How Freemasonry Came to America

A companion to Episode 45 of The Mystic Tye, "The Genesis of American Freemasonry," with Dr. Ric Berman

Most American Masons know the outline. Washington was a Mason. So were Franklin, Revere, and a good number of the men who signed the Declaration. The lodge was there at the founding, and every Grand Lodge in the country will tell you so.

What almost nobody gets told is how the craft actually arrived. Who sent it. Who appointed whom, and why. How a fraternity chartered in a London tavern in 1717 ended up with a lodge in nearly every frontier settlement west of the Blue Ridge inside a century.

This is that story, and the short version is that it did not travel as an idea. It travelled as a network.

There was no England and no America

Start by throwing out the map in your head.

In the early eighteenth century there was no England on one side of the Atlantic and America on the other. There was a greater Britain, and it was run by a remarkably small number of people. A few thousand men in London held most of the levers. Colonial governors, colonial secretaries, receivers of quitrents, royal councillors approved by the Privy Council, all of them appointed from London, most of them known to each other, many of them meeting in the same handful of lodges and the same social circles.

Freemasonry moved through that world the way water moves downhill. It did not need to be exported. It was already inside the machinery of empire.

The first appointments

The formal story begins on the 5th of June 1730, when the Duke of Norfolk, Grand Master of the premier Grand Lodge of England, deputised Daniel Coxe as Provincial Grand Master of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.¹ Coxe was toasted in London the following January as Provincial Grand Master of North America.² It was the first official act of the London Grand Lodge concerning the colonies.

It was also, in practical terms, close to a dead letter. No authenticated record survives of Coxe organising a provincial grand lodge, warranting a lodge, or exercising his authority in any way before his death in 1739.³ When Benjamin Franklin reported that death in the Pennsylvania Gazette, he did not mention that Coxe was a Freemason at all, which suggests the Philadelphia brethren may not have known.⁴

The appointment that actually took hold came three years later. In April 1733 the Grand Master of England, Viscount Montague, named Henry Price, a Boston tailor, Provincial Grand Master of New England.⁵ On the 30th of July that year, at the Bunch of Grapes tavern on King Street, Price read his deputation, organised his grand lodge, and granted a charter to eighteen brethren.⁶ That body still meets as St. John's Lodge, and it is generally recognised as the oldest duly constituted lodge in the Americas.⁷ Price's authority was extended to all of North America the following year.⁸

Pennsylvania and Massachusetts have been arguing about which of them came first for the better part of two centuries, and the argument turns on precisely this distinction between an appointment on paper and a lodge actually constituted.⁹ It is a good argument. It has not been settled.

The men behind the appointments

Here is where Ric Berman's research does something the standard accounts do not. It asks who was making these appointments, and what else those men were doing.

The answer keeps leading back to a Huguenot refugee named Charles Delafaye. Born in Paris in 1677 to a father who had abjured Catholicism and fled to England, Delafaye took his degree at All Souls, Oxford, entered the Secretary of State's office as a clerk in 1699, and rose over forty years to become Under Secretary at both the Northern and Southern Departments, serving four Secretaries of State across changing administrations.¹⁰ He was also an examining magistrate and the government's spymaster, sitting at the centre of Britain's intelligence network for close to three decades, with the Secret Department of the Post Office and its deciphering branch feeding him information on allies and enemies alike.¹¹

He was also a Freemason, and not a peripheral one. Delafaye belonged to the Horn Lodge at Westminster, the lodge of the Duke of Richmond, in the circle around Desaguliers that effectively remade English Freemasonry in the 1720s.¹²

A man like that does not merely hold opinions about colonial appointments. He makes them. Berman's account traces provincial grand masterships flowing outward along lines of family and lodge membership, with Delafaye's own relatives and lodge brothers turning up at the far end of the appointment.¹³ Whether every link in that chain survives scrutiny is exactly the sort of thing a research lodge exists to test, and the conventional record of the New York succession runs through Coxe and then Francis Goelet without comment on kinship.¹⁴ But the shape of the thing is not really in doubt. These were appointments made by people who knew each other, in a world small enough that knowing each other was the whole mechanism.

The schism that made American Masonry

The second thing that crossed the Atlantic was a quarrel.

On the 17th of July 1751, six Irish lodges meeting in London formed a rival grand lodge at the Turk's Head tavern in Soho.¹⁵ They called themselves the Antients, and they called the older 1717 body the Moderns, which was an insult and was meant as one. Laurence Dermott, an Irish painter who had been initiated in Dublin, became their grand secretary in February 1752 and spent the next four decades making the rivalry a genuine contest.¹⁶

It is tempting to read this as a dispute about ritual, and there were real ritual differences. But the engine underneath it was social. The gentrified London lodges had little interest in admitting working and middling men, so those men built their own institution, and its growth was driven by the Irish diaspora, by English condescension toward that diaspora, and above all by the Antients' commitment to social inclusivity and mutual support.¹⁷ The craft became something a broad cross section of male society could join and draw real support from.

Transplant that to a colony and you can see immediately why it mattered. The Antient current came into America through Pennsylvania, with Philadelphia as its hub, and it travelled down the great wagon trails, and when the Piedmont filled up it went over the Blue Ridge into Tennessee and Kentucky. Freemasonry on the frontier was a fundamentally different animal from Freemasonry among the London elite. It was mutual aid. It was the thing that made a settlement survivable.

Burial grounds and grand lodges

Two details make the frontier story concrete, and both come from Berman's research.

The first is Lexington, Kentucky. Go through the membership roll of Lodge Number One and you find that forty percent or more of the male population belonged. These were not established towns with settled families. They were frontier settlements, and in them the lodge was not a club. It was infrastructure.

The second is quieter and, once you have heard it, hard to forget. Often the first thing a new lodge did was establish a burial ground. Berman credits the observation to Daniel Gardner, Grand Secretary of the Grand Lodge of Montana, and notes that once you learn to recognise one, you start finding them in settlement after settlement, dozens of them. The reason is not complicated. Nobody wants to die unremembered thousands of miles from home.

And then the structural fact that ought to be better known than it is: with the obvious exception of the original thirteen, every state in the union founded a Grand Lodge before it achieved statehood. Arizona's Grand Lodge predates Arizona. The lodge got there first, and it brought with it a working system of governance, elections, offices, minutes, appeals, and dues, in places that had no other. People learned how to run a civil society by running a lodge.

The Enlightenment machinery

None of this explains why the fraternity carried the ideas it did, and that question runs back to Europe.

The 1723 Constitutions, produced under Desaguliers and George Payne, committed the craft to two propositions that were genuinely radical in their moment. The first was religious tolerance, at a time when Catholics and Protestants had been killing one another across Europe in numbers that are difficult to comprehend. The second was meritocracy, in a society where birth and wealth determined a man's position almost absolutely.

That first proposition is what got the fraternity condemned. The 1738 papal bull In Eminenti placed Freemasonry under prohibition, and while the reasoning was not spelled out in full, the offence is not hard to identify.¹⁸ Masonry treated religions as being on a par. It held that there is a God and that the route to God is the individual's own affair, whether he is a Protestant, a dissenter, a Catholic, or a Jew. To an established church entangled with an established crown, that is not a mild proposition. It is a direct challenge.

The intellectual current feeding into this is familiar once it is laid out. The persecution of the Huguenots and their flight into England, which brought Desaguliers himself over as a child. The rational observation of Newton. The political philosophy of Locke. The removal of James II in 1688 and the constitutional monarchy that followed. And Montesquieu, who developed his political theory in the 1720s and was initiated into a lodge in London.

Read the Declaration of Independence and the state constitutions with the 1723 Constitutions open beside them and the resemblance is not subtle. This is not a claim that Freemasonry caused the American founding. Most men joined lodges for fellowship, then as now. But there was a current running underneath, and it had somewhere to go.

The part that is harder to celebrate

An honest history does not stop there.

Virtually every provincial grand master in the southern colonies was a slave owner, as were many of the founders. Southern Freemasonry was built on the wealth of a slave economy, and the clearest demonstration is Georgia. The Savannah lodge nearly disappeared because Georgia's economy could not compete with South Carolina's. South Carolina permitted slavery. Georgia prohibited it. Only when the prohibition was lifted in the 1740s and early 1750s did the economy recover, and Freemasonry in Georgia flowered on the strength of it.

The same fracture runs through American society straight to the Civil War and past it. Albert Pike defended slavery before changing his position, and he was not alone in either the defending or the changing.

Elsewhere the record is genuinely mixed rather than simply bad. In imperial India the lodge functioned as an instrument of empire and also as one of the only places where Indian nationals and British administrators met as equals, with mixed lodges by the end of the nineteenth century. In Ireland it was, for a long stretch, the only institution that would seat Protestants and Catholics at the same table.

Masonry did a great deal of good. It could have done more. Both statements are true and neither cancels the other.

What it means for the craft now

Berman gets asked constantly about the future of the fraternity, and he answers as a historian, which is to say by pointing at the pattern.

Freemasonry was wildly aspirational in the 1720s and 1730s, and then in the 1740s it collapsed. It recovered. It boomed again. By the 1920s and 1930s a third of American adults belonged to some fraternal organisation, and most belonged to several. Then that world quietly came apart, and we are living in the aftermath.

His diagnosis comes down to three things. Relevance, meaning the organisation has to matter to the men in it. Leadership, meaning leaders willing to stand on the front foot rather than manage decline. And aspiration, meaning it has to be something people actively want to join.

Look at the periods when the craft flourished and those three are present every time. Look at the periods when it collapsed and at least one is missing.

Which brings the story back around. The men who carried Freemasonry across the Atlantic and over the mountains were not preserving an institution. They were using one, for mutual aid, for governance, for burial, for company, for the practical business of building a society where none existed. The craft was relevant because it was doing something.

That is the whole history in a sentence, and it is also the whole prescription.

Notes and Sources

1. "Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania," Wikipedia (deputation issued 5 June 1730 by the Duke of Norfolk naming Daniel Coxe Provincial Grand Master of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania). Link

2. Ibid. (Coxe attended Grand Lodge in London on 29 January 1731 and was toasted as Provincial Grand Master of North America).

3. "Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania," The Masonic Wiki (no explicit records that Coxe organised a provincial grand lodge or erected lodges before his death on 25 April 1739). Link

4. Ibid. (Franklin's notice of Coxe's death in the Pennsylvania Gazette makes no mention of his Masonic membership).

5. "Our History," St. John's Lodge, Boston (Price appointed Provincial Grand Master of New England by Viscount Montague, deputation dated April 1733). Link

6. Ibid. (30 July 1733, Bunch of Grapes tavern, King Street; charter granted to eighteen brethren).

7. "Freemasonry: What was the first lodge in the United States?", Eighth Masonic District of Pennsylvania (St. John's Lodge as the first duly constituted and chartered American lodge, known as First Lodge until 1783). Link

8. "Henry Price," MasonicGenealogy (Price's commission extended from New England to all North America in 1734 by the Earl of Crawford). Link

9. "Grand Lodge of PA," University Lodge No. 51 (summary of the Pennsylvania and Massachusetts priority dispute, turning on whether Coxe ever acted under his deputation). Link

10. "Charles Delafaye," academia.edu abstract (born Paris 1677, All Souls Oxford, clerk in the Secretary of State's office from 1699, Under Secretary at the Northern then Southern Departments across four Secretaries of State). Link

11. Ibid., and "Espionage, Diplomacy and the Lodge," Masonic Temple Library and Museum review (examining magistrate and spymaster; the Secret Department of the Post Office and its deciphering branch). Link

12. "Huguenots and Early Modern Freemasonry," The Square Magazine (Delafaye a member of the Duke of Richmond's Horn Lodge at Westminster, in the circle around Desaguliers). Link

13. Dr. Ric Berman, in conversation on The Mystic Tye, Episode 45, and in The Genesis of American Freemasonry (2026). The tracing of colonial appointments through Delafaye's family and lodge connections is Berman's own archival argument and should be read in his book rather than summarised here.

14. "Grand Lodge of New York," Wikipedia (the documented succession of Moderns provincial grand masters for New York runs Coxe, then Francis Goelet from 1738, then George Harrison and Sir John Johnson). Link

15. "Some Ancient Scots-Irish-Swedish Sources for Antient Freemasonry," Skirret (17 July 1751, six Irish lodges in London form the Antients Grand Lodge), and "A Brief History of Atholl," antients.org (the Turk's Head tavern in Soho). Link 1 / Link 2

16. "Laurence Dermott," Wikipedia (initiated in Dublin, elected Grand Secretary of the Antients on 5 February 1752 at the Griffin in Holborn). Link

17. Ric Berman, "The London Irish and the Antients Grand Lodge," Eighteenth-Century Life 39:1 (2015), abstract (the Antients shaped by the Irish diaspora, growth driven by social inclusivity and mutual support rather than ritual alone). Link

18. In Eminenti Apostolatus, papal bull of Clement XII, 1738, the first papal condemnation of Freemasonry. Discussed by Berman in Episode 45.

Frontier detail in this article, including the Lexington membership proportion, the practice of establishing burial grounds, the observation credited to Daniel Gardner of the Grand Lodge of Montana, and the point that every state outside the original thirteen founded a Grand Lodge before statehood, is drawn from Dr. Berman's account in Episode 45 and his book The Genesis of American Freemasonry.

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