On the morning of April 12, 1865, Brigadier General Joshua Chamberlain stood on a knoll near Appomattox Court House and watched the Army of Northern Virginia form into column for its final march — the formal surrender procession that would end four years of war. As the Confederate column came abreast of his position, Chamberlain gave a quiet order. A bugle rang out. His Union soldiers shifted to carry arms: the marching salute. The Confederate commander, Major General John B. Gordon, saw it, straightened in his saddle, wheeled his horse to face Chamberlain, dipped his sword in salute, and ordered his own men to return the honor.
Chamberlain later explained his reasoning in his own words: "I resolved to mark it by some token of recognition, which could be no other than a salute of arms." Both men were Freemasons. Whether that brotherhood was present in Chamberlain's thinking on that morning is not recorded. What is recorded is that a man who had been wounded six times in the war chose, in the moment of his enemy's total defeat, to offer respect rather than exultation. The fraternity that had shaped both men had been teaching that lesson for longer than the country had existed.
The Traveling Lodge
Freemasonry and military service have been intertwined in America since before the Revolution. The institution that knit them together was the traveling military lodge — a chartered lodge attached to a regiment, with all its furniture, jewels, and warrant packed into a single wooden chest that moved with the unit.
The first military lodge warrant issued in the American colonies came during the French and Indian Wars, granted by the Provincial Grand Master at Boston to a British regiment on its way to Crown Point. The British army had carried the practice from Europe, where the connection between soldiering and the fraternity was already well established. When those British regulars drilled alongside American colonists in joint exercises and campaigns, the lodge traveled with them — and Freemasonry spread.
By the time of the Revolution, the field lodge was a recognized institution. Ten lodges are documented as operating within the Continental Army during the war. One of them, the American Union Lodge, still exists today under the Grand Lodge of Ohio. Washington himself attended Masonic gatherings with his officers in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania during the campaign. The fraternity provided something the army badly needed: a space where men of different backgrounds and ranks could meet on level ground, bound by obligations that preceded and transcended the chain of command.
The Civil War
If there is a single war in American history in which the Masonic bond was most visibly tested, it is the Civil War — a conflict that set lodge brother against lodge brother across four years of the bloodiest fighting the continent had ever seen.
The evidence of that bond in action is scattered across the war's records: Union and Confederate Masons recognizing each other on the field, wounded men assisted by enemies who shared their fraternal obligations, property protected by officers who identified themselves as brothers. The most celebrated of these encounters at Gettysburg is commemorated in stone. The Friend to Friend Masonic Memorial on the battlefield depicts Union Captain Henry Bingham going to the aid of the mortally wounded Confederate Brigadier General Lewis Armistead — both men Masons, meeting on the ground where Pickett's Charge had just broken and spent itself. Armistead, dying, entrusted his personal effects to be delivered to his old friend Winfield Scott Hancock, the Union general who had held the line against him. Hancock was also a Mason.
Joshua Chamberlain — member of United Lodge No. 8 in Brunswick, Maine, elected on October 7, 1862, before he shipped out — was awarded the Medal of Honor for his defense of Little Round Top at Gettysburg and later received the surrender at Appomattox. John B. Gordon, who led the Confederate column that Chamberlain saluted, was a member of Gate City Lodge No. 2 in Atlanta. The war ended not with one Mason standing over another but with two of them exchanging, in the language Chamberlain used, "a soldier's mutual salutation and farewell."
The Twentieth Century and After
The tradition continued through both world wars. Omar Bradley joined his Masonic lodge while a cadet at West Point. Douglas MacArthur held the 32nd degree of the Scottish Rite. George C. Marshall, who as Army Chief of Staff oversaw the largest military expansion in American history and later designed the postwar European recovery plan that bears his name, was a Mason. Jimmy Doolittle, whose Tokyo raid in April 1942 lifted American morale at its lowest point in the Pacific war, was a Mason.
These men did not attribute their service records to their fraternity. The Craft does not make soldiers. What it does — what it has always done — is build the character that service requires: obligation to something larger than oneself, discipline in conduct, steadiness under pressure, and care for the man beside you regardless of who he is outside the lodge room.
In 1918, Masonic leaders across the country recognized what the fraternity could offer the men returning from war and formed the Masonic Service Association. Its purpose was straightforward: to be a resource for American veterans and their families, providing support, advocacy, and a point of contact with the fraternal network that many of them had carried into uniform and back out again.
The Lodge and the Man in Uniform
There is nothing in Masonic tradition that makes military service a requirement or even a preference. The fraternity has welcomed men of every background and occupation since its founding. But there is something in what Freemasonry teaches — the obligation to one's brothers, the commitment to a cause beyond personal interest, the willingness to stand when it would be easier to walk away — that has resonated with men who have worn the uniform.
Centennial Lodge No. 84 has among its members veterans of every branch of the United States Armed Forces. They do not wear their service on their sleeve in lodge. They do not have to. The apron levels distinctions at the door. But the tradition that brought them to the fraternity is the same one that sent a thousand Masons parading to a new temple on Welton Street in 1890, the same one that carried a lodge in a wooden chest through the campaigns of the Continental Army, and the same one that moved Joshua Chamberlain to order a salute on the morning of April 12, 1865. It is an old tradition. It holds.
SOURCES & REFERENCES
George Washington's Mount Vernon, Freemasonry — mountvernon.org
MasonicWorld.com, The Military and Freemasonry — masonicworld.com
Pennsylvania Grand Lodge, Freemasons Connect with Civil War — pagrandlodge.org
MasonicShop.com, General and Brother Joshua L. Chamberlain — masonicshop.com
Appomattox Court House National Historical Park, Salute of Arms historical marker — National Park Service
Scottish Rite, NMJ, Masonic Military Leaders: A Legacy of Honor — scottishritenmj.org
Masonic Service Association of North America — msana.com