Got some referrals recently:
The Knights of the Golden Circle blog reproduced Lone Star Republics orignally here.
Big League Politics referred to Freemasonries: David Henry X°, Clandestinity and Recognition in What Was Kamala Harris Staffer And His Masonic Brothers Doing Behind The LAPD During Trayvon Riots? and Kamala Harris Aide, A Masonic ‘Grand High Priest’ And Phony Cop, Spoke On Her Behalf At Grandmaster Gathering. I don't endorse their site, it's just me being a completist....
That is all.
Showing posts with label Knights of the Golden Circle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Knights of the Golden Circle. Show all posts
Saturday, February 9, 2019
Friday, May 13, 2016
Ain't just whistlin' Dixie
One would think that Civil War reenactors would be limited to the American states where the war was actually fought. Then again there probably aren't too many members of the SCA from Westeros, and hell, even in my podunk French village there's a Western-style ranch where once or twice a summer they do a rodeo and men with beards show up in American pickups, flying American flags, duded up in shit-kickers and leather vests. So if the French can play cowboy, why can't the Brazilians play the Song of the South?
To be fair, they actually have a reason: they are descendants of American Southerners who'd been enticed by the Brazilian government to settle the country before the Civil War even began. Quite a few went, and today the cities of Americana and Santa Barbara d'Oeste are peopled with, um, people, bearing British surnames, including a name in my family tree: Carr (Amos Adkins married one Mary Carr ca. 1801).
I mentioned these Confederados in my post about the "Golden Circle" (Lone Star Republics, July 2013), a long-time dream of a group of slave-owners of creating a slave-holding empire centered on Havana, with a radius reaching up to the Mason-Dixon line and down to the northern tip of South America and everything in between.
After
the Civil War, many of the defeated Confederates moved and set up
operations in Cuba and Brazil, where slavery was still legal until the
1880's. In Brazil they and their descendants are known as Confederados. The dream of the Golden Circle didn't die with the Confederacy.
Brazil was perhaps not the ideal location, but it was sparsely populated, agricultural, and most of all, friendly to slavery. It was the last holdout in the Americas against abolition.
I have a French friend who's lived in Brazil some years now and we were discussing this yesterday before he pressed on with his European visit and then lo and behold, the New York Times wrote an article about annual celebrations by the descendants of the Confederados.
Critics see the outfits and the romanticism, the Stars and Bars Confederate battle flags being flown, and point out that the whole issue of slavery is being sidestepped. The celebrants counter that for them, the flag and celebration don't honor slavery or racism, it's all about heritage. A familiar argument. I'm sure this is often true. But I recently saw a segment of Amy Shumer's Chelsea Handler's show about reenactors in the US, and the discourse of the participants was flat-out racist, not in a "hateful" way, but the extremely patronizing and romanticized version of history was pretty jaw-dropping. Slaves were happy and well-cared for, certainly not ill-treated....why would you treat your property poorly? etc. Well, even if this is a selective presentation of the participants' attitudes, it was authentic, and something tells me their attitude is less exception than rule.
I don't want to say that anyone proud of their heritage is a racist, but man, I'm from the South, and people who fly the Confederate flag are a dime a dozen and most of them would probably not be among those pushing for say, the recognition of MLK Day. Knowhutimean, Vern? A lot of people who fly the Confederate flag tend to casually refer to blacks with epithets. I'm from Florida and there you hear it often enough that you can draw some conclusions.
The process of "de-Confederatization" was hammered out militarily and politically during Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Era, but the cultural legacy is today's news nearly daily. It began with getting the Stars and Bars so-called Confederate flag off of state flags, but is now being fought out over the names of schools or buildings, and monuments to specific Confederate Generals. I wrote about this earlier in the year (The Politics of Removal; Pulling an Oneida). Whatever misgivings you may have about the destruction of the past in this form, you have to understand at least to some degree why a black guy walking down the street isn't going to feel so good about seeing a monument to Jefferson Davis. States' Rights, heritage, whatever you want to call it, the Confederacy and the Civil War boil down to slavery. The flag commonly referred to as the "Confederate flag" was never even the national flag of the CSA at all, and it was never a part of any state's flag until the 50's and 60's, added there in order to defy the Federal gub'ment as a symbol of white supremacy and in defiance of integration.
Interestingly, the coat of arms of Americana includes a shield with the
Notice also the center is adorned with a beehive, a symbol used by Freemasons and Mormons to symbolize hard work, industry, and a harmonious social order where everyone knows their place and does their job. I don't know if the beehive is a Masonic reference, nor if the obelisk in the town cemetery was erected by Masons. The obelisk has become the focal point, however, for Confederado celebrations, bearing an engraved Stars and Bars Confederate battle flag on the socle. I only muse about the possible Masonic connection because the Golden Circle scheme appears to have been the long-standing dream of a group of Freemasons in New Orleans who were involved in the establishment of the short-lived Republic of West Florida, the Republic of Texas, several failed invasions of Cuba, and other filibustering expeditions south of the border. I know this sounds a little wing-nutty, but I think if you read my Lone Star Republics post and look at the references, you'll find that although it's not a well-known history and corresponds too neatly with the wildest of conspiracy theories, the fact remains that a shadowy group of Freemasons in New Orleans were using the cover of the Lodge to plot the overthrow of the Catholic Spaniards throughout the Americas using rhetoric pulled straight from the degrees of the Scottish Rite.
The descendants are organized into the Fraternidade Descendência Americana and their symbol doesn't do much to disprove the possibility of a Masonic connection. Triangle logo? Check. Masonic symbol of Fraternity? Check.
Of course, it begins to look as though these things are Masonic in origin after all, when you see that in the cemetery where these present-day Confederados gather every three months there is a monument to pioneering Confederate settler Col. William H. Norris, honored with a triangle/pyramid monument with unmistakable Masonic symbolism:
 |
| http://cronicas-cronicas.blogspot.fr/2012/08/razao-no-4-cemiterio-do-campo-ou.html |
Norris was a veteran of the Mexican-American War, an Alabama state senator, and the leader of a group of 30 Confederate families who set off for Brazil after the end of the Civil War. In 1861 he had been elected Grand Master of the Alabama Masonic Lodge.
Norris helped establish the Confederate presence in Americana and Santa Bárbara d'Oeste and began planting cotton. He served as a Congressman for the State
of São Paulo and was commissioned as a Colonel in the National Guard. It is said that he purchased his land with a cache of gold buried on his farm that his wife had saved from being taken by Union soldiers after flashing some sort of Masonic hailing sign at their commanding officer.
Full disclosure: I am descended from one Culvin F. Sanders, a lawyer who served in the Army of Tennessee as a cavalry Captain in the Buckner Guards under General P. R. Cleburne. He participated in all the battles of the Army of Tennessee. He was also a Freemason, as all his descendants have been. I loathe what he fought for, and feel no real family fealty, yet I admit, perhaps to my discredit, some ambivalence about that heritage. As I've said in other posts about Confederate monuments, I would not seek to honor it, but recognize it, and perhaps somehow understand what responsibilities I have regarding my past, and what I can do to ameliorate its legacy.
Info for the following part of this post comes from an article that can be read here.
Now, you might think I'm making too much of this Masonic connection, but dig this, one entrance to Americana is marked by a large Square and Compasses because it was "founded in 1865
by Confederate emigrants, most of them
Freemasons...."
At least 154 families began the migration in 1865 and maybe as many as 4000 more joined them in the next ten years (although half eventually headed back).
Why Brazil? Well, as I discussed in my post on the Golden Circle, Texas, Central America and South America, along with the Caribbean, had long been eyed as having the potential for a Southern slave-holding confederation much like Confederate States of America. As we saw in that post, many of these efforts were led by Masons.
As it turns out, the Confederados' emigration was facilitated by prominent Freemasons in Brazil and even the Emperor Dom Pedro I was a Mason.
The Masons founded George Washington Lodge in the village before it had even been named Americana. They'd been encouraged by Freemason Charles Nathan, a member of a Brazilian immigration society that helped arrange passage to Brazil via New Orleans. More encouragement came from Freemason Taveres Bastos, founder of the immigration society and friend of the Emperor, who as previously mentioned, was himself a Freemason, like his father before him.
As it turns out, the Confederados' emigration was facilitated by prominent Freemasons in Brazil and even the Emperor Dom Pedro I was a Mason.
The Masons founded George Washington Lodge in the village before it had even been named Americana. They'd been encouraged by Freemason Charles Nathan, a member of a Brazilian immigration society that helped arrange passage to Brazil via New Orleans. More encouragement came from Freemason Taveres Bastos, founder of the immigration society and friend of the Emperor, who as previously mentioned, was himself a Freemason, like his father before him.
Another Freemason and friend of Bastos was Joachim Maria Saldaña Mariño, co-editor of a liberal newspaper in Rio de Janeiro and Grand Master of the Grande Oriente do Brasil ao Vale
dos Beneditinos, the Emperor’s branch of Freemasonry. He was also
President of São Paulo, the province where Americana was founded. Mariño was particularly active in the
mid-1860s in the cause of separation of church and state. Mariño signed one Alabama migrant's Masonic papers, a fellow named Dr. Russell McCord. These documents not only testify to the Brazilian-Confederate amity; a second signer was José Maria
da Silva Paraños, the Visconde do Rio Branco. He was
also Grand Master of the Grande Oriente do Brasil, and he was the author of
the first emancipation legislation that led to the abolition
of slavery in Brazil. Ironic, no?
As previously stated, half of the Confederates didn't stick it out, but those that stayed are the ancestors of a small but proud minority in Americana. In the small museum that celebrates the Confederados, Masonry is not given short-shrift, and they hold their quarterly festivals in the cemetery of their ancestors, amid plenty of Confederate flags and people in historical dress, and headstones emblazoned with the Square and Compasses....
Erratum: In this post I originally referred to the "Confederate battle flag" as the "Stars and Bars." I was mistaken, as Mr. Dawson points out in a comment below. The "Stars and Bars" was nickname of the first national flag of the CSA and doesn't resemble the more familiar battle flag with the 13 stars arranged in a saltire cross. This flag in a square form was used as The Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia and in rectangular form as The Second Confederate Navy Jack. It appears in the canton of the 2nd and 3rd national flags and also in The Second Confederate Navy Ensign. It also appears in the canton of other battle flags and there are some variations. It is now certainly more well-known than the Stars and Bars and is used widely as a symbol of the South and the CSA. It is also widely known as the "Confederate Flag", though strictly speaking, this is inaccurate. I refer to it as the "Confederate flag" or the "Confederate battle flag" in place of "Stars and Bars"; this is indicated by a strikethrough in the text. In any event, it is the flag chosen by the Confederados and seems ubiquitous in photos of their celebrations, whereas the national flags aren't pictured at all. Thanks to Mr. Dawson to pointing out my error. My apologies.
I also came across these articles looking to see what nomenclature other writers used in connection with Americana.
Vice weighs in with a piece on the Confederados' view of their heritage and writes a parallel narrative about modern slavery in Brazil: The Brazilian Town Where the American Confederacy Lives On
The Fog of Policy refers to the Vice and NYT articles in The Confederacy Still Lives in the Deep Deep South
Wikipedia: Flags of the Confederate States of America
****
I also came across these articles looking to see what nomenclature other writers used in connection with Americana.
Vice weighs in with a piece on the Confederados' view of their heritage and writes a parallel narrative about modern slavery in Brazil: The Brazilian Town Where the American Confederacy Lives On
The Fog of Policy refers to the Vice and NYT articles in The Confederacy Still Lives in the Deep Deep South
Wikipedia: Flags of the Confederate States of America
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
“Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
 |
| From WikiBear |
A couple of users over at Treasure Net have linked to our Lone Star Republics post and have generated both some visits and some positive responses on their forums. So, here's a brief shout-out to Treasure Net. Although the context is treasure hunting, and thus the fabled hidden "Confederate Gold", you'll find some stuff about the Knights of the Golden Circle if you search their forums (indeed, the very real Saddle Ridge Hoard may have been cached by the KGC).
So, one good deed deserves another. Check out their forums. Some innarestin' stuff over there.
Update 04/26. Looks like that post is kind of popular...it's been re-printed here: http://knights-of-the-golden-circle.blogspot.fr/2016/04/lone-star-republics.html
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Lone Star: Back to Africa
Preface
I originally intended this post to be a quick blurb about Liberia, but I kept running across information which seemed relevant to my initial subject; before I knew it I was heading off into numerous fascinating directions, and, as is so often the case, what I found could easily be transformed into a book if only the situation were a bit different: firstly that I were a smarter fellow and secondly if I had access to a world-class library.
Fortunately the Internet is getting better and better and there is no lack of original documents available online. My work here wouldn't hold much water in a peer-reviewed journal, but I do think it's a credible survey of some valuable secondary sources. I've also got some academic background in the subject. In 1991-1992 I wrote my senior thesis for my B.A. in history on black nationalism and the Back to Africa movement. My emphasis was on the spiritual dimensions of these movements and traced their evolution from advocating a literal, physical repatriation to Africa into a spiritual re-orientation and cultural return, a voluntary separation of the races within the United States and the re-definition of what it meant to be Black, Negro, Asiatic, Muslim, what have you. What surprises me in retrospect is that in my original paper, 60+ pages long, I never once touched upon the topic of Freemasonry, whereas now I believe it was an important, if not the principal catalyst to the development of some of the more radical spiritual/political movements in 19th-century African-American life.
The Gid, my LoS partner, actually accompanied me on a trip in late 1991 to South Carolina to visit a separatist group there living according to the customs and religious practices of the Nigerian Yoruba, something I only recalled towards the end of writing this. (See Oyotunji, they didn't have a website back then!)
This is a limited and often surface treatment of several related topics and I ask you to recall that this post is not the fruit of years of research and reflection, but a public expression of my learning process; it is thus prone to errors of interpretation. It is also, in a sense, a prose poem in disguise.
The Lone Star in Africa
In Lone Star Republics (July, 2013) I used the title to identify several mostly short-lived republics created by different revolutionaries, impresarios, adventurers and filibusterers intent on setting up new republics around the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, largely corresponding to the area (the Golden Circle) envisioned by the Knights of the Golden Circle as the natural location for their slave-holding commercial empire, an extension of the South. These various filibuster schemes may or may not have been directly linked to the larger schemes of the Knights and/or the Confederate States of America. What the Lone Star Republics did have in common were two things: Masonic leadership and the unabashed reference to Freemasonry on flags which prominently featured a solitary star, either on a solid field of blue or red or in a canton of that color against a field of horizontal bars. Various configurations of this heraldry exist and in some cases, such as in Chile and Texas, the flag is referred to as a "Lone Star Flag".
Musing on this, my mind wandered to the flag of Liberia. I didn't expect to find a relevant connection, to be honest, mainly because in the Golden Circle, the Lone Star Republics were established in part to extend or preserve the institution of slavery. Liberia, on the other hand, was created in order to repatriate freed slaves in Africa. So slavery was certainly part of the equation, but was Freemasonry? The answer is yes.
In my initial musings, Morocco and Liberia were the only African flags that came to mind featuring solitary stars, but I soon stumbled across the flag of Ghana. Looking first at Morocco, I soon rejected any notion of Masonic influence, but I was surprised to see that the flag, which features a green five-pointed star on a red field, once featured a six-pointed star, or "Star of David." While it may be surprising to see a symbol so closely associated with Judaism on a Muslim country's flag, it's actually used quite a bit in Muslim heraldry and is known by Muslims as the "Seal of Solomon" in addition to the "Star of David." Its widespread use in hermetic and alchemical texts may well explain how the star came to be used in Freemasonry, but in this it is only tangentially related to the topic at hand.
If we exclude the flags which feature a Muslim crescent and star or a Communist star and sickle, we also have to extend the list of star-bearing flags to include: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bassau, Senegal, Togo and Zimbabwe.
The stars in these flags are said to represent Islam, Marxism or the light of revolution; sometimes a star is a star is a star, it has many associations and doesn't necessarily refer to Freemasonry. I think, however, that like the Lone Star Republics in the Americas, the star on the Liberian flag represents Freemasonry and its Five Points of Fellowship. As for the other flags, unless you think Islam and international Communism are parts of a conspiracy which includes Freemasonry, and there are clearly people who do, I don't think there's a Masonic connection, although Togo's flag is said to be inspired by that of Liberia.
(A useful overview of Freemasonry in Africa can be found here).
Liberia
A quick look at Liberia's history is enough to demonstrate why I feel that the lone star in Liberia's flag represents Freemasonry.
Wikipedia gives a succinct summary:
In 1820, the American Colonization Society (ACS) began sending black volunteers to the Pepper Coast to establish a colony for freed American blacks. These free African Americans came to identify themselves as Americo-Liberian, developing a cultural tradition infused with American notions of racial supremacy, and political republicanism. The ACS, a private organization supported by prominent American politicians such as Abraham Lincoln, Henry Clay, and James Monroe, believed repatriation was preferable to emancipation of slaves. Similar organizations established colonies in Mississippi-in-Africa and the Republic of Maryland, which were later annexed by Liberia. On July 26, 1847, the settlers issued a Declaration of Independence and promulgated a constitution, which, based on the political principles denoted in the United States Constitution, created the independent Republic of Liberia.
I haven't been able to find any indication that the ACS was Masonic, per se, but many early supporters and members were Freemasons. Attendees at its inaugural meeting in 1816 included Freemasons such as James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Francis Scott Key; Henry Clay presided. On the other hand, another attendee was Daniel Webster, who ran for Vice-President in 1838 as a candidate for the Anti-Masonic Party. Of the three man considered to be the ACS' co-founders, Henry Clay, John Randolph and Richard Bland Lee, only Clay was a Freemason. (As far as I can tell).
In addition to Freemasons, Monroe, Jackson, Key and Henry Clay were also slaveholders. The ACS was a mix of slaveholders and abolitionists, many of them Quakers, whose motivations were to mitigate the dangers of a slave-holding society, such as slave rebellions, and to expunge freed blacks from American society. Most of them didn't support mixing with the blacks they repatriated; repatriation was really a drastic kind of segregation. Wikipedia states that:
Critics have said the ACS was a racist society, while others point to its benevolent origins and later takeover by men with visions of an American empire in Africa.
This is an interesting point to consider, as it resolves the apparent conflict between the aims of the KCG and Lone Star adventurers and those of the ACS, which at first appear more benevolent. That said, the rhetoric of the ACS was deemed racist even by standards of the time and some contemporary abolitionists expressed the belief that the "ACS' works [were] palliative propaganda to soften the continuation of slavery in the United States." This belief characterized the historiography of the society during the 1980's and 90's, but more recently this has shifted back to the view that the group was genuinely anti-slavery.
The other colonies mentioned by Wikipedia do not appear to have had an especially strong Masonic presence. Only one leader of the Maryland colony (the Republic of Maryland from 1854 to 1857) before it became part of Liberia appears to have been a Mason; John Brown Russwurm, a Prince Hall Mason, was the longest-serving Governor of Maryland in Africa (1836-1851), the precursor to the Republic. Mississippi-in-Africa was a short-lived colony with only one Governor before becoming part of Liberia.
From what I gather (some sources differ), the first repatriated ex-slaves arrived in what was to become Liberia in 1822. In 1827 they adopted the following flag, modeled on the US flag of 13 stripes and blue canton.
The cross was sometimes represented with a longer bottom "arm", but after Liberia issued a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution, establishing the Republic of Liberia in 1847, the cross was replaced by a star.
According to the FOTW website:
....Liberia’s national flag is called “Lone Star”. The eleven horizontal stripes represent the eleven signers of the declaration of independence and the constitution of the Republic of Liberia; the blue field symbolizes the continent of Africa; the five pointed white star depicts Liberia as the first “independent republic” on the continent of Africa; the red color designates “valor”; the white, “purity”; and the blue, “fidelity”. Although these representations are uniquely Liberian, the flag itself is a replica of “Old Glory”, the national flag of the United States.
Other sources confirm the "Lone Star" appellation; it is also the nickname of the national football (soccer) team.
Although information on Masonry in Liberia prior to independence is scanty, after independence was quite a different story.
Author Chris Hodapp:
From the beginning, Liberian society quickly developed into three classes: settlers with European-African lineage, who came to be known as Americo-Liberians; freed slaves from slave ships and the West Indies; and indigenous native people from the existing tribes already living in the territory. Liberia was dominated by a single political party for over 130 years, the True Whig Party, based in large part on the American Whigs, the precursor to the Republican Party in the years after the American Revolution and before the Civil War. The Liberian Whigs were almost entirely Americo-Liberians, and top government officials were uniformly Freemasons. By the 1970s, there were seventeen lodges at work in the country under the auspices of the Grand Lodge of Ancient Free & Accepted Masons of the Republic of Liberia, with approximately 1,000 members, and the longstanding sentiment of the tribal population was that decisions about the nation were all made secretly behind Masonic closed doors.
This small clique of about a dozen families dominated the country's politics and excluded indigenous Africans and descendants of slaves from points other than the US. This hegemony and the exclusion of indigenous Africans from the Lodge meant that when a coup d'etat was staged by Samuel Doe in 1980, the Lodge was targeted alongside the existing political regime; the hand-in-glove relationship between Lodge and State is personified by William R. Tolbert, Jr. who was both President of Liberia and Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Liberia at the time of the coup. Naturally, the Lodge was outlawed by Doe in 1980.
During the turmoil and violence which has taken place since the coup in 1980, the Grand Lodge building was virtually destroyed and fell into ruin, eventually becoming the home of thousands of squatters. The squatters were evicted in 2005 and the Lodge is apparently currently rebuilding their Lodge building....and their influence.
Early African-American Proponents
Liberia and other colonies like it were only the beginning of a Back to Africa movement which envisioned a literal repatriation of freed slaves. As the only one of these colonies to survive, it would continue to play an inspiring role in the Back to Africa movement, even as the movement took on an increasingly Pan-African character. So far we've looked at predominantly white-led groups, so let's turn to some important African-Americans.
Paul Cuffee (1759-1817) was a man of mixed-race descent. His mother was a Native American and his father a freed slave from what is now Ghana. An enterprising self-made man, he made himself one of the day's richest African-Americans by his early fifties, learning as much as he could about shipping and commerce. After acquiring the necessary wealth and resources, he became interested in voyages that mixed personal enrichment with African repatriation. In 1815, at great personal cost, he led 38 colonists to Sierra Leone, where they successfully established themselves. Cuffee would later envision mass repatriation to Sierra Leone but eventually favored Haiti. His involvement with the ACS was brief; he was too repulsed by their open racism, but the ACS derived great inspiration from his successes; Liberia after all is a neighbor to Sierra Leone. Like many in the ACS, Cuffee was a Quaker.
Prince Hall (1735-1807) was an abolitionist, educator, philanthropist and what would be today called a civil rights leader. He was also a proponent of the Back to Africa movement and founder of what is known as Prince Hall Freemasonry. Prince Hall and 15 other black men were initiated into a Lodge attached to the Grand Lodge of Ireland. The Irish Lodge was a military Lodge and when it left town the men were authorized to operate as a Lodge. Here the history became a bit convoluted, but suffice it to say that due to racism within Masonry it became independent of the Grand Lodge of England in 1827 and evolved into a separate institution for black Masons. Until recently, many "mainstream"--that is to say whites only--Grand Lodges did not recognize it as legitimate, relegating it to clandestine status, usually reverting to the often Byzantine arguments of legitimacy to mask what was essentially racism.
(For an overview of Prince Hall Masonry, see here).
When I first saw the following chart 10+ years ago, all of of the states below the Mason-Dixon line were in white; as you can see, the only states which still do not recognize Prince Hall are below the line in what was once the Confederacy.
Prince Hall and those who joined him to found Boston's African Masonic
Lodge built a fundamentally new "African" movement on a preexisting
institutional foundation. Within that movement they asserted emotional,
mythical, and genealogical links to the continent of Africa and its
peoples. --James Sidbury
According to the Grand Lodge of Liberia, when the original Americo-Liberian settlers landed in Liberia in the early 1820's, it was known that there were Prince Hall Masons among them, but it was not until 1867 that the dispensation was given so that Prince Hall Masons in Liberia could form a Grand Lodge under the aegis of Prince Hall Masonry.
The Back to Africa movement and Prince Hall Masonry have had a long association, dating back to Prince Hall himself.
Although Hall and Cuffee were rough contemporaries, and both were proponents of repatriation, I cannot find anything online to demonstrate that the men knew one another. Surely as abolitionists, education activists and leaders in the African-American community in Massachusetts, they must have at least known of each other, but with my limited resources I'm afraid I can't say much else.
Freemasonry and other Fraternal organizations were certainly an important feature of African-American civil life. In a kind of weird coincidence, there was even a fraternal group called the Order of the Lone Star Race Pride. A book entitled (1910) discusses this Lodge in some detail beginning on page 115. Thing is, this book lists literally dozens of fraternal groups in the South, but the name, not just the Lone Star but the reference to Race Pride is for me anyway, highly evocative.
A third Prince Hall Mason to have a profound effect on Marcus Garvey was Martin R. Delaney (1812-1885). Some have argued he was the first black nationalist. Abolitionist, writer, journalist, philosopher, inventor....he was also one of the first three blacks admitted to Harvard Medical School and the first black field officer in the US Army, obtaining the rank of major. In 1853 he wrote a short book entitled The Origin And Objects Of Ancient Freemasonry: Its Introduction Into The United States, And Legitimacy Among Colored Men. He had written his first book proposing mass emigration, perhaps to the West Indies or South America in 1852. In 1854 he led the National Emigration Convention and read his Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent; this moment is considered to be one of the foundations of black nationalism.
That said, he travelled to Liberia in 1859 to look into to possibility of settlement; he stayed nine months and signed a treaty for settling "unused" land in exchange for bringing skill to the region, but white missionaries undermined his plans and the outbreak of the Civil War put an end to them. He later sought an appointment as Consul General to Liberia. As Reconstruction began to be curbed and whites successfully began limiting the voting rights of blacks, a group of African-Americans in Charleston again took up plans for emigration; in 1877, they formed the Liberia Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company. Delaney chaired he finance committee with Delany as chairman of the finance committee and a year later, the company purchased a ship called the Azor for the voyage. Delany was president of the board that organized the voyage but he withdrew in 1880 to concentrate on supporting his family. This was his last involvement in an emigration scheme before his death.
The UNIA
Marcus Garvey (1877-1940), was a proponent of Pan-Africanism, Black Nationalism and going Back to Africa. Like Paul Cuffee (1759-1817) before him, who helped to create ACS, he sought to mix business interests with African repatriation in founding the Black Star Line, taking its name from the White Star Line of Titanic fame. Internally plagued with corruption and infiltrated by government agents who did their best to destroy it through sabotage, the Black Star Line lasted three years (1919-1922), but it's impact on African-Americans (in the larger sense of the Americas) and Africans was enormous. Not wanting to overstate the issue, it is of interest in this post because Garvey chose the star for his symbol. Could it also have been a Masonic reference? Was he inspired by Liberia's flag? Like Governor Russwurm, Garvey was a Prince Hall Freemason.
Another of Garvey's creations was the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, founded in 1917.
Interestingly the UNIA itself had many Masonic characteristics:
In 1922, in his perceptive analysis of Garvey and the UNIA, Hodge Kirnon stated that "there is no indication that Garvey meant it [the UNIA] to be anything more than a fraternal order." .... Amy Jacques Garvey later recalled that Garvey became a Mason "through the influence of John E. Bruce and Dr. [F. W.] Ellegor [but] he did not attend Masonic meetings, he was always too busy, so the connection dropped." Moreover, she disclosed that UNIA chapters operated quite freely within the ranks of black fraternities.
During the final four years of his life, Garvey turned even more emphatically toward the Masonic ideal based on secret knowledge. With the defeat of Ethiopia in the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935--1936 and the rapid escalation of militarism throughout Europe and Asia, Garvey revised dramatically his previous estimates of what political movements alone could be expected to accomplish. Thus, he viewed as problematic the absence of "masonry in his [the Negro's] political ideals," noting that "there is nothing secret in what he is aiming at for his own hope of preservation." Garvey was alluding to the evolution of the fraternal idea from its earlier craft stage into a potent political vehicle, one based on the organization of secret revolutionary brotherhoods.
From the start, the UNIA shared numerous features with fraternal benevolent orders. The UNIA's governing Constitution and Book of Laws held the same status and function as Freemasonry's Book of Constitutions and Book of the Law. The UNIA's titular "potentate" was clearly analogous to the "imperial potentate" of the Ancient Egyptian Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, or black Shriners. The High Executive Council of the UNIA and ACL reflected the Imperial Council of the black Shriners and the Supreme Council of Freemasonry in general. The elaborate and resplendent public displays by the UNIA, particularly during its annual conventions, drew upon the example of the black Shriners and other fraternal groups. .... Other features shared with fraternal orders included solemn oaths and binding pledges, special degrees of chivalry (such as the Cross of African Redemption, Knight of the Sublime Order of the Nile, and Knight of the Order of Ethiopia), and an auxiliary Ladies' Division with its own "lady president" (article 5, sec. 5). An editorial in the Negro World (30 April 1921) entitled "A Word Regarding Titles," pointed out that "the Order of Free and Accepted Masons, the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows and other religious and fraternal bodies have a hierarchy of titles. And we do not see wherein the U.N.I.A. is introducing an innovation."
The Lone Star meets the Black Star
The UNIA also did work to help African-Americans migrate to Liberia, sending a delegation there in 1923 to scope out the situation and make a survey of potential migration sites, a project supported by the Liberian government. Apparently Liberia was going to lease land to the UNIA for one dollar per acre. The plan fell through, however, and the Liberian government cut a better deal with the Firestone Rubber Company.
When Garvey died in 1940, James R. Stewart was elected to head the UNIA. In 1949 he moved to Liberia, where he became a citizen. The Parent Body of the UNIA was located there until Stewart's Death in 1964. Liberian President William Tubman became Potentate and Supreme Commissioner of the UNIA in 1954 and was a close friend of Stewart. Tubman was President of Liberia from 1944 to 1971 and became known as the "Father of Modern Liberia". He was also a Prince Hall Mason. He was succeeded by his VP since 1952, William Tolbert, who was, we have seen, also Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Liberia.
Ethiopianist and Arabist Offshoots
I came across an interesting paragraph in a book entitled Black Pilgrimage to Islam by Robert Dannin:
Evidence of the struggle between churched and unchurched ideologies is also reflected in the history of the Prince Hall Masonic lodges where Ethiopianist and Arabist proponents clashed repeatedly. Ethiopianism had roots in the missionary experience as a quasi-biblical justification for emigration. It originated in the work of Martin Delany and came to rest in Marcus Garvey's familiar scenario of a pure African nation. Though radical in style. it belonged to and constituted a theology of redemption. Arabism, on the other hand, was a representation or Islam constructed out of fragmentary knowledge. Like other folk traditions and vestigial religious beliefs it was discordant to the ears of churchmen.
Having once studied this subject at some great length, I saw in this "Ethiopianist and Arabist" conflict a reference to developments in African-American spirituality. Again, "America" here meaning the entirety of the New World. The Ethiopianist tendency is most visible in Rastafarianism. The Arabist tendency was expressed in Noble Drew Ali's Moorish Science Temple and later in the Nation of Islam. In other words, Prince Hall Freemasonry is an important source of both Rastafarianism and the Nation of Islam. A lot of people will find that proposition outrageous, as Freemasonry is often vilified by the Nation of Islam, but I think there's some merit in the argument.
I have long been aware of a book entitled Dread Jesus by William David Spencer. Spencer traces Rastafarianism back to Garvey's UNIA. Furthermore, he
....insists on the role played on the foundation of Rastafari religion by three preachers: Leonard Howell, H. Archibald Dunkley, and Joseph Nathaniel Hibbert. As far as Dunkley and Hibbert are concerned, he insists on their membership in the Great Ancient Brotherhood of Silence, or Ancient Mystic Order of Ethiopia, one of the "black" (or "Prince Hall") Masonic organizations. Spencer claims that a number of features of Rastafari religion derive from this branch of Freemasonry (including the name "Jah" for "God", coming from the Masonic form "Jah-Bul-On"). Later Rastafari leaders and authors, such as Dennis Forsythe, were in turn influenced, according to Spencer, by the Rosicrucian order AMORC. Rastafari is, thus, a syncretistic faith including elements from the Western esoteric and occult tradition, Christianity, and Jamaican and Caribbean lore (including the trademark Rastafari dreadlocks, and the use of ganja.
This will undoubtedly be hard to swallow, but as Dannin says "Freemasonry was....integral to the construction of black civil society in Colonial North America." Indeed he links the growth in Prince Hall with the "considerable immigration of West Indian colored people". This is a little more credible when we consider that Hall may have been born in Barbados or elsewhere in the Caribbean, although Sidbury believes he was a native New Englander. What is certain is that Garvey was born in Jamaica, and lived there after being deported from the US. He died in London but his body was re-interred in Jamaica twenty years later. Furthermore, Rastafarians consider him a religious prophet, as does the pre-Rasta Holy Piby; Marcus Garvey is to John the Baptist as Haile Selassi is to Jesus. Some even consider him a reincarnation of St. John. A patron saint of Freemasons, incidentally.
The flag of Ghana features the African tricolor associated with Ethiopia and Rasta, with a black star in the center--inspired by Marcus Garvey! The tricolor refers to the flag
Kwame Nkrumah, first President of Ghana after independence and pan-Africanist, also named the national football team the Black Stars and the national shipping line the Black Star Line in honor of Garvey.
As for Arabism, Freemasonry is one of the many sources of belief for the Moorish Science Temple of America, which also drew upon just about every other mystical current from several world religions: Gnosticism, Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, etc. although a quick look around the net indicates the "Moors" claim to be the inventors of Freemasonry.
(The Mormon Endowment Ceremony is also drawn from Masonic ritual, yet many Mormons claim the reverse to be true, that somehow Freemasons are practicing a "corrupted" version of much more ancient LDS rituals).
The Arabist element is the Moorish Science is that it is presented as a sect of Islam, despite its decidedly "New Age" potpourri of syncretism and the belief that African-American are descended from, as the name suggests, the Moors, or Medieval Muslims of North Africa.
After Temple founder Noble Drew Ali's death, Wallace Dodd Ford, aka Wallace Fard Muhammad, founded the group that became the Nation of Islam. He was succeeded by Elijah Muhammad who in turn was succeeded by current leader Louis Farrakhan.
Something I learned just now and brings us full-circle is the flag used by the Moorish Science Temple of America:
It's the Moroccan Flag, which if you'll recall was the other flag I considered before thinking of the Liberian Lone Star. Full Circle!
Conclusion
I should pause to say that Rastafarianism or the Moorish Science Temple are not Masonic creations or "fronts". I do think however, that Freemasonic elements have made their way into them. It seems natural that any young man of a mystical bent who later goes on to found a spiritual or secret society, or even a religion, would at some point be attracted to Freemasonry. It was not unusual for young men of the period to have multiple fraternal memberships and seekers, well, seek. Joining the Masons and perhaps finding them insufficient, they move on to other things. It would seem that for a spiritual visionary, Freemasonry might become stifling and limited, hence their need to create a system of their own, borrowing freely from elements of the past. Theosophy, New Thought, New Age, what have you, all incorporate elements from the Western mystical tradition, including Masonry, as well as from various Eastern traditions as well.
Unlike the Lone Star Republics, which in my opinion were definitely Masonic vehicles whose five-pointed stars refer to the Masonic Five Points of Fellowship, the star used by Garvey is more uncertain. I do think it's possible, given the UNIA's link to Liberia. Given that after Liberia declared independence, its civil leaders were virtually indistinguishable from the leadership of its Grand Lodge, it's hard not to conclude that the adoption of what in Liberia is called a "Lone Star" is not a nod to Masonry, especially considering that Masons in the Americas from whence they came were using the same symbolism for their Republican activities at roughly the same time. Maybe it isn't so cut and dry, but the symbols are there, as is a strong Masonic connection. It seems clear that Prince Hall Masonry was an influence on the Back to Africa movement, but even more so on black nationalism; it provided an example of black men doing things for themselves, separately. It's no secret that Garvey worked together with white separatists and nationalists, for they were essentially working towards the same goal. Garvey passed through Prince Hall and Liberia was practically an extension of a Prince Hall Grand Lodge for over a century. Other more radical spiritual movements seem to have felt its influence as well. In the Golden Age of Fraternalism, Freemasonry was king, for both black and white.
I'm sure I've left a lot out and have certainly oversimplified a lot of complex history, stressing as I am points in common as opposed to points of difference, but this doesn't invalidate what is in fact the common ground. I'd welcome any thoughts on the subject, especially as it is one in which I feel especially hampered by relying on the Internet alone to find information. Please, feel free to write and set me straight if I'm wrong and hook us up with any important and relevant information.
I originally intended this post to be a quick blurb about Liberia, but I kept running across information which seemed relevant to my initial subject; before I knew it I was heading off into numerous fascinating directions, and, as is so often the case, what I found could easily be transformed into a book if only the situation were a bit different: firstly that I were a smarter fellow and secondly if I had access to a world-class library.
Fortunately the Internet is getting better and better and there is no lack of original documents available online. My work here wouldn't hold much water in a peer-reviewed journal, but I do think it's a credible survey of some valuable secondary sources. I've also got some academic background in the subject. In 1991-1992 I wrote my senior thesis for my B.A. in history on black nationalism and the Back to Africa movement. My emphasis was on the spiritual dimensions of these movements and traced their evolution from advocating a literal, physical repatriation to Africa into a spiritual re-orientation and cultural return, a voluntary separation of the races within the United States and the re-definition of what it meant to be Black, Negro, Asiatic, Muslim, what have you. What surprises me in retrospect is that in my original paper, 60+ pages long, I never once touched upon the topic of Freemasonry, whereas now I believe it was an important, if not the principal catalyst to the development of some of the more radical spiritual/political movements in 19th-century African-American life.
The Gid, my LoS partner, actually accompanied me on a trip in late 1991 to South Carolina to visit a separatist group there living according to the customs and religious practices of the Nigerian Yoruba, something I only recalled towards the end of writing this. (See Oyotunji, they didn't have a website back then!)
This is a limited and often surface treatment of several related topics and I ask you to recall that this post is not the fruit of years of research and reflection, but a public expression of my learning process; it is thus prone to errors of interpretation. It is also, in a sense, a prose poem in disguise.
The Lone Star in Africa
In Lone Star Republics (July, 2013) I used the title to identify several mostly short-lived republics created by different revolutionaries, impresarios, adventurers and filibusterers intent on setting up new republics around the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, largely corresponding to the area (the Golden Circle) envisioned by the Knights of the Golden Circle as the natural location for their slave-holding commercial empire, an extension of the South. These various filibuster schemes may or may not have been directly linked to the larger schemes of the Knights and/or the Confederate States of America. What the Lone Star Republics did have in common were two things: Masonic leadership and the unabashed reference to Freemasonry on flags which prominently featured a solitary star, either on a solid field of blue or red or in a canton of that color against a field of horizontal bars. Various configurations of this heraldry exist and in some cases, such as in Chile and Texas, the flag is referred to as a "Lone Star Flag".
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| The Golden Circle from http://knights-of-the-golden-circle.blogspot.fr/ |
In my initial musings, Morocco and Liberia were the only African flags that came to mind featuring solitary stars, but I soon stumbled across the flag of Ghana. Looking first at Morocco, I soon rejected any notion of Masonic influence, but I was surprised to see that the flag, which features a green five-pointed star on a red field, once featured a six-pointed star, or "Star of David." While it may be surprising to see a symbol so closely associated with Judaism on a Muslim country's flag, it's actually used quite a bit in Muslim heraldry and is known by Muslims as the "Seal of Solomon" in addition to the "Star of David." Its widespread use in hermetic and alchemical texts may well explain how the star came to be used in Freemasonry, but in this it is only tangentially related to the topic at hand.
If we exclude the flags which feature a Muslim crescent and star or a Communist star and sickle, we also have to extend the list of star-bearing flags to include: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bassau, Senegal, Togo and Zimbabwe.
The stars in these flags are said to represent Islam, Marxism or the light of revolution; sometimes a star is a star is a star, it has many associations and doesn't necessarily refer to Freemasonry. I think, however, that like the Lone Star Republics in the Americas, the star on the Liberian flag represents Freemasonry and its Five Points of Fellowship. As for the other flags, unless you think Islam and international Communism are parts of a conspiracy which includes Freemasonry, and there are clearly people who do, I don't think there's a Masonic connection, although Togo's flag is said to be inspired by that of Liberia.
(A useful overview of Freemasonry in Africa can be found here).
Liberia
A quick look at Liberia's history is enough to demonstrate why I feel that the lone star in Liberia's flag represents Freemasonry.
Wikipedia gives a succinct summary:
In 1820, the American Colonization Society (ACS) began sending black volunteers to the Pepper Coast to establish a colony for freed American blacks. These free African Americans came to identify themselves as Americo-Liberian, developing a cultural tradition infused with American notions of racial supremacy, and political republicanism. The ACS, a private organization supported by prominent American politicians such as Abraham Lincoln, Henry Clay, and James Monroe, believed repatriation was preferable to emancipation of slaves. Similar organizations established colonies in Mississippi-in-Africa and the Republic of Maryland, which were later annexed by Liberia. On July 26, 1847, the settlers issued a Declaration of Independence and promulgated a constitution, which, based on the political principles denoted in the United States Constitution, created the independent Republic of Liberia.
I haven't been able to find any indication that the ACS was Masonic, per se, but many early supporters and members were Freemasons. Attendees at its inaugural meeting in 1816 included Freemasons such as James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Francis Scott Key; Henry Clay presided. On the other hand, another attendee was Daniel Webster, who ran for Vice-President in 1838 as a candidate for the Anti-Masonic Party. Of the three man considered to be the ACS' co-founders, Henry Clay, John Randolph and Richard Bland Lee, only Clay was a Freemason. (As far as I can tell).
In addition to Freemasons, Monroe, Jackson, Key and Henry Clay were also slaveholders. The ACS was a mix of slaveholders and abolitionists, many of them Quakers, whose motivations were to mitigate the dangers of a slave-holding society, such as slave rebellions, and to expunge freed blacks from American society. Most of them didn't support mixing with the blacks they repatriated; repatriation was really a drastic kind of segregation. Wikipedia states that:
Critics have said the ACS was a racist society, while others point to its benevolent origins and later takeover by men with visions of an American empire in Africa.
This is an interesting point to consider, as it resolves the apparent conflict between the aims of the KCG and Lone Star adventurers and those of the ACS, which at first appear more benevolent. That said, the rhetoric of the ACS was deemed racist even by standards of the time and some contemporary abolitionists expressed the belief that the "ACS' works [were] palliative propaganda to soften the continuation of slavery in the United States." This belief characterized the historiography of the society during the 1980's and 90's, but more recently this has shifted back to the view that the group was genuinely anti-slavery.
The other colonies mentioned by Wikipedia do not appear to have had an especially strong Masonic presence. Only one leader of the Maryland colony (the Republic of Maryland from 1854 to 1857) before it became part of Liberia appears to have been a Mason; John Brown Russwurm, a Prince Hall Mason, was the longest-serving Governor of Maryland in Africa (1836-1851), the precursor to the Republic. Mississippi-in-Africa was a short-lived colony with only one Governor before becoming part of Liberia.
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| Republic of Maryland, 1854 - 1857 |
The cross was sometimes represented with a longer bottom "arm", but after Liberia issued a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution, establishing the Republic of Liberia in 1847, the cross was replaced by a star.
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| Flag of Liberia, 1847-Present |
....Liberia’s national flag is called “Lone Star”. The eleven horizontal stripes represent the eleven signers of the declaration of independence and the constitution of the Republic of Liberia; the blue field symbolizes the continent of Africa; the five pointed white star depicts Liberia as the first “independent republic” on the continent of Africa; the red color designates “valor”; the white, “purity”; and the blue, “fidelity”. Although these representations are uniquely Liberian, the flag itself is a replica of “Old Glory”, the national flag of the United States.
Other sources confirm the "Lone Star" appellation; it is also the nickname of the national football (soccer) team.
Although information on Masonry in Liberia prior to independence is scanty, after independence was quite a different story.
Author Chris Hodapp:
From the beginning, Liberian society quickly developed into three classes: settlers with European-African lineage, who came to be known as Americo-Liberians; freed slaves from slave ships and the West Indies; and indigenous native people from the existing tribes already living in the territory. Liberia was dominated by a single political party for over 130 years, the True Whig Party, based in large part on the American Whigs, the precursor to the Republican Party in the years after the American Revolution and before the Civil War. The Liberian Whigs were almost entirely Americo-Liberians, and top government officials were uniformly Freemasons. By the 1970s, there were seventeen lodges at work in the country under the auspices of the Grand Lodge of Ancient Free & Accepted Masons of the Republic of Liberia, with approximately 1,000 members, and the longstanding sentiment of the tribal population was that decisions about the nation were all made secretly behind Masonic closed doors.
This small clique of about a dozen families dominated the country's politics and excluded indigenous Africans and descendants of slaves from points other than the US. This hegemony and the exclusion of indigenous Africans from the Lodge meant that when a coup d'etat was staged by Samuel Doe in 1980, the Lodge was targeted alongside the existing political regime; the hand-in-glove relationship between Lodge and State is personified by William R. Tolbert, Jr. who was both President of Liberia and Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Liberia at the time of the coup. Naturally, the Lodge was outlawed by Doe in 1980.
During the turmoil and violence which has taken place since the coup in 1980, the Grand Lodge building was virtually destroyed and fell into ruin, eventually becoming the home of thousands of squatters. The squatters were evicted in 2005 and the Lodge is apparently currently rebuilding their Lodge building....and their influence.
Early African-American Proponents
Liberia and other colonies like it were only the beginning of a Back to Africa movement which envisioned a literal repatriation of freed slaves. As the only one of these colonies to survive, it would continue to play an inspiring role in the Back to Africa movement, even as the movement took on an increasingly Pan-African character. So far we've looked at predominantly white-led groups, so let's turn to some important African-Americans.
Paul Cuffee (1759-1817) was a man of mixed-race descent. His mother was a Native American and his father a freed slave from what is now Ghana. An enterprising self-made man, he made himself one of the day's richest African-Americans by his early fifties, learning as much as he could about shipping and commerce. After acquiring the necessary wealth and resources, he became interested in voyages that mixed personal enrichment with African repatriation. In 1815, at great personal cost, he led 38 colonists to Sierra Leone, where they successfully established themselves. Cuffee would later envision mass repatriation to Sierra Leone but eventually favored Haiti. His involvement with the ACS was brief; he was too repulsed by their open racism, but the ACS derived great inspiration from his successes; Liberia after all is a neighbor to Sierra Leone. Like many in the ACS, Cuffee was a Quaker.
Prince Hall (1735-1807) was an abolitionist, educator, philanthropist and what would be today called a civil rights leader. He was also a proponent of the Back to Africa movement and founder of what is known as Prince Hall Freemasonry. Prince Hall and 15 other black men were initiated into a Lodge attached to the Grand Lodge of Ireland. The Irish Lodge was a military Lodge and when it left town the men were authorized to operate as a Lodge. Here the history became a bit convoluted, but suffice it to say that due to racism within Masonry it became independent of the Grand Lodge of England in 1827 and evolved into a separate institution for black Masons. Until recently, many "mainstream"--that is to say whites only--Grand Lodges did not recognize it as legitimate, relegating it to clandestine status, usually reverting to the often Byzantine arguments of legitimacy to mask what was essentially racism.
(For an overview of Prince Hall Masonry, see here).
When I first saw the following chart 10+ years ago, all of of the states below the Mason-Dixon line were in white; as you can see, the only states which still do not recognize Prince Hall are below the line in what was once the Confederacy.
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| Copyright Paull Bessel: http://bessel.org/masrec/phamap.htm |
According to the Grand Lodge of Liberia, when the original Americo-Liberian settlers landed in Liberia in the early 1820's, it was known that there were Prince Hall Masons among them, but it was not until 1867 that the dispensation was given so that Prince Hall Masons in Liberia could form a Grand Lodge under the aegis of Prince Hall Masonry.
The Back to Africa movement and Prince Hall Masonry have had a long association, dating back to Prince Hall himself.
Although Hall and Cuffee were rough contemporaries, and both were proponents of repatriation, I cannot find anything online to demonstrate that the men knew one another. Surely as abolitionists, education activists and leaders in the African-American community in Massachusetts, they must have at least known of each other, but with my limited resources I'm afraid I can't say much else.
Freemasonry and other Fraternal organizations were certainly an important feature of African-American civil life. In a kind of weird coincidence, there was even a fraternal group called the Order of the Lone Star Race Pride. A book entitled (1910) discusses this Lodge in some detail beginning on page 115. Thing is, this book lists literally dozens of fraternal groups in the South, but the name, not just the Lone Star but the reference to Race Pride is for me anyway, highly evocative.
A third Prince Hall Mason to have a profound effect on Marcus Garvey was Martin R. Delaney (1812-1885). Some have argued he was the first black nationalist. Abolitionist, writer, journalist, philosopher, inventor....he was also one of the first three blacks admitted to Harvard Medical School and the first black field officer in the US Army, obtaining the rank of major. In 1853 he wrote a short book entitled The Origin And Objects Of Ancient Freemasonry: Its Introduction Into The United States, And Legitimacy Among Colored Men. He had written his first book proposing mass emigration, perhaps to the West Indies or South America in 1852. In 1854 he led the National Emigration Convention and read his Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent; this moment is considered to be one of the foundations of black nationalism.
That said, he travelled to Liberia in 1859 to look into to possibility of settlement; he stayed nine months and signed a treaty for settling "unused" land in exchange for bringing skill to the region, but white missionaries undermined his plans and the outbreak of the Civil War put an end to them. He later sought an appointment as Consul General to Liberia. As Reconstruction began to be curbed and whites successfully began limiting the voting rights of blacks, a group of African-Americans in Charleston again took up plans for emigration; in 1877, they formed the Liberia Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company. Delaney chaired he finance committee with Delany as chairman of the finance committee and a year later, the company purchased a ship called the Azor for the voyage. Delany was president of the board that organized the voyage but he withdrew in 1880 to concentrate on supporting his family. This was his last involvement in an emigration scheme before his death.
The UNIA
Marcus Garvey (1877-1940), was a proponent of Pan-Africanism, Black Nationalism and going Back to Africa. Like Paul Cuffee (1759-1817) before him, who helped to create ACS, he sought to mix business interests with African repatriation in founding the Black Star Line, taking its name from the White Star Line of Titanic fame. Internally plagued with corruption and infiltrated by government agents who did their best to destroy it through sabotage, the Black Star Line lasted three years (1919-1922), but it's impact on African-Americans (in the larger sense of the Americas) and Africans was enormous. Not wanting to overstate the issue, it is of interest in this post because Garvey chose the star for his symbol. Could it also have been a Masonic reference? Was he inspired by Liberia's flag? Like Governor Russwurm, Garvey was a Prince Hall Freemason.
Another of Garvey's creations was the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, founded in 1917.
Interestingly the UNIA itself had many Masonic characteristics:
In 1922, in his perceptive analysis of Garvey and the UNIA, Hodge Kirnon stated that "there is no indication that Garvey meant it [the UNIA] to be anything more than a fraternal order." .... Amy Jacques Garvey later recalled that Garvey became a Mason "through the influence of John E. Bruce and Dr. [F. W.] Ellegor [but] he did not attend Masonic meetings, he was always too busy, so the connection dropped." Moreover, she disclosed that UNIA chapters operated quite freely within the ranks of black fraternities.
During the final four years of his life, Garvey turned even more emphatically toward the Masonic ideal based on secret knowledge. With the defeat of Ethiopia in the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935--1936 and the rapid escalation of militarism throughout Europe and Asia, Garvey revised dramatically his previous estimates of what political movements alone could be expected to accomplish. Thus, he viewed as problematic the absence of "masonry in his [the Negro's] political ideals," noting that "there is nothing secret in what he is aiming at for his own hope of preservation." Garvey was alluding to the evolution of the fraternal idea from its earlier craft stage into a potent political vehicle, one based on the organization of secret revolutionary brotherhoods.
From the start, the UNIA shared numerous features with fraternal benevolent orders. The UNIA's governing Constitution and Book of Laws held the same status and function as Freemasonry's Book of Constitutions and Book of the Law. The UNIA's titular "potentate" was clearly analogous to the "imperial potentate" of the Ancient Egyptian Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, or black Shriners. The High Executive Council of the UNIA and ACL reflected the Imperial Council of the black Shriners and the Supreme Council of Freemasonry in general. The elaborate and resplendent public displays by the UNIA, particularly during its annual conventions, drew upon the example of the black Shriners and other fraternal groups. .... Other features shared with fraternal orders included solemn oaths and binding pledges, special degrees of chivalry (such as the Cross of African Redemption, Knight of the Sublime Order of the Nile, and Knight of the Order of Ethiopia), and an auxiliary Ladies' Division with its own "lady president" (article 5, sec. 5). An editorial in the Negro World (30 April 1921) entitled "A Word Regarding Titles," pointed out that "the Order of Free and Accepted Masons, the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows and other religious and fraternal bodies have a hierarchy of titles. And we do not see wherein the U.N.I.A. is introducing an innovation."
The Lone Star meets the Black Star
The UNIA also did work to help African-Americans migrate to Liberia, sending a delegation there in 1923 to scope out the situation and make a survey of potential migration sites, a project supported by the Liberian government. Apparently Liberia was going to lease land to the UNIA for one dollar per acre. The plan fell through, however, and the Liberian government cut a better deal with the Firestone Rubber Company.
When Garvey died in 1940, James R. Stewart was elected to head the UNIA. In 1949 he moved to Liberia, where he became a citizen. The Parent Body of the UNIA was located there until Stewart's Death in 1964. Liberian President William Tubman became Potentate and Supreme Commissioner of the UNIA in 1954 and was a close friend of Stewart. Tubman was President of Liberia from 1944 to 1971 and became known as the "Father of Modern Liberia". He was also a Prince Hall Mason. He was succeeded by his VP since 1952, William Tolbert, who was, we have seen, also Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Liberia.
Ethiopianist and Arabist Offshoots
I came across an interesting paragraph in a book entitled Black Pilgrimage to Islam by Robert Dannin:
Evidence of the struggle between churched and unchurched ideologies is also reflected in the history of the Prince Hall Masonic lodges where Ethiopianist and Arabist proponents clashed repeatedly. Ethiopianism had roots in the missionary experience as a quasi-biblical justification for emigration. It originated in the work of Martin Delany and came to rest in Marcus Garvey's familiar scenario of a pure African nation. Though radical in style. it belonged to and constituted a theology of redemption. Arabism, on the other hand, was a representation or Islam constructed out of fragmentary knowledge. Like other folk traditions and vestigial religious beliefs it was discordant to the ears of churchmen.
Having once studied this subject at some great length, I saw in this "Ethiopianist and Arabist" conflict a reference to developments in African-American spirituality. Again, "America" here meaning the entirety of the New World. The Ethiopianist tendency is most visible in Rastafarianism. The Arabist tendency was expressed in Noble Drew Ali's Moorish Science Temple and later in the Nation of Islam. In other words, Prince Hall Freemasonry is an important source of both Rastafarianism and the Nation of Islam. A lot of people will find that proposition outrageous, as Freemasonry is often vilified by the Nation of Islam, but I think there's some merit in the argument.
I have long been aware of a book entitled Dread Jesus by William David Spencer. Spencer traces Rastafarianism back to Garvey's UNIA. Furthermore, he
....insists on the role played on the foundation of Rastafari religion by three preachers: Leonard Howell, H. Archibald Dunkley, and Joseph Nathaniel Hibbert. As far as Dunkley and Hibbert are concerned, he insists on their membership in the Great Ancient Brotherhood of Silence, or Ancient Mystic Order of Ethiopia, one of the "black" (or "Prince Hall") Masonic organizations. Spencer claims that a number of features of Rastafari religion derive from this branch of Freemasonry (including the name "Jah" for "God", coming from the Masonic form "Jah-Bul-On"). Later Rastafari leaders and authors, such as Dennis Forsythe, were in turn influenced, according to Spencer, by the Rosicrucian order AMORC. Rastafari is, thus, a syncretistic faith including elements from the Western esoteric and occult tradition, Christianity, and Jamaican and Caribbean lore (including the trademark Rastafari dreadlocks, and the use of ganja.
This will undoubtedly be hard to swallow, but as Dannin says "Freemasonry was....integral to the construction of black civil society in Colonial North America." Indeed he links the growth in Prince Hall with the "considerable immigration of West Indian colored people". This is a little more credible when we consider that Hall may have been born in Barbados or elsewhere in the Caribbean, although Sidbury believes he was a native New Englander. What is certain is that Garvey was born in Jamaica, and lived there after being deported from the US. He died in London but his body was re-interred in Jamaica twenty years later. Furthermore, Rastafarians consider him a religious prophet, as does the pre-Rasta Holy Piby; Marcus Garvey is to John the Baptist as Haile Selassi is to Jesus. Some even consider him a reincarnation of St. John. A patron saint of Freemasons, incidentally.
The flag of Ghana features the African tricolor associated with Ethiopia and Rasta, with a black star in the center--inspired by Marcus Garvey! The tricolor refers to the flag
Kwame Nkrumah, first President of Ghana after independence and pan-Africanist, also named the national football team the Black Stars and the national shipping line the Black Star Line in honor of Garvey.
As for Arabism, Freemasonry is one of the many sources of belief for the Moorish Science Temple of America, which also drew upon just about every other mystical current from several world religions: Gnosticism, Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, etc. although a quick look around the net indicates the "Moors" claim to be the inventors of Freemasonry.
(The Mormon Endowment Ceremony is also drawn from Masonic ritual, yet many Mormons claim the reverse to be true, that somehow Freemasons are practicing a "corrupted" version of much more ancient LDS rituals).
The Arabist element is the Moorish Science is that it is presented as a sect of Islam, despite its decidedly "New Age" potpourri of syncretism and the belief that African-American are descended from, as the name suggests, the Moors, or Medieval Muslims of North Africa.
After Temple founder Noble Drew Ali's death, Wallace Dodd Ford, aka Wallace Fard Muhammad, founded the group that became the Nation of Islam. He was succeeded by Elijah Muhammad who in turn was succeeded by current leader Louis Farrakhan.
Something I learned just now and brings us full-circle is the flag used by the Moorish Science Temple of America:
It's the Moroccan Flag, which if you'll recall was the other flag I considered before thinking of the Liberian Lone Star. Full Circle!
Conclusion
I should pause to say that Rastafarianism or the Moorish Science Temple are not Masonic creations or "fronts". I do think however, that Freemasonic elements have made their way into them. It seems natural that any young man of a mystical bent who later goes on to found a spiritual or secret society, or even a religion, would at some point be attracted to Freemasonry. It was not unusual for young men of the period to have multiple fraternal memberships and seekers, well, seek. Joining the Masons and perhaps finding them insufficient, they move on to other things. It would seem that for a spiritual visionary, Freemasonry might become stifling and limited, hence their need to create a system of their own, borrowing freely from elements of the past. Theosophy, New Thought, New Age, what have you, all incorporate elements from the Western mystical tradition, including Masonry, as well as from various Eastern traditions as well.
Unlike the Lone Star Republics, which in my opinion were definitely Masonic vehicles whose five-pointed stars refer to the Masonic Five Points of Fellowship, the star used by Garvey is more uncertain. I do think it's possible, given the UNIA's link to Liberia. Given that after Liberia declared independence, its civil leaders were virtually indistinguishable from the leadership of its Grand Lodge, it's hard not to conclude that the adoption of what in Liberia is called a "Lone Star" is not a nod to Masonry, especially considering that Masons in the Americas from whence they came were using the same symbolism for their Republican activities at roughly the same time. Maybe it isn't so cut and dry, but the symbols are there, as is a strong Masonic connection. It seems clear that Prince Hall Masonry was an influence on the Back to Africa movement, but even more so on black nationalism; it provided an example of black men doing things for themselves, separately. It's no secret that Garvey worked together with white separatists and nationalists, for they were essentially working towards the same goal. Garvey passed through Prince Hall and Liberia was practically an extension of a Prince Hall Grand Lodge for over a century. Other more radical spiritual movements seem to have felt its influence as well. In the Golden Age of Fraternalism, Freemasonry was king, for both black and white.
I'm sure I've left a lot out and have certainly oversimplified a lot of complex history, stressing as I am points in common as opposed to points of difference, but this doesn't invalidate what is in fact the common ground. I'd welcome any thoughts on the subject, especially as it is one in which I feel especially hampered by relying on the Internet alone to find information. Please, feel free to write and set me straight if I'm wrong and hook us up with any important and relevant information.
Sunday, July 7, 2013
Lone Star Republics
It's with some trepidation that I release this post. Because it covers such a long and convoluted period, filled with all kinds of secret machinations, I'm bound to have made some mistakes. Hopefully none of them to serious or embarrassing! Bear that in mind. Ultimately, for me this is a kind of "catalogue and summary", an overview of Masonic involvement in the Republic of Texas and the filibuster expeditions linked to it. It has branched out in quite a few directions, covering a lot of terrain, but only superficially. There's also a lot of speculation, duly noted. Towards the end I pose an almost stream-of-consciousness series of questions I'd like to see answered, and somebody out there probably has. The Internet is no substitute for a first-rate university library.
A subject that gets short shrift here is Albert Pike. I almost don't discuss him at all. Confederate General, pre-eminent Freemason and leader of the Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite, vocal advocate of slavery, publisher, lawyer, philosopher and mystical poet....I find it hard to imagine, given his stature, goals, time spent in the West and in New Orleans, etc., that he was not somehow involved with the Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC), at least peripherally, if not dead center. But again, running out of steam and getting increasingly diffuse, I have decided to leave this question for another time, if ever. As for the KGC, that's another can of worms that pops open early in this post, also deserving fuller treatment than I give it here.
There are a lot of sites out there discussing Pike and the KGC; separating the wheat from the chaff will be hard work in itself.
You might want to go through the following posts, which cover some other material relevant to this post and which mark the beginning of some of the reflections found in this "catalogue":
My visit last April to the US was a whirlwind, including an Anthony Bourdain-like 48 hours in Austin, Texas to visit my old friend and LoS banner-maker, .sWineDriveR. .sWD. told me about a building festooned with Masonic statues and of course, I was interested in seeing them. After a kind of dérive through downtown we decided to enter the State Capitol Building and sit in on some sort of weird parliamentary palaver; we then popped out the other side and stumbled onto the Zavala State Archives and Library. Lo and behold, there were our Freemasons:
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| Sam Houston -- Lorenzo de Zavala State Archives and Library Building |
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Anson Jones -- Lorenzo de Zavala State Archives and Library Building
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Houston ('36-'38) and Jones ('44-'46) were both Presidents of the Republic of Texas (1836-1845). Archive namesake Zavala was interim Vice-President during the interim Presidency of David Gouverneur Burnet (1836). All four men were Freemasons. Actually, there's no need to iterate this, for no less than
"All of the presidents, vice presidents,
and secretaries of state were Masons." [Here and hereafter all boldface added.]
My mind set in motion, I then recalled a Masonic plaque I'd seen at the Alamo 20 years prior. TripAdvisor hooks us up with this photo:
These plaques are explained at the Alamo website:
Many Masons participated in the struggle for Texas
independence. Many Texas military and political leaders were Masons,
including: Stephen F. Austin, Edward Burleson, Benjamin Rush Milam,
Juan Seguín, Sam Houston, David G. Burnet, Lorenzo de Zavala,
Thomas Rusk, Mirabeau B. Lamar, John A. Wharton, and James W. Fannin.
Masons continued to play a significant leadership
role in the Republic of Texas. According to The New Handbook
of Texas (2:1169): "Although constituting only about
1% of the population [of Texas], Masons filled some 80 percent
of the republic's higher offices. All of the presidents, vice presidents,
and secretaries of state were Masons."
Wow.
Turns out that despite the plaque only a handful of Masons participated in the defense of the Alamo; what they lacked in numbers there, however, they made up for by playing an out-sized role in the leadership of the Republic.
The Texans’ first shot was fired by Eli
Mitchell on October 2, 1835, near Gonzales. He and his commander,
Colonel John H. Moore, were both Masons.
Masonic historian Dr. James D. Carter counts twenty-two known Masons
among the fifty-nine signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence,
signed at Washington-on-the Brazos on March 2, 1836.
By 1846 Masons had served in nearly every major governmental post in
the Republic. All the Presidents and Vice Presidents of the Republic of
Texas were Masons. In 1844, George K. Teulon, Grand Secretary of the
Grand Lodge of the Republic of Texas, addressing a gathering of Masons
in Portland, Maine, observed
“Texas is emphatically a Masonic Country:
Our national emblem, the ‘Lone Star’, was chosen from among the emblems
selected by Freemasonry, to illustrate the moral virtues — it is a
five-pointed star, and alludes to the five points of fellowship.”
Freemasonry in Texas has grown in the last 169 years. Today there are
over 110,000 Masons in 889 lodges in The Grand Lodge of Texas, making it
the fourth largest grand lodge in the world.
The emblem he's talking about is now part of the Texas state flag and gives the state its nickname, so I decided to check out the Texas flag to get a nice clear mental picture:
I learned that this flag was only adopted in 1839. Before 1839 the Republic of Texas used a flag designed by President (and Freemason) David Burnet. The Burnet Flag, used between 1836 and 1839, is a bit more simple. This version has a yellow star, but I've seen other versions where the star is white:
Compare that with a flag purportedly flown by Zavala:
And this next one flown by Captain William Scott's Liberals at the Battle of Concepción on October 28, 1835.
The Texian commanders at the Battle of Concepción, James Bowie and James Fannin, were both Freemasons. I don't know about Capt. Scott. Anyone?
What struck me about these flags, especially the Burnet flag, is that they are pretty much the exact same flag as the one used for the obscure and short-lived Republic of West Florida, something I'd read about years ago while researching something about my native state.
Here's what one source has to say about the RWF:
In 1810, a group of prominent planters, all Freemasons, gathered in Bayou Sara near St. Francisville, and adopted a plan of government for Spanish West Florida – an area from the Perdido River to the Mississippi River and South of the 31st Parallel [Mostly in present-day Louisiana, in other words]. In September, the Fort at Baton Rouge fell and the Republic of West Florida was declared to be sovereign. The blue banner with the single white star in the middle, symbolizing the five points of fellowship under which the ringleaders met, was adopted as the official flag of the Republic. The flag would later be used in the Texas Rebellion, and it became the "Bonnie Blue Flag" in a later conflict. On December 6, 1810, Territorial Governor Claiborne, under order from President Madison, both Freemasons, incorporated West Florida in the Louisiana Territory. Thus ended the three-month-old independent nation led by Freemasons.
What struck me about these flags, especially the Burnet flag, is that they are pretty much the exact same flag as the one used for the obscure and short-lived Republic of West Florida, something I'd read about years ago while researching something about my native state.
Here's what one source has to say about the RWF:
In 1810, a group of prominent planters, all Freemasons, gathered in Bayou Sara near St. Francisville, and adopted a plan of government for Spanish West Florida – an area from the Perdido River to the Mississippi River and South of the 31st Parallel [Mostly in present-day Louisiana, in other words]. In September, the Fort at Baton Rouge fell and the Republic of West Florida was declared to be sovereign. The blue banner with the single white star in the middle, symbolizing the five points of fellowship under which the ringleaders met, was adopted as the official flag of the Republic. The flag would later be used in the Texas Rebellion, and it became the "Bonnie Blue Flag" in a later conflict. On December 6, 1810, Territorial Governor Claiborne, under order from President Madison, both Freemasons, incorporated West Florida in the Louisiana Territory. Thus ended the three-month-old independent nation led by Freemasons.
The "later conflict" the author refers to is the American Civil War (1861-1865). The "Bonnie Blue Flag" was an unofficial banner of the Confederate States of America at the start of the American Civil War in 1861:
When the state of Mississippi seceded from the Union in January 1861, a flag bearing a single white star on a blue field was flown from the capitol dome. Harry Macarthy helped popularize this flag as a symbol of the Confederacy by composing the popular song "The Bonnie Blue Flag" early in 1861. Some seceding southern states incorporated the motif of a white star on a blue field into new state flags.
It appears that some Texas units carried the Bonnie Blue into battle, as well. This makes sense as the aims of the Republic of West Florida, the Republic of Texas and the Confederate States of America were pretty much the same: preserve and expand slavery in order to support a feudal economy based on labor-intensive agriculture. It just so happens that their unifying symbol was the Lone Star, emphasizing the Confederate model as opposed to the Federalist design of the United States. The star represented Masonic fellowship and thus Freemasonry. Nearly all the leaders of these and subsequent schemes were members. The question then becomes if one use of the flag was merely inspired by the other, or if the same group of people, people belonging to the same group, were behind both uses. At this point I'm tempted to speculate if the group was the Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC).
Freemasons organized their revolt against Spain in 1810 and formed the short-lived Republic of West Florida. At the same time, Mexico was in the process of breaking away from Spain. Dig this fun fact: there are five revolutionary commanders and leaders listed on Wikipedia's page about the War for Mexican Independence (1810-1821). They are:
- Manuel Hidalgo
- José Maria Morelos
- Francisco Xavier Mina
- Vincente Guerrero
- Augustine de Iturbide
We've already seen that 80% of the upper echelons of the Republic of Texas (1836-1845) were Freemasons. In the wake of the US annexation of Texas, the unsettled boundary dispute unresolved by the Texas Revolution and the Republic of Texas erupted in the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. All of these conflicts seem to be the same struggle in many ways, with periodic lulls.
So here's where the KGC is hard to shunt aside. The generally accepted lifespan of the KGC is 1854-1865, but if the following quote is correct, it's possible if not probable that the group originated during or even before the Mexican-American War. If my speculations have some merit, it could even date back to before 1810:
The original objective of the KGC was to annex a golden circle of territories in Mexico (which would be divided into 25 slave states), Central America, northern South America, and Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean for inclusion in the United States as slave states. As anti-slavery agitation increased after the Dred Scott Decision was issued, the members proposed a separate confederation of slave states, with US states south of the Mason-Dixon line to secede and to align with other slave states to be formed from the golden circle. In either case, the goal was to increase the power of the Southern slave-holding upper class to such a degree that it could never be dislodged.
...
Following the Mexican-American War of 1846, the group's original goal was to provide a force to colonize the northern part of Mexico and the West Indies. This would extend pro-slavery interests.
This sounds a lot like an anticipation of the Confederate States of America. We'll also take a look at a series of filibuster expeditions to several areas located in the "Golden Circle."
I later came across a paper by Antonio de la Cova, professor of Latin American studies at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Terre Haute, IN, called "Filibusters and Freemasons: The Sworn Obligation."
De la Cova writes about an attempt to secure independence for Cuba from Spain in the wake of the Mexican-American War. After his service in the war, General William Jenkins Worth was approached by a group of Cuban plantation owners who called themselves the Havana Club.
This group had already made one attempt, using privately-funded mercenaries (filibusters) to accomplish the task, but had failed.
Worth was chosen because of his military expertise, but in this case is was just as important that he was a Freemason.
As this researcher (Lawrence Sullivan) points out, using de la Cova as his source:
In 1810, Louisiana Freemasons led a revolt against Spain that proclaimed the Republic of West Florida, an area later annexed to their state. And most of the leaders of the 1836 uprising that drove the Mexicans out of Texas were Freemasons, including Stephen Austin, Samuel Houston and David Crockett.
The professor says Freemasons also were behind failed attempts at Cuban insurrection in 1810 and '23, as well as a coup attempt in Spain in 1840.
The Havana Club was created in 1848 by wealthy plantation owners. They feared that France and England's pressure on Spain to abolish slavery could lead to the destruction of the Cuban economy. Much like the fears expressed by the KGC.
The plan was to hire 5,000 American Mexican War veterans to invade and overthrow the Spanish regime. In August that year they sent an emissary to propose their plan to Worth. This emissary
found Worth in Newport, RI, and used international ritualistic signs, code words and a secret-grip handshake to identify himself as a brother Freemason.
Worth was offered the substantial sum of three million dollars to execute the plan. His salary was to be $100,000 and the remainder was to be used for raising and paying an army. But nothing came of it. Before any action could be taken, the War Dept. transferred Worth back to Texas and he died of cholera there not long after he arrived. But the conspirators were not deterred. They managed to get 400 men together on an island in the Gulf in preparation for an invasion of Cuba. Zachary Taylor (not a Freemason) somehow caught wind of the plot and managed to stop the planned invasion with, in Sullivan's words, "a few strokes of his pen". Some of them did get to Cuba, but didn't manage to spark the rebellion they'd hoped for. (Totally off-topic, it would be interesting to look into the parallels between this failed invasion and the Bay of Pigs). In 1851, the same group again managed to land on Cuba's shores, only to be routed; the survivors were executed or enslaved.
Cuba wouldn't gain independence until 1902, but its flag is telling:
They incorporated Masonic emblems in the design of their flag and agreed to use the red, white, and blue tricolor of liberty. Master Mason Miguel Teurbe Tolon drew three oblong horizontal blue stripes, separated by two white stripes, to represent the three regions into which Spain divided Cuba. Lopez superimposed on the banner's left an equilateral triangle, resembling a Master Mason's apron, "for besides its Masonic significance it is also a striking geometrical figure." He rejected placing the Masonic All-Seeing Eye in the center of the triangle, as it was difficult to embroider. Instead, they used "the Five-pointed Star of the Texas flag because it also carries a symbolic meaning," representing the Masonic five points of fellowship.
In 1810 a group of Freemason planters had established an independent republic in present-day Louisiana. In the same year, another group of Freemason planters also tried to achieve the very same goal in Cuba. In 1810, the Mexican Revolution also began, incited and led by Freemasons. Is it so wacky to think that maybe these events were coordinated by the same group of people? As we shall later see, in every case a shadowy group of New Orleans Freemasons were implicated in these events.
The Havana Club attempted a third invasion of Cuba, to head off the abolition of slavery and the destruction of their economic privilege. In the meantime, Freemasons had formed the Republic of Texas, accepting annexation to the US ten years after on the condition that slavery be permitted to continue. Another provision was that "up to four additional states could be created from Texas' territory with the consent of the State of Texas (and that new states north of the Missouri Compromise Line would be free states)." It's hard not to see a direct line from one group to another, all using the Lone Star as their symbol. The creation of new slave-holding states in the Texas plan, for example, sounds a lot like the goal of the Knights of the Golden Circle, the Havana Club, the filibusters, the CSA....
The "Golden Circle" was to be
....centered in Havana and was 2,400 miles (3,900 km) in diameter. It included northern South America, most of Mexico, all of Central America, Cuba, Haiti/Dominican Republic and most other Caribbean islands, and the American South. In the United States, the circle's northern border roughly coincided with the Mason-Dixon line, and within it were included such cities as Washington D.C., St. Louis, and Pittsburgh of the US, and Mexico City and Panama City (and most of those countries' areas).
At the outbreak of the Civil War, however, the KGC focused its efforts on supporting the Confederacy through a variety of direct and subversive actions: providing materiel and troops, stirring up anti-war sentiment in the North, fomenting rebellion in the Northwest....
After the Civil War, many of the defeated Confederates moved and set up operations in Cuba and Brazil, where slavery was still legal until the 1880's. In Brazil they and their descendants are known as Confederados. The dream of the Golden Circle didn't die with the Confederacy.
During the course of my investigations I came across the story of William Walker, yet another Freemason filibuster who attempted to establish slave-holding Republics in Mexico and Central America.
His first attempt was in Mexico:
In the summer of 1853, Walker traveled to Guaymas, seeking a grant from the government of Mexico to create a colony that would serve as a fortified frontier, protecting US soil from Indian raids. Mexico refused, and Walker returned to San Francisco determined to obtain his colony, regardless of Mexico's position. He began recruiting from amongst American supporters of slavery and the Manifest Destiny Doctrine, mostly inhabitants of Kentucky and Tennessee. His intentions then changed from forming a buffer colony to establishing an independent Republic of Sonora, which might eventually take its place as a part of the American Union (as had been the case previously with the Republic of Texas).
Like some kind of Sam Peckinpah film, Walker actually succeeded in capturing La Paz with only 45 men and declared a Republic of Lower California, putting it under the laws of Louisiana so that slavery would be legal. He never controlled Sonora, but that didn't stop him from pronouncing Baja California part of the Republic of Sonora. Even though other men joined him, Walker was obliged to retreat for lack of supplies and the unsurprising resistance by Mexican troops. His plan strikes me as being a pinnacle of optimism, to put it mildly.
After his defeat, Walker was put on trial and acquitted. He was down but not out, and set his sights on Central America.
Walker sailed to Nicaragua from San Francisco on May 3, 1855, with approximately 60 men. Upon landing, his group was reinforced by 170 locals and about 100 Americans, including the well-known explorer and journalist Charles Wilkins Webber (a veteran of the Texas Revolution) and the English adventurer Charles Frederick Henningsen. I'm not sure if Henningsen was a Freemason, but he apparently was a "warm, personal" friend of Albert Pike, "who looked after his welfare" when Henningsen was older and in diminished circumstances. (References to Pike remain elusive in the works I've consulted. De la Cova's essay mentions his name in a footnote, but only as the subject heading in 10,000 Famous Freemasons; the reference isn't to Pike. His name does not appear at all in the books I've consulted about the Texas Revolution).
Walker's Flag of Nicaragua should look familiar:
His time in Nicaragua was turbulent and difficult to summarize quickly. I'll just quote the essentials
[Walker] set himself up as President of Nicaragua, after conducting a fraudulent election. He was inaugurated on July 12, 1856, and soon launched an Americanization program, reinstating slavery, declaring English an official language and reorganizing currency and fiscal policy to encourage immigration from the United States. Realizing that his position was becoming precarious, he sought support from the Southerners in the U.S. by recasting his campaign as a fight to spread the institution of black slavery, which many American Southern businessmen saw as the basis of their agrarian economy. With this in mind, Walker revoked Nicaragua's emancipation edict of 1824. This move did increase Walker's popularity in the South and attracted the attention of Pierre Soulé, an influential New Orleans politician [and Freemason], who campaigned to raise support for Walker's war. Nevertheless, Walker's army, weakened by an epidemic of cholera and massive defections, was no match for the Central American coalition....
On May 1, 1857, Walker surrendered to Commander Charles Henry Davis of the United States Navy under the pressure of the Central American armies, and was repatriated. Upon disembarking in New York City, he was greeted as a hero, but he alienated public opinion when he blamed his defeat on the U.S. Navy.
Walker set off for another aborted mission six months later. In 1860, during yet another scheme, this time in Honduras, he was captured and executed shortly thereafter.
By this time, a pattern was quite obvious. Southern Freemasons were hell bent on creating a new Republic in Latin America for mercantile reasons that depended upon the extension of slavery.
With this post I realize that I may just be a victim of confirmation bias, cherry-picking facts and Freemasons and ignoring the rest. For example, I've come across a book titled The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854-1861. It is a more detailed examination of this topic than I could ever hope to achieve. I don't have a hard copy of the book, but it would appear from the searches I've made in in Google Books that Freemasonry and Pike aren't mentioned in these books at all. One could argue that this is a good indication that I'm deluded. On the other hand, if what I've managed to cobble together has any truth to it, the exclusion of Freemasonry from a discussion of the "Caribbean Empire" would constitute a serious if not fatal flaw in the author's approach.
This latter proposition is not only supported by the work of de la Cova, but at least two other books which feature extensive discussion of what are clearly a Masonic conspiracies, to use a totally loaded expression; these books are not hysterical anti-Masonic rants, but rather staid, academic works of peer-reviewed scholarship.
Take for example the following paragraphs from "Texas and the Spread of That Troublesome Secessionist Spirit through the Gulf of Mexico Basin.":
Easily the most important meeting ground of filibusters, financiers, and politicians of all ethnicities and the key vehicle for the dissemination of political ideas was Freemasonry. Indeed, Freemasons played leading roles in every secessionist movement around the Gulf of Mexico (and elsewhere) from the Florida rebellion of 1810 and the Republic of Texas of 1836 to the Cuban separatist attempts of the late 1840s and early 1850s. As Antonio Rafael de la Cova has shown, the fraternity’s own ideology impelled its members to join such movements; it was their "sworn obligation" as he notes. For instance, Scottish Rite Masons attaining the ninth and tenth degrees vowed to assist "those who struggle against oppression" and in the thirty-second degree swore to become “"soldiers of freedom" and wage war against tyranny and despotism.
There was also an institutional dimension to the filibustering and separatist ventures of the Freemasons. Masonic lodges became privileged sites where members could meet one another regularly, exchange information, and organize rebellions and movements without fear of reprisal. Masons could provide introductions to other Masons occupying important posts, and they were always able to recognize each other through secret signs and rely on one another, as they swore on the Bible to "'always aid and assist all poor, distressed, worthy Master Masons' and to 'fly to his relief' upon seeing the Grand Hailing Sign of Distress." In the absence of political parties within the Spanish Empire in the 1800s and 1810s (and even after parties were established in Mexico in the 1820s), it was only natural that the more established lodges and grand lodges in Louisiana and elsewhere in the South would sponsor new lodges all around the Gulf of Mexico basin. Grand lodges of Louisiana and South Carolina chartered some of the earliest lodges in Cuba, and prominent Louisiana Masons--beginning with Stephen F. Austin of the Louisiana no. 109 Lodge--became influential colonists and politicians in Coahuila and Texas. Even the symbols employed in these insurrections and breakaway republics were of Masonic inspiration. The ubiquitous lone star--the five-pointed star that was in the symbol of the West Florida Republic, the Texas Republic, and the proposed project to liberate Cuba in 1848-49--represented the Masonic five points of fellowship. While Freemasons represented small minorities in each of the gulf provinces and colonies, they predominated in all filibustering/separatist movements during the first half of the nineteenth century. (Résendez, 198-199)
Chapter 2 of Miller's New Orleans and the Texas Revolution is dedicated to detailing the machinations of the group of Freemasons in New Orleans who financed and helped foment revolution in Texas, along with the group's links to Mexican Freemasons via Zavala. The details are stunning--addresses, dates of meetings, etc.--and leave no doubt that the Texas Revolution and the foundation of the Republic of Texas was in large part a Masonic conspiracy. That sounds fantastic, but it's a legitimate if sensational way of phrasing it.
When we recall that New Orleans politician (and Freemason) Pierre Soulé had campaigned on behalf of William Walker we edge closer to the conclusion that there was a sustained and concerted effort by Freemasons to create the Golden Circle, providing further evidence that the motivation was, as with Cuba's Havana Club, economic. As Miller concludes:
Commercial exploitation and land speculation were certainly greater forces behind any meetings with Texian representatives with New Orleans business men and capitalists.
The disturbing fact remains that slavery was an essential component of this economic system. As I suspected, the early attempts to create these republics, from West Florida to Texas to Nicaragua--in parallel (or concert) with the efforts of the KGC--was to propagate slavery out of fears that abolition in the US would eventually destroy the economic fortunes of the planters and land speculators behind the revolutionaries and filibusters.
Southerners had been eyeing Texas as an extension of the cotton kingdom since the early 1800s. Stephen F. Austin remarked in 1829 to Governor Augustin Viesca that he predicted that the Southern states would eventually secede from the United States. Ramón Musquiz, jefe politico of San Antonio de Béxar, wrote to the governor of Coahuila y Texas on March 11, 1833, discussing the affairs in Texas. He predicted that the Southern states would attempt to secede from the United States and “[t]he acquisition of Texas or its attachment to them when they make their attempt, would enlarge the territory belonging to the new government and because [of] this one acquisition or attachment, the new state would doubtless gain greater wealth than it would receive from the other states”.
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Stephen E Austin also believed that Louisiana had a vested interest in what happened to Texas. Writing to his cousin Mary Austin Holly from New Orleans in August, 1835, Austin stated that, “It is very evident that Texas should be effectually and fully, Americanized--that is--settled by a population that will harmonize with their neighbors to the East. . . . Texas must be a slave country. It is no longer a matter of doubt. The interest of Louisiana requires that it should be. A population of fanatical abolitionists in Texas would have a very dangerous and pernicious influence on the overgrown slave population of that state. (Miller, 31-32)
"Southerners had been eyeing Texas as an extension of the cotton kingdom since the early 1800s." Likewise Cuba, Mexico itself and Central America.
Another interesting thing with this whole Golden Circle/Slave Republic filibuster scheming is it's link with the insurrections against Spain farther south. In ¡Viva la Revolución! I mentioned that the flag of Chile as having been inspired by the US flag. More strikingly, it is essentially the flag of the great State of Texas:
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| Flag of Chile, aka La Estrella Solitaria -- "The Lone Star", 1817 |
|
| Texas Flag aka The Lone Star Flag. |
The adoption of the Chilean flag is usually attributed to José Ignacio Zenteno del Pozo y Silva, Chilean Minister of War and Navy 1817-1822 under Bernardo O'Higgins, although the actual designer is said to have been one Antonio Arcos y Arjona.
Need we add that O'Higgins and Zenteno were Freemasons and members of the clandestine Lautaro Lodge?
Likewise Poinsett, who had served past Master of Recovery Lodge #31, Greenville, SC, and was a member of Solomon's Lodge, Charleston.
As for Arcos y Arjona, at least one source claims "ses liens avec les loges maçonniques espagnoles sont connus." ("His links with Masonic Lodges are known").
After Robert Poinsett left Chile and returned to the United States, he was appointed the first U.S. ambassador to Mexico in 1825, after having served as a special envoy in 1822-23. As ambassador, he became mixed up in the country’s political turmoil and was recalled in 1830. Apparently, one reason behind his recall, which he himself requested, was the result of a Masonic dispute, with the Mexican Scottish Rite claiming he was promoting the York Rite at their expense. We'll take a closer look at this in a moment....
Poinsett was also a "lifelong" friend of Zavala, having met him in 1822 (Henson, 28). Poinsett was intimately involved in facilitating his voyage in the US to meet with investors interested in profiting from land acquisition in Texas (Henson, 46). Poinsett was in the thick of Masonic intrigues over a period of thirty years, intimately involved in three revolutions in both hemispheres of the Americas.
Poinsett may have been the first to suggest the use of the Lone Star, in Chile, but it was used in Texas about the same time. The earliest Texas Lone Star Flag was used by Dr. James Long, who led filibuster expeditions into Mexico as early as 1819. He even set up an early attempt at a Republic of Texas, which lasted a month. On a second expedition, he had more success, but was eventually forced to surrender and executed in Mexico in 1821. In these he was joined by José Félix Trespalacios. According to Edward Miller, they both met with the very same groups of merchants and capitalists (and New Orleans Freemasons) that Austin and Zavala met with some 15 years later for their more successful attempt to set up a Republic of Texas. Long and Trespalacios clearly ran in Masonic circles, but if they themselves were Freemasons, I cannot determine.
Long's first flag is the one pictured above, but for his second expedition in 1820, he used the same flag which would be used at the same time for the Republic of West Florida; a lone white star. The only difference was that he favored a red field as opposed to blue.
According to one website
Among his "Supreme Council" of advisers were Stephen Barker, Horatio Bigelow, John G. Burnet, Hamlin Cook, J. Child, Peter Samuel Davenport ---, Pedro Procello, John Sibley ---, W.W. Walker, and Bernardo Gutiérrez, former commander of the Republican Army of the North. In addition to Long, Vicente Tarin, former Commandant of the Second Flying Company of Alamo de Parras and anti-Spanish resistance leader in Texas, was a signatory to Dr. Long's Declaration of Independence where he is identified as "Secretary."
How many of these men were Freemasons?
As a brief aside, I should mention that in addition to these filibuster expeditions, one prior attempt to secede from Mexico was attempted by Anglo settlers about ten years before the Texas Revolution.
The Fredonian Rebellion took place between December 1826 and January 1827, led by Haden (or Hayden) and Benjamin Edwards. The rebels declared the short-lived Fredonian Republic built around the colony led by older brother Haden, who was a Freemason, but that didn't stop fellow Freemason Stephen Austin from condemning Edwards' actions and actively helped quell it by sending armed men from his colony to aid the Mexican army. Perhaps Austin feared Edwards would ruin his own plans; his correspondence indicates he felt it "premature." Interestingly, the Fredonian flag did not feature a Lone Star. A Freemason, but not the right kind?
After his defeat, the Edwards brothers fled to Louisiana, but Haden
returned to Texas during the Texas Revolution and made his home in Nacogdoches until his death, on August 14, 1849. Edwards was the first worshipful master of Milam Lodge No. 2 when it was organized in 1837, a fact that indicates his status in the Anglo leadership. Until his death he was engaged in the land business.
The filibusters were essentially mercenaries attempting to establish slave-holding republics by force. But in Mexico there was another kind of colonist called an "empresario". The empresarios were settlers who had been granted the right to form colonies in Mexico in exchange for recruiting settlers and assuming responsibility for their welfare. Many of the leaders of the Texas Revolution had been empresarios: Austin, Burnet and Zavala among them. Haden Edwards had been an empresario.
Large tracts of land were at stake and, as one can imagine, the potential for fortune lured many adventurers. In Masonic connections, pecuniary interests, and institutional development along Mexico's far north Andrés Reséndez reports that although Freemason accounted for less than ten percent of empresario-led colonists, more than half of the land grants given to empresarios were granted to Freemasons. With those kinds of numbers, it was inevitable that conflicts arose between Masonic camps. In Mexico, this was played out in the rivalry between the York and Scottish Rites. This reflected a larger conflict between centralists and federalists; the Scottish, or "escocés" favored tighter control over the colonists, including requirements made law in 1824 that they speak Spanish and practice Catholicism. "Yorkinos" favored less restrictive and less centralist policies; unrestricted immigration, religious freedom, free trade, etc.. Thus, when Poinsett petitioned for the creation of more York Rite lodges, he was, perhaps unintentionally, promoting a federalist agenda. His good friend Zavala, for example, received a land grant far larger than the usually-imposed limit.
Reséndez believes that these conflicting interests between the landed classes were the prelude to the civil war which was the Texas Revolution. In this case the fears of the escocés were borne out as a result of a less restrictive policy regarding Anglo immigration to Texas. Poinsett personally opposed slavery, but by favoring the Yorkinos he was in effect supporting the goals of slaveholders.
The aforementioned Colonization Law of 1824 provoked the Fredonian Rebellion. It is telling that Milam Lodge, led by Haden, was one of the three Lodges from which the Grand Lodge of Texas was formed in 1849; although dropped in 1858, the original Constitution affirmed that the Texas Grand Lodge were York Rite Masons. Austin, who helped suppress the rebellion, was affiliated with the Scottish Rite; his involvement thus reflects the conflict between the Rites as part of the wider conflict of competing landed interests. As the "Father of Texas" Austin clearly had no problem with revolution, he merely thought Edwards was being hastily imprudent to the point of madness. That said, the contradictory fact remains that ten years after the Edwards debacle, Austin's support for revolution was prompted by Mexico's shift from a federalist to a centralist model.
According to one history, Benjamin Edwards "was one of those who viewed the whole movement of immigrants into Texas as a prelude to ultimate annexation of the territory to the United States." He too worried if their actions might be premature. Bear in mind that this York/Scottish divide didn't reflect the situation the the United States. Nicholas A. Sterne, a friend of Sam Houston, "While still in New Orleans [had] joined the Masonic lodge, including the Scottish Rite, an affiliation of great importance to him in later years." Sterne was an active player in the Fredonian Rebellion and was arrested for smuggling arms and sentenced to death. His Masonic affiliation saved his life.
This Mexican federalist/centralist conflict parallels the underlying conflict of America's own Civil War. Ironically the Southern Jurisdiction is headquartered in Washington, D.C. and Pike, it's charismatic leader for over 30 years, is the only Confederate general honored by a statue in the capital city of the Union he fought against. Pike, incidentally, lived in New Orleans between 1853 and 1857. During the Civil War, Pike was the Confederacy's envoy to the Native American tribes of the area and he made several contact with the Creeks and Cherokees. Haden Edwards had also worked with the Creek and Cherokee Indians, to the extent that the flag he used, red and white bands emblazoned with the word "Independence", symbolized the red and the white man. The 50+ percent of land grants granted to Freemason's during Edwards' day included grants to Anglo-Americans, Mexicans and Indians.
I found an interesting text here and I'd like to quote it at some length. As I've said, I find it unlikely that some of the filibusters and impresarios weren't working in conjunction with members of the Knights of the Golden Circle. While I'd hesitate to say these filibuster expeditions were all directed by the KGC, they certainly shared the very same aims.
From its earliest roots in the Southern Rights Clubs in 1835, the Knights of the Golden Circle was to become the most powerful secret and subversive organization in the history of the United States with members in every state and territory before the end of the Civil War....
One little-known historical fact that is presented in the records from the 1860 K.G.C. convention is that the Knights had their own well-organized army in 1860, before the Civil War had even begun, so they were prepared in the event of war with the North. In May of 1860 the Knights of the Golden Circle reported a total membership of 48,000 men from the North, who supported "the constitutional rights of the South," as well as men from the South, with an army of "less than 14,000 men" and new recruits joining at a rapid rate.
Shortly before the Civil War began, the state of Texas was the greatest source of this organization's strength. Texas was home for at least thirty-two K.G.C. castles in twenty-seven counties, including the towns of San Antonio, Marshall, Canton, and Castroville. Evidence suggests that San Antonio may have served as the organization’s national headquarters for a time.
The KGC re-branded itself as the Order of American Knights in 1863 and then again as the Order of the Sons of Liberty in 1864. I wonder if ex-Knights were among the six Confederate veterans who founded the KKK in 1865? The Ku Klux Klan is believed to have taken it's name from the Greek κύκλος, meaning...."circle"!
The text quoted above gives a bit of detail about their numbers and the extent of their power. Later in the war they talked of fomenting rebellion in the Old Northwest as wells as using agents to agitate for pacifism and draft riots in the North. Sam Houston is said to have been a member, as well as Jesse James. Perhaps the most sinister alleged member is John Wilkes Booth. The veracity of these claims is (perhaps) impossible to prove, but the fact is that with Houston and Booth at least, their known views correspond neatly with the stated goals of the KGC.
The Masonic character of the KGC is without doubt: three degrees, oaths, grips, hailing signs. This would suggest that some members had a familiarity with Freemasonry, at the very least. The KGC, however, unlike the Freemasons, were a secret society in the true sense of the word. Lodges don't hide their meeting places and Masons don't hide their membership. This is how we know all of the guys we've discussed were Freemasons. The Knights were actively opposing the US government during wartime. You were unlikely to see a Knight sporting a KGC ring or enamel badge on their buggy. So, we can only surmise to which extent Masons were implicated in the KGC. As to whether or not it was an outgrowth of Freemasonry itself, while some would easily jump to that conclusion, nothing I have read so far leads me to do the same.
I would expect to find large numbers, however, of Masons as members and leaders of the KGC, given the Masonic involvement in parallel filibuster expeditions in Florida, Texas and Cuba. Briefly put, the Masonic brotherhood in the South facilitated these schemes and used the cover and secret modes of recognition Freemasonry offered in order to carry out actions of questionable legality, schemes which would certainly have been frowned upon by the US government.
A lot of questions linger. Is the KGC older than 1854 or did it, as widely believed, evolve from earlier groups sympathetic to slavery and the South? Was there a central organization behind the various filibuster expeditions, or did they simply involve the same actors over a period of some decades? Wouldn't new contenders have wanted to talk to the folks who showed interest previously, or who had already tried? Was the KGC Masonic? Was Albert Pike a Knight? Was the KKK founded by ex-Knights? Was this all about land and money, or was it an ongoing series of strikes against Catholic Spain? Or both? Were the 9th and 10th degrees of the Scottish Rite, which include the obligation to assist "those who struggle against oppression" and the 32nd degree obligation to become "soldiers of freedom" against despotism subordinate to the desire to maintain a ruling class's economic privileges? Do these oaths have any value when, in addition to creating republics with Constitutional-style liberties, they also included the propagation of slavery? Does that in turn render the US constitution worthless?
The Spanish-American War is sometimes cited as the last of the filibuster wars. It certainly was a huge blow to Spain, the final nail in the imperial coffin. Three important territories acquired as a result of this war adopted flags incorporating Masonic elements in their design (Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines). Cuba may well have been the last Lone Star Republic. Many of the leaders and generals in the independence struggle were Freemasons:
"The Cuban Freemasonry movement was influenced by the principles of the French Revolution - "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity" - as well as the Masons' main guidelines: God, Reason, Virtue."
Spain had already been weakened by the wars of independence led by Freemasons in the early 19th century and Americans were eager to rid Cuba of the Spanish as the one exception to the Monroe Doctrine, formulated by President and Freemason James Monroe. "Apostle" of Cuban Independence José Marti was also a Freemason. Marti knew that he would have to defeat the Spanish, but he was also wary of US involvement, for he knew the Cubans might have to fight for independence from another colonial power, the US. Cuba was ceded to the US in the wake of the war, but the treaty was ignored by President (and Freemason) Teddy Roosevelt; Cuba was granted independence in 1902, although the US retained the right to have some measure of control over Cuban financial and foreign policy.
The Filipinos also feared falling into the clutches of another colonial power when the US entered into war against Spain in 1898. The Filipinos had already been fighting for independence for a few years at that point. The revolt against the Spanish empire had been lead by the Katipunan, a secret society whose organization and rituals were influenced by Freemasonry and whose key leadership consisted of Freemasons. The national hero of the Philippines, Freemason Andrés Bonifacio, flew a battle flag any filibuster would have gladly flown: a field of red emblazoned with a single white sun, or star, with the acronym "K.K.K." (for Kataas-taasan, Kagalang-galang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan (Highest and Most Honorable Society of the Children of the Nation). They would not continue to lead the fight against the US, who basically replaced the Spanish, due to internal schisms and dissension. Their fears were not ungrounded, and the Philippines were not granted formal independence until 1946 and included one war between American occupiers and Filipino revolutionaries between 1899 and 1902.
The Spanish-American War has also been called the first of America's imperialist wars. The War inaugurated at the beginning of "America's Century" where the American economic model rose ascendant over the world. It was not the feudal agricultural model envisioned by the filibusters, the KGC and Southern economic interests, but that of the industrial North. The protection of US economic interests has played out in nearly every country in the Caribbean and Latin America. The dreams of a Golden Circle may seem far out, but American economic elites have often had their way south of the US border. Of course, this is no longer carried out under the cloak of Freemasonry but of groups, think tanks, commissions and boardrooms. None dare call it conspiracy and to be frank, there's no need when it can rightfully be referred to as "business as usual."
Further reading:
De La Cova, Rafael. "Filibusters and Freemasons: The Sworn Obligation." Journal of the Early Republic 17.1 (1997).
Denslow, William R. 10,000 Famous Freemasons. Richmond: Macoy Publishing & Masonic Supply Co., Inc., 1957.
Henson, Margaret Swett. Lorenzo De Zavala: The Pragmatic Idealist. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1996.
May, Robert E. The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854-1861. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.
Miller, Edward L. New Orleans and the Texas Revolution. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004.
Résendez, Andréz. "Masonic connections, pecuniary interests, and institutional development along Mexico's far north." The Divine Charter: Constitutionalism and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Mexico. Denton: Texas State Historical Association, 2007. 109-132
Résendez, Andréz. "Texas and the Spread of That Troublesome Secessionist Spirit through the Gulf of Mexico Basin." Secession As an International Phenomenon: From America's Civil War to Contemporary Separatist Movements. Don H. Doyle. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010. 198-199.
Report of the Judge Advocate General on "The Order of American Knights," alias "The Sons of Liberty". A western conspiracy in aid of the Southern Rebellion. Washington, D.C.: Daily Chronicle Print, 1864.
According to one website
Among his "Supreme Council" of advisers were Stephen Barker, Horatio Bigelow, John G. Burnet, Hamlin Cook, J. Child, Peter Samuel Davenport ---, Pedro Procello, John Sibley ---, W.W. Walker, and Bernardo Gutiérrez, former commander of the Republican Army of the North. In addition to Long, Vicente Tarin, former Commandant of the Second Flying Company of Alamo de Parras and anti-Spanish resistance leader in Texas, was a signatory to Dr. Long's Declaration of Independence where he is identified as "Secretary."
How many of these men were Freemasons?
As a brief aside, I should mention that in addition to these filibuster expeditions, one prior attempt to secede from Mexico was attempted by Anglo settlers about ten years before the Texas Revolution.
The Fredonian Rebellion took place between December 1826 and January 1827, led by Haden (or Hayden) and Benjamin Edwards. The rebels declared the short-lived Fredonian Republic built around the colony led by older brother Haden, who was a Freemason, but that didn't stop fellow Freemason Stephen Austin from condemning Edwards' actions and actively helped quell it by sending armed men from his colony to aid the Mexican army. Perhaps Austin feared Edwards would ruin his own plans; his correspondence indicates he felt it "premature." Interestingly, the Fredonian flag did not feature a Lone Star. A Freemason, but not the right kind?
After his defeat, the Edwards brothers fled to Louisiana, but Haden
returned to Texas during the Texas Revolution and made his home in Nacogdoches until his death, on August 14, 1849. Edwards was the first worshipful master of Milam Lodge No. 2 when it was organized in 1837, a fact that indicates his status in the Anglo leadership. Until his death he was engaged in the land business.
The filibusters were essentially mercenaries attempting to establish slave-holding republics by force. But in Mexico there was another kind of colonist called an "empresario". The empresarios were settlers who had been granted the right to form colonies in Mexico in exchange for recruiting settlers and assuming responsibility for their welfare. Many of the leaders of the Texas Revolution had been empresarios: Austin, Burnet and Zavala among them. Haden Edwards had been an empresario.
Large tracts of land were at stake and, as one can imagine, the potential for fortune lured many adventurers. In Masonic connections, pecuniary interests, and institutional development along Mexico's far north Andrés Reséndez reports that although Freemason accounted for less than ten percent of empresario-led colonists, more than half of the land grants given to empresarios were granted to Freemasons. With those kinds of numbers, it was inevitable that conflicts arose between Masonic camps. In Mexico, this was played out in the rivalry between the York and Scottish Rites. This reflected a larger conflict between centralists and federalists; the Scottish, or "escocés" favored tighter control over the colonists, including requirements made law in 1824 that they speak Spanish and practice Catholicism. "Yorkinos" favored less restrictive and less centralist policies; unrestricted immigration, religious freedom, free trade, etc.. Thus, when Poinsett petitioned for the creation of more York Rite lodges, he was, perhaps unintentionally, promoting a federalist agenda. His good friend Zavala, for example, received a land grant far larger than the usually-imposed limit.
Reséndez believes that these conflicting interests between the landed classes were the prelude to the civil war which was the Texas Revolution. In this case the fears of the escocés were borne out as a result of a less restrictive policy regarding Anglo immigration to Texas. Poinsett personally opposed slavery, but by favoring the Yorkinos he was in effect supporting the goals of slaveholders.
The aforementioned Colonization Law of 1824 provoked the Fredonian Rebellion. It is telling that Milam Lodge, led by Haden, was one of the three Lodges from which the Grand Lodge of Texas was formed in 1849; although dropped in 1858, the original Constitution affirmed that the Texas Grand Lodge were York Rite Masons. Austin, who helped suppress the rebellion, was affiliated with the Scottish Rite; his involvement thus reflects the conflict between the Rites as part of the wider conflict of competing landed interests. As the "Father of Texas" Austin clearly had no problem with revolution, he merely thought Edwards was being hastily imprudent to the point of madness. That said, the contradictory fact remains that ten years after the Edwards debacle, Austin's support for revolution was prompted by Mexico's shift from a federalist to a centralist model.
According to one history, Benjamin Edwards "was one of those who viewed the whole movement of immigrants into Texas as a prelude to ultimate annexation of the territory to the United States." He too worried if their actions might be premature. Bear in mind that this York/Scottish divide didn't reflect the situation the the United States. Nicholas A. Sterne, a friend of Sam Houston, "While still in New Orleans [had] joined the Masonic lodge, including the Scottish Rite, an affiliation of great importance to him in later years." Sterne was an active player in the Fredonian Rebellion and was arrested for smuggling arms and sentenced to death. His Masonic affiliation saved his life.
This Mexican federalist/centralist conflict parallels the underlying conflict of America's own Civil War. Ironically the Southern Jurisdiction is headquartered in Washington, D.C. and Pike, it's charismatic leader for over 30 years, is the only Confederate general honored by a statue in the capital city of the Union he fought against. Pike, incidentally, lived in New Orleans between 1853 and 1857. During the Civil War, Pike was the Confederacy's envoy to the Native American tribes of the area and he made several contact with the Creeks and Cherokees. Haden Edwards had also worked with the Creek and Cherokee Indians, to the extent that the flag he used, red and white bands emblazoned with the word "Independence", symbolized the red and the white man. The 50+ percent of land grants granted to Freemason's during Edwards' day included grants to Anglo-Americans, Mexicans and Indians.
I found an interesting text here and I'd like to quote it at some length. As I've said, I find it unlikely that some of the filibusters and impresarios weren't working in conjunction with members of the Knights of the Golden Circle. While I'd hesitate to say these filibuster expeditions were all directed by the KGC, they certainly shared the very same aims.
From its earliest roots in the Southern Rights Clubs in 1835, the Knights of the Golden Circle was to become the most powerful secret and subversive organization in the history of the United States with members in every state and territory before the end of the Civil War....
One little-known historical fact that is presented in the records from the 1860 K.G.C. convention is that the Knights had their own well-organized army in 1860, before the Civil War had even begun, so they were prepared in the event of war with the North. In May of 1860 the Knights of the Golden Circle reported a total membership of 48,000 men from the North, who supported "the constitutional rights of the South," as well as men from the South, with an army of "less than 14,000 men" and new recruits joining at a rapid rate.
Shortly before the Civil War began, the state of Texas was the greatest source of this organization's strength. Texas was home for at least thirty-two K.G.C. castles in twenty-seven counties, including the towns of San Antonio, Marshall, Canton, and Castroville. Evidence suggests that San Antonio may have served as the organization’s national headquarters for a time.
The KGC re-branded itself as the Order of American Knights in 1863 and then again as the Order of the Sons of Liberty in 1864. I wonder if ex-Knights were among the six Confederate veterans who founded the KKK in 1865? The Ku Klux Klan is believed to have taken it's name from the Greek κύκλος, meaning...."circle"!
The text quoted above gives a bit of detail about their numbers and the extent of their power. Later in the war they talked of fomenting rebellion in the Old Northwest as wells as using agents to agitate for pacifism and draft riots in the North. Sam Houston is said to have been a member, as well as Jesse James. Perhaps the most sinister alleged member is John Wilkes Booth. The veracity of these claims is (perhaps) impossible to prove, but the fact is that with Houston and Booth at least, their known views correspond neatly with the stated goals of the KGC.
The Masonic character of the KGC is without doubt: three degrees, oaths, grips, hailing signs. This would suggest that some members had a familiarity with Freemasonry, at the very least. The KGC, however, unlike the Freemasons, were a secret society in the true sense of the word. Lodges don't hide their meeting places and Masons don't hide their membership. This is how we know all of the guys we've discussed were Freemasons. The Knights were actively opposing the US government during wartime. You were unlikely to see a Knight sporting a KGC ring or enamel badge on their buggy. So, we can only surmise to which extent Masons were implicated in the KGC. As to whether or not it was an outgrowth of Freemasonry itself, while some would easily jump to that conclusion, nothing I have read so far leads me to do the same.
I would expect to find large numbers, however, of Masons as members and leaders of the KGC, given the Masonic involvement in parallel filibuster expeditions in Florida, Texas and Cuba. Briefly put, the Masonic brotherhood in the South facilitated these schemes and used the cover and secret modes of recognition Freemasonry offered in order to carry out actions of questionable legality, schemes which would certainly have been frowned upon by the US government.
A lot of questions linger. Is the KGC older than 1854 or did it, as widely believed, evolve from earlier groups sympathetic to slavery and the South? Was there a central organization behind the various filibuster expeditions, or did they simply involve the same actors over a period of some decades? Wouldn't new contenders have wanted to talk to the folks who showed interest previously, or who had already tried? Was the KGC Masonic? Was Albert Pike a Knight? Was the KKK founded by ex-Knights? Was this all about land and money, or was it an ongoing series of strikes against Catholic Spain? Or both? Were the 9th and 10th degrees of the Scottish Rite, which include the obligation to assist "those who struggle against oppression" and the 32nd degree obligation to become "soldiers of freedom" against despotism subordinate to the desire to maintain a ruling class's economic privileges? Do these oaths have any value when, in addition to creating republics with Constitutional-style liberties, they also included the propagation of slavery? Does that in turn render the US constitution worthless?
The Spanish-American War is sometimes cited as the last of the filibuster wars. It certainly was a huge blow to Spain, the final nail in the imperial coffin. Three important territories acquired as a result of this war adopted flags incorporating Masonic elements in their design (Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines). Cuba may well have been the last Lone Star Republic. Many of the leaders and generals in the independence struggle were Freemasons:
"The Cuban Freemasonry movement was influenced by the principles of the French Revolution - "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity" - as well as the Masons' main guidelines: God, Reason, Virtue."
Spain had already been weakened by the wars of independence led by Freemasons in the early 19th century and Americans were eager to rid Cuba of the Spanish as the one exception to the Monroe Doctrine, formulated by President and Freemason James Monroe. "Apostle" of Cuban Independence José Marti was also a Freemason. Marti knew that he would have to defeat the Spanish, but he was also wary of US involvement, for he knew the Cubans might have to fight for independence from another colonial power, the US. Cuba was ceded to the US in the wake of the war, but the treaty was ignored by President (and Freemason) Teddy Roosevelt; Cuba was granted independence in 1902, although the US retained the right to have some measure of control over Cuban financial and foreign policy.
The Filipinos also feared falling into the clutches of another colonial power when the US entered into war against Spain in 1898. The Filipinos had already been fighting for independence for a few years at that point. The revolt against the Spanish empire had been lead by the Katipunan, a secret society whose organization and rituals were influenced by Freemasonry and whose key leadership consisted of Freemasons. The national hero of the Philippines, Freemason Andrés Bonifacio, flew a battle flag any filibuster would have gladly flown: a field of red emblazoned with a single white sun, or star, with the acronym "K.K.K." (for Kataas-taasan, Kagalang-galang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan (Highest and Most Honorable Society of the Children of the Nation). They would not continue to lead the fight against the US, who basically replaced the Spanish, due to internal schisms and dissension. Their fears were not ungrounded, and the Philippines were not granted formal independence until 1946 and included one war between American occupiers and Filipino revolutionaries between 1899 and 1902.
The Spanish-American War has also been called the first of America's imperialist wars. The War inaugurated at the beginning of "America's Century" where the American economic model rose ascendant over the world. It was not the feudal agricultural model envisioned by the filibusters, the KGC and Southern economic interests, but that of the industrial North. The protection of US economic interests has played out in nearly every country in the Caribbean and Latin America. The dreams of a Golden Circle may seem far out, but American economic elites have often had their way south of the US border. Of course, this is no longer carried out under the cloak of Freemasonry but of groups, think tanks, commissions and boardrooms. None dare call it conspiracy and to be frank, there's no need when it can rightfully be referred to as "business as usual."
Further reading:
De La Cova, Rafael. "Filibusters and Freemasons: The Sworn Obligation." Journal of the Early Republic 17.1 (1997).
Denslow, William R. 10,000 Famous Freemasons. Richmond: Macoy Publishing & Masonic Supply Co., Inc., 1957.
Henson, Margaret Swett. Lorenzo De Zavala: The Pragmatic Idealist. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1996.
May, Robert E. The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854-1861. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.
Miller, Edward L. New Orleans and the Texas Revolution. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004.
Résendez, Andréz. "Masonic connections, pecuniary interests, and institutional development along Mexico's far north." The Divine Charter: Constitutionalism and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Mexico. Denton: Texas State Historical Association, 2007. 109-132
Résendez, Andréz. "Texas and the Spread of That Troublesome Secessionist Spirit through the Gulf of Mexico Basin." Secession As an International Phenomenon: From America's Civil War to Contemporary Separatist Movements. Don H. Doyle. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010. 198-199.
Report of the Judge Advocate General on "The Order of American Knights," alias "The Sons of Liberty". A western conspiracy in aid of the Southern Rebellion. Washington, D.C.: Daily Chronicle Print, 1864.
****
I have provided links to the full or (via Google Books) partial versions of some of the works I consulted for this post. If you're interested in further reading and are think you might want to buy the books, please consider using the links provided below.
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