The Origins of Freemasonry. Margaret C. Jacob

Not the masonic ones. In large measure their publishers cast the contents of diaries aimed at the fraternity in decidedly secular terms. It seems reasonable to suggest that publishers probably knew their audiences.

      Before we dwell upon the striking differences between masonic almanacs and ones aimed at the general public, some similarities are worth noting. At first, masonic and other diaries were hardly pocket-size, but by mid-century they began to resemble what we routinely carry with us today. They were light-weight, small, and hence fragile. Generally, eighteenth-century owners put their names in a diary’s margin, just as they occasionally recorded in cramped spaces important birth and death dates. Sometimes a personal note slipped through. Take an American entry that vividly reminds us of a lost world. An almanac jotting in a margin from one month in 1729 tells us that “Black Nanny died the 20th day.”¹ But she is as unknowable as are most of the owners of pocket almanacs, masonic or non, slave-owning or not. In the paucity of available blank pages and in the absence of detailed jottings, eighteenth-century almanacs, generic or masonic, differ from our diaries, which first and foremost provide real space for a listing of our personal affairs. People in the eighteenth century must have kept such diurnal agendas in their heads, or put them in the traditional personal, sometimes confessional or spiritual diaries.² Those, however, generally recorded events after they happened.

      We have few such poignant entries in European almanacs, masonic or otherwise, as the one about the death of an American slave nanny. Samples from the print runs of these small, fragile books nonetheless survive—to be found in multiple editions—because so many businessmen and travelers needed them. They were deeply utilitarian in purpose, yet interspersed with a wide variety of thoughts, aphorisms and pieties. Thus both general and masonic diaries give us glimpses, however nearly opaque, into the daily thoughts available to their users. The almanacs provided information about everything from coach times to the meeting hours of local courts and, in the case of diaries made for freemasons, the location of lodges in multiple cities. Eighteenth-century almanacs, whether masonic or generic, were meant to be predictive and reliable guides to the world at a glance. As a genre the almanac stretched well back into the early seventeenth century, but it came into its own, and into a mass circulation, largely in the eighteenth.³

      We focus on the diaries bought by freemasons and published especially for their use. The diaries allow us to inch our way closer to the lives of their masonic users, without letting us assume that the buyer subscribed to all the sentiments found in a diary. Perhaps inevitably, by the 1730s enterprising publishers saw the masonic market for such diaries and began to produce them with a style and content that they thought would sell. The repetition of themes and ideas suggest that by the mid-eighteenth century masonic formulas had emerged that were commercially successful enough to warrant repetition. Indeed, aside from farmers, freemasons were among the few groups whom publishers sought specifically to woo, and decade by decade masonic almanacs—as far as we can tell from what survives in libraries—became more numerous. The genre began in 1735 when William Smith, a London publisher, produced the first masonic “pocket companion,” as he called it.⁴

      Alas, not as many masonic pocket companions from Britain and America have survived as we would like. The best examples of such almanacs come from the Dutch Republic: there are boxes of them housed with meticulous care at the Library of the Grand East in The Hague. They could be in Dutch or French, since the latter language was used by many in the republic. Also with a French text the publisher had a larger, international audience. We can imagine such a diary selling in Belgium, Switzerland, France, or even Germany where the educated often used French.

      Mostly the masonic diaries found today in The Hague will provide our examples, bearing in mind that the ones in Dutch, like their British counterparts, were aimed at a largely Protestant audience. We would expect Catholics to be more wrapped in the daily liturgy of the saints in part because Protestants had frowned upon their cults, relics, and statues. Predictably the French diaries offered a diurnal religiosity and gave every day its proper saint. Neither religion had the edge, however, when it came to piety or a sense of the afterlife, the religious time-out-of-mind that promised salvation and that was plainly visible in the almanacs aimed at the larger public.

      Being involved in this secular world, hence the need for such a practical diary, could be seen by both Catholics and Protestants as a distraction from Godliness. This fear of worldliness may account for the overall pious tone adopted by generic diary after diary. After a user managed to catch the coach listed in an almanac, the time could be passed by the reading of pious texts. Thus the appearance of secular themes, and the general absence of a specified religion in masonic diaries—as seen in every European language—becomes distinctive. Such worldliness strikes the historian as particularly interesting. So too in the masonic diaries a remarkable cosmopolitanism surfaces and complements their generally secular stance. Seldom did a masonic diary fail to mention the locations of lodges in other countries, or events of importance wherever freemasons had an interest. A German masonic diary sang the praises of the local rulers and the protection they gave the lodges. Nary a religious theme appears; only the unity of the freemasons mattered.⁵

      Most nonmasonic diaries never cast their geographical gaze so far and wide. Some generic American ones, even in the years of the French Revolution, made no reference to events in Europe.⁶ Others did at least give an estimate of the population of the various European countries.⁷ But the English language diaries from both Britain and the American colonies did lay emphasis upon the chronology of the monarchy and who sat on the British throne at the moment. Whether general or masonic, diaries inculcated the broad outlines of royal government and dynastic succession. They achieved a timelessness, or regularity, as sure as the phases of the moon or the setting of the winter sun.

      One of the earliest American masonic diaries appears aimed at both a generic and a masonic audience; perhaps we have in it evidence of a publisher who hedged his bets. This early American diary also possessed distinctively American qualities. In contrast to the European diaries for freemasons, the American one gave an eccentric history of the origins of the order, one that laid emphasis upon the working men in the earliest lodges. In English, French, and Dutch language diaries the story of the origins of the fraternity stuck pretty close to the account given in Anderson’s Constitutions of 1723. It laid emphasis upon royal patronage and architects as the key to masonic evolution. We know, however, from the work of Steven Bullock that in the American colonies by the 1760s the lodges had become “ancient” and had broken with the orthodoxy of the Grand Lodge and its official history. The early American diary of 1764 bowed briefly in the direct of royal patronage for the order. Then, with a feisty tone, it said that the stonemasons, patronized by Edward III, “agreed upon Tokens etc. to know one another by, and to assist one another against being impressed and not to work unless free, and on their own terms”; hence they were called freemasons. It even said that the fraternity in those olden days enjoyed equality with the royal Order of the Garter.⁸ It was artisans and not architects who inspired the American masonic imagination, both white and black.⁹

      All these sentiments suggest that by the 1760s in the colonies a high degree of independence from the imperial or royal narrative of freemasonry had come to prevail. As Steven Bullock shows, such independence of spirit had become symptomatic of a larger movement stirring among the general American population. The rest of this early American diary, aimed only in part at a masonic audience, is relatively unremarkable except, just as we shall see with its European counterparts that it gave an entirely secular chronology of important dates from Roman times onward. It also added some astrology, an essay on health by the famous English doctor George Cheyne, a list of all the English kings, and a curious essays on love and marriage, supposedly by the seventeenth-century English scientist Robert Boyle. In it we learn of his sentiment “I have seldom seen a happy marriage.” One might contemplate that grim thought while on a stage wagon, picked up conveniently because the times and prices were given in the diary.

      An American masonic diary from just into the new century, 1801, suggests that the secularism of the eighteenth century was distinctive to the colonial age that spawned Franklin and Jefferson. In the first year of the nineteenth century the pocket almanac gives saints’ days as well as all the secular dates, the Fourth of July for example, and provides an extensive list of lodges all over the