Brothers in the Room, or the Freemasons Who Stood Near History
2026-11-04
Chromolithograph “Washington as a Mason”: George Washington in a Masonic apron and sash stands on a checkered floor beneath an arch inscribed with virtues, flanked by columns and small vignettes of scenes and portraits
Washington as a Mason, drawn by James Fuller Queen, printed in oil colours by P. S. Duval & Son, Philadelphia, 1867. Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
A walk through the documented Freemasons who stood near the great events of the last three centuries, from a borrowed Bible in New York to a suspended Grand Orient in Rio de Janeiro, and through the famous names that the internet keeps enrolling in lodges they never entered. The lodge was rarely the hidden hand. It was the room where ambitious men learned to meet.
Outside — “Sergeant! Sir! Salute! Salaam!”
Inside — “Brother,” an’ it doesn’t do no ’arm.
— Rudyard Kipling, “The Mother-Lodge”, The Seven Seas (1896)
There is a popular picture of the Freemason in history. He sits in a candlelit room behind a locked door, and from that room he moves kings like pieces on a board. Revolutions begin at his signal. Constitutions are drafted in his cipher. Every president, every liberator, every genius with a strange symbol somewhere in his biography is quietly added to the roll.
The truth is stranger, and in a sense more modest. Between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries the lodge became one of the few places where a printer could sit beside a marquis, where a Catholic officer could share a table with a Protestant merchant, where an apprentice of ideas could be heard by men far above his station. That made it a magnet for exactly the kind of people who end up in history books. It did not make it a government.
So this is a list, as promised, but a historian’s list. Every name below has been checked against the lodge records, Grand Lodge histories or serious scholarship that we have. Where the record is silent, I say so. Where a famous name has been claimed without evidence, he goes to the gallery of legends at the end, and he goes there with respect.
The thesis is simple: Freemasons were present at an astonishing number of famous events, but they were present as men, not as a machine. The lodge did not make history. It gathered the men who did.
[](#a-society-of-gentlemen-not-a-secret-government "Jump to this heading")A Society of Gentlemen, Not a Secret Government
Modern speculative Freemasonry is usually dated to 1717, when four London lodges formed what became the Grand Lodge of England. Within a generation lodges had spread across Europe and the colonies, carried by merchants, soldiers and diplomats. They offered conviviality, charity, a moral vocabulary drawn from the builder’s trade, and, crucially, a private space in an age when public assembly was watched.
That privacy is what fed the legend. A society that keeps its ceremonies to itself will always be suspected of keeping more than ceremonies. The Catholic Church condemned it from 1738 onward; absolutist governments distrusted it; and later conspiracy writers turned every coincidence of membership into proof of a plan.
But membership is not a plan.
The lodges were divided on almost everything that mattered politically. There were royalist lodges and republican lodges, lodges full of colonial officers and lodges full of colonial rebels. In the same war, brothers wore opposite uniforms. To read history as a Masonic project, one has to ignore all the Masons who lost.
What follows, then, is not a map of a conspiracy. It is a map of a sociability: who was really in the room, and what they were doing when history knocked.
[](#i-the-american-founders "Jump to this heading")I. The American Founders
I. George Washington. The best documented Mason among the American founders. He was initiated in Fredericksburg Lodge No. 4, Virginia, on 4 November 1752, at the age of twenty. Two of his public moments carry a Masonic signature that no one disputes.
The first is his inauguration in New York on 30 April 1789. According to the account preserved by St. John’s Lodge No. 1 and repeated by the National Park Service at Federal Hall, it was discovered at the last moment that no Bible had been provided for the oath. Jacob Morton, marshal of the parade and Master of St. John’s Lodge, fetched the lodge’s altar Bible, a 1767 King James edition. The oath was administered by Robert R. Livingston, Chancellor of New York, who was also Grand Master of the state’s Masons. The book is still in the lodge’s custody and has since been used at other inaugurations.
The second is 18 September 1793. The Architect of the Capitol describes the laying of the Capitol’s first cornerstone as the first large public event in the federal city: lodges from Maryland and Virginia marched in procession, and the inscribed silver plate recorded that the stone was laid “by the Grand Lodge of Maryland, several lodges under its jurisdiction, and Lodge 22, from Alexandria, Virginia.” Washington himself stepped into the trench and set the stone.
Nothing hidden there. It was a public civic ceremony performed in the manner of the day, with crowds, artillery and music.
II. Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was initiated in Philadelphia in 1731, was elected Grand Master of Pennsylvania in 1734, and in the same year printed an American edition of James Anderson’s Constitutions of the Free-Masons, the first Masonic book published in America. Decades later, as envoy in Paris, he joined the lodge Les Neuf Sœurs and served as its Master in 1779 and 1780.
III. Paul Revere. The silversmith of the midnight ride was Grand Master of Massachusetts from 1794 to 1797. On 4 July 1795 he presided over the laying of the cornerstone of the new Massachusetts State House, alongside Governor Samuel Adams.
[](#ii-a-bible-a-cornerstone-and-a-ride "Jump to this heading")II. A Bible, a Cornerstone and a Ride
It is worth pausing on what these three men show.
The popular lists treat the American Revolution as a Masonic revolution. It is true that many revolutionary leaders were Masons, and true that lodges in Boston were lively places of political talk. But many signers of the Declaration were not Masons, and many Masons in the colonies remained loyal to the Crown. The lodges supplied networks, trust and ceremony. They did not supply a single political line.
Look again at the inauguration Bible. It appears because nobody remembered to bring one. A Mason happened to be standing nearby and knew where a book could be found. That is the Masonic hand in history at its most typical: not a conspiracy, but a man with the right key at the right moment.
[](#iii-the-lincoln-problem "Jump to this heading")III. The Lincoln Problem
Here the first legend must be cleared away.
Abraham Lincoln was not a Freemason. He never petitioned a lodge, and no record of his initiation exists. The Lincoln Lore bulletin of 1971 put it in its title, “Abraham Lincoln Was Not a Freemason”, and surveyed the claims: that he had been made a Mason in New York, in Pennsylvania, in an army lodge outside Richmond. None stands up.
The legend has an honourable source. Lincoln is reported to have told a delegation of the Grand Lodge of Illinois in 1860 that he had long respected the fraternity. After his assassination, a French lodge at Choisy-le-Roi even voted to inscribe his name on its roll, a gesture of grief that later readers mistook for a membership. Some brethren went further and called him a Mason “in spirit”.
A Mason in spirit is not a Mason. Any list that includes Lincoln is telling you more about its compiler than about the Civil War.
[](#iv-paris-1778-the-philosophers-lodge "Jump to this heading")IV. Paris, 1778: The Philosophers’ Lodge
IV. Voltaire. On 7 April 1778, less than two months before his death, the old philosopher was received into the Paris lodge Les Neuf Sœurs, named for the nine Muses and devoted to the sciences, letters and arts. Contemporary gazettes treated it as a public sensation. Franklin, then the lodge’s most famous foreign member, was present and is traditionally named among those who accompanied him.
The scene is irresistible and true: the most famous sceptic of the century entering a lodge on the arm of the most famous American, a few weeks before death. It does not mean that the Enlightenment was a Masonic plot. It means that the Enlightenment’s celebrities liked to be seen together, and the lodge was one of the stages where they could be.
V. The Marquis de Lafayette. Here the historian must be careful. Lafayette was without doubt a Freemason; lodges across the United States honoured him as a brother on his triumphal tour of 1824 and 1825, and several conferred memberships and higher degrees on him. What remains unproven is where and when he was first made a Mason. American tradition long placed his initiation in a military lodge during the Revolution, often in Washington’s presence. Lafayette himself said he had been initiated in France before entering American service, and no original record settles the matter.
So: a Mason, certainly. Made a Mason by Washington, a legend.
[](#v-vienna-and-weimar-music-and-letters "Jump to this heading")V. Vienna and Weimar: Music and Letters
Portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in a red coat with a white cravat, seated at a keyboard instrument with a sheet of music
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, posthumous portrait by Barbara Krafft, 1819. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
VI. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart was received as an apprentice into the Viennese lodge Zur Wohltätigkeit (“Beneficence”) on 14 December 1784, passed to the second degree on 7 January 1785, and became a Master shortly afterwards. He frequented the larger and more aristocratic lodge Zur wahren Eintracht, led by the naturalist Ignaz von Born. When Joseph II’s Masonic decree of December 1785 forced the Viennese lodges to merge, Mozart’s lodge was folded into Zur neugekrönten Hoffnung.
He wrote music for lodge occasions, and in 1791 he wrote Die Zauberflöte, The Magic Flute, with the librettist and actor-manager Emanuel Schikaneder, himself a Freemason. The opera is full of trials, temples, silence and the triumph of light over night, and it has been read as a Masonic allegory ever since.
Yet the opera never names Freemasonry, and much of its “Masonic” meaning belongs to Enlightenment imagery that was shared far beyond the lodges: Egyptian wisdom, the sage-king, the ordeal of virtue. The persistent legend that Mozart was poisoned by Masons for betraying their secrets in the opera has no evidence behind it whatever.
VII. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe was received into the lodge Amalia in Weimar on 23 June 1780, advanced one year later, and became a Master on 2 March 1782, immediately after his patron Duke Carl August. The lodge, still active, counts him among its brothers alongside Wieland and Herder.
Goethe’s case is the opposite of Mozart’s. He wrote poems for lodge occasions, but no one has managed to turn Faust into a manual of the Craft. He was a Mason as he was a minister of state: thoroughly, and as one role among many.
[](#vi-the-liberators-of-spanish-america "Jump to this heading")VI. The Liberators of Spanish America
The Latin American wars of independence are where Masonic history becomes most contested, because national myths and Masonic pride run into each other.
VIII. Simón Bolívar. The most solid of the claims. A document preserved by the Supreme Council of Venezuela records Bolívar’s reception in the Paris lodge Saint-Alexandre d’Écosse, dated by the Masonic calendar to a day that corresponds to 11 January 1806. Scholars still argue about which degree the document records and how active he remained. In 1828, as president, Bolívar banned “all secret societies or confraternities” in Gran Colombia; the decree of 8 November 1828 did not name Freemasonry, but the lodges fell under it. The liberator who had been made a Mason in Paris ended by closing the lodges at home.
IX. José de San Martín. Argentine Masonic historiography gives his initiation in the lodge Integridad at Cádiz on 6 May 1808, and names him with Carlos María de Alvear among the founders of the Logia Lautaro in Buenos Aires in 1812. The debate is about the Lautaro itself. Was it a Masonic lodge, or a political secret society that borrowed Masonic forms to bind patriots together? Historians are divided, and the debate has been fierce enough that one must report it rather than resolve it.
X. José Martí. The Cuban poet and apostle of independence was made a Mason in Spain in the early 1870s, during his exile, and his membership is recorded by Cuban Masonic historians. As with so many of these men, Freemasonry was a chapter of his youth rather than the engine of his later war.
[](#vii-garibaldi-the-red-shirt-in-the-lodge "Jump to this heading")VII. Garibaldi, the Red Shirt in the Lodge
Portrait of Giuseppe Garibaldi with a full beard, wearing a dark hat and a light cloak over a red shirt
Portrait of Giuseppe Garibaldi by Silvestro Lega, 1861. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
XI. Giuseppe Garibaldi. The hero of two worlds was made a Master Mason in Palermo in 1860, the year of the Thousand. In 1862 the Supreme Council of the Scottish Rite at Palermo, the home of the republican and radical brethren, made him its Grand Master. The Grand Orient of Italy, reconstituted at Turin in 1859 and closer to Cavour, gave its own Grand Mastership to the diplomat Costantino Nigra and offered Garibaldi only an honorary title.
That small detail destroys the idea of a single Masonic will behind the Risorgimento. Italian Masonry was split along the same line that split Italian politics: monarchists here, republicans there. Garibaldi was a Mason. So were men who wanted him kept at arm’s length.
And there is a Brazilian thread. Garibaldi spent years in South America in the 1830s and 1840s, fighting for the rebel Riograndense Republic in the Ragamuffin War. It is there that he met Anita, the woman who would follow him into Italian legend.
[](#viii-the-british-empires-brothers "Jump to this heading")VIII. The British Empire’s Brothers
The digitisation of the United Grand Lodge of England’s membership registers, published online in 2015, turned some old claims into plain facts.
XII. Winston Churchill. Initiated in Studholme Lodge No. 1591, London, on 24 May 1901, passed on 19 July and raised a Master Mason on 25 March 1902. His active Masonic life was short, but the record is clear.
XIII. Rudyard Kipling. Initiated in the Lodge Hope and Perseverance No. 782 at Lahore on 5 April 1886, under the minimum age, by special dispensation. He served briefly as the lodge’s secretary. The poem quoted at the head of this essay is his memory of that lodge, where, he wrote, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Parsi, Jew and Christian sat as brothers. He ceased to be an active Mason around 1889, but the lodge never left his imagination; “The Man Who Would Be King” is unthinkable without it.
XIV. Arthur Conan Doyle. Initiated in the Phoenix Lodge No. 257 at Southsea on 26 January 1887, the year Sherlock Holmes first appeared in print. He resigned in 1889, rejoined from 1902 to 1911, and in 1900, during the Boer War, attended a lodge meeting at Bloemfontein at which Kipling was also present.
XV. Oscar Wilde. Initiated in Apollo University Lodge No. 357, Oxford, on 23 February 1875, while an undergraduate at Magdalen. A friend’s diary records him being “much struck” by the gorgeousness of the lodge’s regalia, which is perhaps the most Wildean sentence in Masonic history. He took further degrees, joined a second lodge, and then drifted away; he was struck off Apollo for non-payment of dues in 1878.
[](#ix-stage-swing-and-the-moon "Jump to this heading")IX. Stage, Swing and the Moon
The twentieth century added new kinds of celebrity, and the lodges followed them.
XVI. Harry Houdini. The escape artist was initiated in St. Cecile Lodge No. 568 in New York, a lodge long favoured by performers, on 17 July 1923, and raised a Master Mason on 21 August of the same year. He joined the Shriners weeks before his death in 1926. It is a pleasing irony that the great debunker of fraudulent mediums entered a society so often accused of secret powers, and found there only a room full of fellow showmen.
XVII. Duke Ellington. Ellington belonged to Social Lodge No. 1 in Washington, D.C., of the Prince Hall tradition, the historically Black branch of American Freemasonry founded in the eighteenth century by Prince Hall of Boston. The Prince Hall lodges were, for generations, among the institutions in which Black American leadership trained itself; jazz and blues counted many members there.
XVIII. Buzz Aldrin. This is one of the claims that sounds like an internet invention and turns out to be true. Aldrin, initiated in Alabama and raised in Colorado, carried on Apollo 11 in July 1969 a small silk flag of the Supreme Council, 33°, Southern Jurisdiction, hand-sewn by the Supreme Council’s librarian Inge Baum. After his return he presented it at the House of the Temple in Washington, where it is kept in the archives.
Note, however, what is not true. No Masonic flag was planted on the Moon. The flag on the lunar surface was the American one. The Masonic flag travelled in his personal kit and came home.
[](#x-brazil-the-lodge-and-the-empire "Jump to this heading")X. Brazil: The Lodge and the Empire
Portrait of Emperor Pedro I of Brazil in military uniform with decorations, a sash and epaulettes
Dom Pedro I, Emperor of Brazil, by Simplício Rodrigues de Sá, c. 1830. Museu Imperial, Petrópolis, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Nowhere is the Masonic presence in a founding event better documented, or more dramatic, than in Brazil in 1822.
On 17 June 1822 the Grande Oriente do Brasil was founded in Rio de Janeiro, built around the lodge Comércio e Artes na Idade do Ouro and two lodges born from it. Its first Grand Master was José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, minister of the Prince Regent. Its first Grand Warden was Joaquim Gonçalves Ledo.
Those two men led rival factions. Bonifácio wanted a strong constitutional monarchy under Pedro; Ledo and his allies leaned towards a more liberal settlement, with the sovereignty of a constituent assembly. Both wanted independence.
XIX. José Bonifácio. The “Patriarch of Independence”, scientist and statesman, first Grand Master of the Grande Oriente.
XX. Joaquim Gonçalves Ledo. Journalist and politician, the great Masonic organiser of the Rio liberals, and the man most associated with the campaign to make Pedro “Perpetual Defender of Brazil”.
XXI. Dom Pedro I. The Prince Regent was received into the order on 2 August 1822. Five weeks later, on 7 September, came the Cry of Ipiranga. On 4 October the Grande Oriente made him its Grand Master, replacing Bonifácio. Eight days later he was acclaimed Emperor.
And then the turn. On 21 October 1822 the new Emperor, now Grand Master, ordered the suspension of the Grande Oriente’s work, pending inquiries. Four days later he wrote to Ledo that the work could resume, but it did not. The rivalry between Bonifácio and Ledo had come to a head; Ledo’s party was persecuted, and Ledo himself fled to Buenos Aires. The Grand Master had closed his own Grand Orient.
[](#xi-what-1822-really-shows "Jump to this heading")XI. What 1822 Really Shows
It would be easy to tell this story as the Masonic conquest of Brazil. It is better told as the opposite.
Yes, the lodges were where the independence party met, argued and recruited. Yes, the young prince accepted initiation and the highest office within weeks, because the lodge was where the political class was. But the lodge did not command Pedro. Pedro used it, and when it became the arena of a factional fight he did not control, he shut it.
The lodge was not the hidden hand of independence. It was the room in which the men of independence fought each other.
[](#xii-abolition-and-the-free-womb "Jump to this heading")XII. Abolition and the Free Womb
Formal portrait of Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca, with white beard, in dress uniform with decorations
Portrait of Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca by G. A. Roth, 1891. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
XXII. Visconde do Rio Branco. José Maria da Silva Paranhos was Grand Master of the Grande Oriente do Brasil from 1871 to 1880. In 1871, as President of the Council of Ministers, he carried through Parliament the Law of the Free Womb, the Lei do Ventre Livre of 28 September 1871, which declared free the children born to enslaved women from that day on. Brazilian Masonry has always remembered that its Grand Master was the prime minister of that law. The historian adds that he carried it as head of a Conservative cabinet, against bitter resistance from his own party, and that the Emperor’s support counted for at least as much as any lodge.
XXIII. Joaquim Nabuco and XXIV. Rui Barbosa. Both were initiated as law students in the same São Paulo lodge, the Loja América: Nabuco on 1 April 1869, Rui on 1 July 1869. The Loja América was a lively abolitionist and liberal circle. Neither man made Masonry the centre of his later life; Nabuco’s lodge activity lapsed when he returned to Pernambuco, and Rui did not resume regular lodge life after graduation. But it is fair to say that two of the great voices of Brazilian abolitionism took some of their first political steps in a lodge.
[](#xiii-the-republic-of-1889 "Jump to this heading")XIII. The Republic of 1889
XXV. Deodoro da Fonseca. The marshal who proclaimed the Republic on 15 November 1889 became Grand Master of the Grande Oriente do Brasil in 1890, while he was head of the provisional government, and held the office until 1892.
XXVI. Quintino Bocaiúva. Journalist, author of the Republican Manifesto of 1870 and foreign minister of the provisional government, he was Grand Master of the Grande Oriente from 1901 to 1904.
XXVII. Campos Sales. The fourth president of the Republic was a Mason associated with São Paulo’s Loja Piratininga, one of the lodges of the republican movement in that province.
Again the Masonic presence is real, and again it is easy to overstate. The coup of 15 November was a military affair, born of the army’s quarrels with the imperial government, of the planters’ resentment after abolition, and of a sick, tired emperor. Many republicans were Masons; so were many monarchists. The Grand Mastership came to Deodoro after the Republic, as an honour paid to power, not as the order that had produced it.
[](#xiv-the-gallery-of-legends "Jump to this heading")XIV. The Gallery of Legends
Now for the names that the lists love and the records do not support.
I. Abraham Lincoln. Not a Mason, as shown above.
II. Thomas Jefferson. Often listed; no evidence that he was ever initiated. Some modern sources even note that he succeeded Franklin as envoy in Paris without following him into the lodge.
III. Duque de Caxias. Brazil’s patron of the army is claimed by many Brazilian lodges, and some accounts give an initiation around 1842. I could not find a documented lodge or date. Until one is published, Caxias belongs in this gallery.
IV. Santos Dumont. There are lodges named after him, which is a tribute, not a record. I found no evidence that the aviator was ever initiated.
V. Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhães. The positivist teacher of the republican officers is frequently named as a Mason. I found no lodge or date of initiation in the sources I could check; his intellectual home was Comte’s positivism, which had its own church and its own rituals.
VI. Mozart murdered by the Masons. A nineteenth-century legend with no evidence.
VII. Jean Sylvain Bailly and Condorcet in Les Neuf Sœurs, often listed as members; there is no documentation.
The rule is easy to state: a lodge named after a man, a Masonic speech in his honour, or a Masonic-sounding phrase in his writings proves nothing. Only a record proves membership.
[](#xv-why-the-lists-lie "Jump to this heading")XV. Why the Lists Lie
Why do lists of famous Masons grow so wildly?
Partly from pride. A fraternity that has really counted Washington, Mozart and Churchill naturally wishes to count Lincoln and Santos Dumont as well. Partly from fear. Anti-Masonic writers, from the Abbé Barruel’s history of Jacobinism in the 1790s onward, needed the Craft to be everywhere in order to blame it for everything. Pride and fear produce the same inflated list, one as a hall of fame, the other as a charge sheet.
And partly from the nature of the internet, where a name copied from one list to another becomes, by repetition, a fact.
The historian’s defence is dull and effective: the register, the minute book, the dated certificate. Most of the men above have one. Some do not. That difference is the whole difference between history and legend.
[](#xvi-a-note-on-discretion "Jump to this heading")XVI. A Note on Discretion
Readers will notice what this essay has not said. It has described no ceremony, no words, no gestures. That is deliberate.
Lodge membership, offices, the founding of Grand Lodges, public cornerstone ceremonies and published correspondence are history, and are treated here as such. What happens inside a lodge belongs to those who take part in it. One can write the history of a church without reciting its liturgy, and one can write the history of Freemasonry without pretending to expose it.
[](#xvii-the-room-where-it-happened "Jump to this heading")XVII. The Room Where It Happened
Gather the scenes together.
A borrowed altar Bible in New York, 1789. A silver plate laid under a stone on a hill above the Potomac, 1793. A dying philosopher received into a lodge of Muses in Paris. A young composer in Vienna, writing music for his brothers and an opera of trials for the city. An Italian general made Grand Master by one Masonic body and kept at a distance by another. A Brazilian prince made Grand Master in October and closing his Grand Orient a few weeks later. A prime minister and Grand Master freeing the children of slaves. A silk flag that went to the Moon in an astronaut’s kit and came home again.
None of these is a conspiracy. Each is a man of his age doing what men of his age did: joining, belonging, using the bonds he had made.
Freemasons were present at an astonishing number of famous events, but they were present as men, not as a machine. The lodge did not make history. It gathered the men who did, and it let them call one another brother, at least until they left the room.
--
Chamber of Reflections
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