank you.

The Better Angels of Our Nature by Michael A. Halleran. University of Alabama Press, 2010. Hardcover, 229 pages.

Reviewed by Michael Hoffman

Michael A. Halleran has furnished readers with the first book-length study of the role of Freemasons in the War Between the States that makes even an attempt at what would be called scholarship. Two earlier “histories” are actually only collections of hearsay and anecdotes. (Heroic Deeds of Noble Master Masons During the Civil War by Jacob Jewell [1916]; and House Undivided by Allen E. Roberts [1961)].

Mr. Halleran’s purview is narrow, the alleged humanitarian and philanthropic mission of Masonry, which crossed military lines and expressed its tender mercies for members of the Brotherhood, whether Union or Confederate.

In the course of endeavoring to make his case however, the author marshals a body of information which points in many directions, offering the reader numerous worthwhile research leads.

Mainstream historians have, since the 1860s, pretended that Freemasonry played no noteworthy role in the war. Masonic membership among the officer class on both sides was said not to have mattered and to have had little or no impact on the outcome of the war. Yet how are we to know for certain if we don’t investigate?

In truth, from the firing on Fort Sumter in April of 1861 to the final surrender of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia four years later, Freemasons played a pivotal role. When Confederate General Pierre G. T. Beauregard, a Freemason and Knight Templar, ordered the bombardment of Fort Sumter, it was under the command of Union Major Robert Anderson of New Jersey’s Mercer Lodge no. 50.

When Lee surrendered his army, the “last salute” was exchanged between Union General Joshua Chamberlain of United Lodge no. 8 in New Brunswick, Maine, and Confederate General John B. Gordon of Georgia’s Atlanta Lodge no. 59.