The Anti-Masons: Abraham Lincoln's Power Brokers

William Seward, Thurlow Weed and Thaddeus Stevens led the Fight Against the Masonic Cryptocracy and Proved Indispensable to Lincoln

Copyright©2025 by Independent History and Research • Revisionist History® Website

Author’s Note: “The Anti-Masons: Abraham Lincoln's Power Brokers,” is the penultimate installment of this writer’s four-part study of the history of resistance to Freemasonry in the early Republic. The intended first chapter, on resistance in colonial and revolutionary America, will appear last, due to the late arrival of primary research materials.

This work was made possible by the paid subscriptions of Substack subscribers to Michael Hoffman’s Revelation of the Method, and by donations from truth seekers. I could not bring this writing to fruition without their generous assistance, for which I am most grateful.

THE MURDER OF AN AUTHOR OVER A BOOK HE HAS WRITTEN IMBUES HIS DEATH WITH AN AWFUL PATHOS

Among the fathomless acts of perfidy which the masonic order has perpetrated in the United States, the assassination of William Morgan, the arson of his publisher’s printing office and the judicial coverup that ensued, has forever put paid to the grotesque fiction that Freemasonry is emblematic of brotherhood, tolerance and liberty.

Its Luciferian illumination is and always was the optical illusion of a counter-church, what Milton termed “a great furnace flamed; yet from those flames, no light; but rather darkness visible.”

It has been the vocational aspiration of the “historians” whose books are showcased at Barnes and Noble and in the pages of America’s “newspapers of record,” to bury and erase the witness which giants of American history have borne against this horrid crew.

“…over-zealous members of the Masonic order, in their solicitude to prevent the publication of a book had, under various pretexts and by perversions of legal authority, spirited away author William Morgan, first from Batavia to Canandaigua and from Canandaigua to Fort Niagara where, after a confinement of several days he was put to death…” —Harriet Weed (ed.), Life of Thurlow Weed Including His Autobiography, Volume I (1884), p. 351.

Publisher David Miller’s office in Batavia, New York where Morgan’s book had been typeset and printed, was set afire by Freemasons on Saturday, September 10, 1826 (Weed, ibid., p. 218). Morgan was abducted the following day in Canandiagua, 53 miles east.

Title page of the first edition of William Morgan’s Illustrations of Freemasonry published Aug. 14, 1826, less than a month prior to his assassination

The zeal of Thaddeus Stevens to defend the republic from Masonry’s dual jurisdiction over the police and courts has been lost in the cloud of controversy which his detestation of unreconstructed Southern whites generated.

Anti-Mason William Seward’s achievements are often over-shadowed by the man who would be his boss from 1861 onward, a fellow by the name of Abe Lincoln.

Thurlow Weed meanwhile, a founder of the anti-Masonic movement which arose after the events of 1826, and who happened to be Seward’s close friend, sponsor and counselor, would become Lincoln’s Elon Musk. A political king-maker in the antebellum era, Weed’s mandate from the president was foreign diplomacy rather than budget reductions.

Weed would be nearly forgotten were not for the revival of his memory by Edward Achorn in his detailed account of Weed’s political acumen and generosity of spirit in The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention that Changed History (2023), a political battle that Seward, the favorite for the party’s presidential nomination, lost to the prairie lawyer from Illinois. Seward’s magnanimity shone forth when he ungrudgingly went directly to work helping to elect his rival, and became a man it could be said without blushing that Lincoln came to love.

William Seward is remembered almost exclusively as Secretary of State during the Civil War and for purchasing Alaska. Stevens, though memorialized by the Civil Rights movement, is much reviled on the Right, a bullseye on the target of states’ rights libertarians.

The Seward, Weed and Stevens triumvirate was defined by their work for an America free of secret society influence and the leg up those societies gave to their members, though the irascible Stevens, despite the cause he shared with Seward, was on more than one occasion his detractor.

Weed was a born organizer. In 1827 he co-founded with Solomon Southwick the national Anti-Mason Party. Seward, Weed and Stevens, together with Southwick, Attorney General William Wirt, former President John Quincy Adams and many other Americans infuriated by masonic crimes, were nineteenth century proponents of a meritocracy free of interference from a fraternity seeking to impose their princelings on government, the military and the business world, while non-masons of greater talent and dedication were shoved aside.

Though less than it once was in its near century of dominion (1880-1970), the influence of the masonic lodge, as well as other secret societies in the U.S. and Britain (where Freemasonry is virtually synonymous with the “Oxbridge old boys’ network”), is ongoing. (Predicated on the maintenance of omertà [“silence”], Italy also continues to be riddled with stealth organizations whose influence extends into the Vatican, and from there throughout the world).

Skull and Bones Boasberg

In addition to the Masons, America at the executive level is plagued by alumni of the Skull and Bones society of Yale University. The controversy over Federal District Judge James “Jeb” Boasberg, who has sought to nullify Donald Trump’s immigrant deportation orders beginning March 15 (the “Ides of March,” cf. the soothsayer’s premonition in Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene II), has led to the revelation that Boasberg has been a member of Skull and Bones since the autumn of 1984, at the start of his senior year at Yale.

This cabal is one of the most successful at keeping its arcana inviolate. Since its founding in 1832, no member has been known to have disclosed the secrets of its initiation process, the meaning of its name or the number associated with it (322). There has been hearsay about an initiation ceremony which entails the recruit being placed in a coffin and made to confess embarrassing details of scandals and sins in his past.

In 2002 Boasberg was languishing as a lowly homicide prosecutor in the District of Columbia when his judicial career was launched by his brother “Bonesman,” President George W. Bush, who appointed him Associate Justice of the D.C. Court. Going forward nine years, Boasberg was catapulted to the federal bench, and then to a rotating position as chief justice of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The influence of secret societies over the government and courts in the US, Canada and Britain has yet to be recounted by any comprehensive historical work. Establishment historians are typically either not interested or actively involved in extending Columbia University Prof. Richard Hofstadter’s set-in-concrete decree to academia, that the subject is strictly off-limits to “reputable” scholars, a reflection of “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” consisting of “conspiratorial fantasy.” Hofstadter’s marching orders to the professorocracy were disseminated in the November, 1964 issue of Harper’s Magazine, a periodical popular at that time among the intelligentsia.

The essay was derived from a speech he gave at Oxford University the year before, synchronistically several hours before President Kennedy was assassinated by a conspiracy orchestrated by the CIA. In Harper’s, the myopic Hofstadter surveyed the history of crusades against Freemasonry while omitting the movement’s major catalyst, the abduction and murder of Morgan.

In 1965 Hofstadter’s hypothesis became an eponymous book—a gospel actually—for journalists and professors keen on advancing their careers by remaining in the good graces of the gatekeepers.

In our era of the Revelation of the Method, Hofstadter’s “gate” has been enfeebled and some links are missing, though it is still the case that the only conspiracies permissible to be discussed extensively are largely confined to those in the Fascist, conservative Christian, “Arab terrorist” and “white supremacist” categories.

There are multiple losses to the cause of the advancement of knowledge engendered by the stigmatization of investigative digging into the chronicle of masonic and other secret societies in the United States. Perhaps the most manifest specimen of this loss is the failure to explore the force behind the Ku Klux Klan in the early twentieth century. The Klan billed its de facto jurisdiction over police and courts in the South as “the Invisible Empire,” which is a fitting description of American Freemasonry in general. The identity of the clandestine sponsors of the Klan, circa 1895-1950, remains a potato of the distinctly hot type.

Equality of opportunity founded on individual merit versus secret society entitlement

Let’s demystify this subject by debunking the notion that it is of interest for the most part to religious people perturbed by occult diabolism.

Secret societies subvert the virtues a republic is supposed to confer and guarantee. The phenomenon manifests whenever a private group or gang exerts control over society for the exclusive benefit of its own members or extended family. It is an appalling fact that in the majority of the nations of the world young people are seething with revolutionary fervor and rage owing to a state of affairs in which the best and brightest among them can’t land a job with a living wage, or advance in their careers when they do have employment.

This corrupt predicament is caused by preferment being reserved by those who have a “connection;” and “pull.” Positions and promotions are obtained largely on the basis of who you know, to whom you are related, or due to a quid pro quo for crimes committed. From Egypt to Venezuela, Pakistan to Paraguay, Nigeria to Nicaragua, that’s the way it is.

America became a beacon for people suffering in this way in part because ours was a republic which banned titles of nobility (cf. US Constitution, Article I, Section 9), and strived for equality before the law. America often failed to fulfill the republican virtues proclaimed, yet it was in the striving that enough of that virtue was retained to permit the waves of immigrants who entered from Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to have a markedly better chance of gaining a measure of the freedom and prosperity denied them in their homeland. This occurred however, while in many regions of the U.S. rights for black people whose ancestors had been in this country for 300 years, continued to be dishonorably restricted.

The struggle of common working people throughout the world is for equality of opportunity founded on individual merit. Therein lies the battle contra the secret society phenomenon. One need not be mystically-oriented to be engaged in it.

It is not “paranoid style” to observe that occult organizations in the United States such as Freemasonry and the Skull and Bones society give unfair advantage to their initiates, and attempt to create a clandestine dual jurisdiction over law enforcement and the judiciary.

Lincoln's Anti-Masonic Power Brokers: A Revisionist History