The most famous Mason in American history received his first Masonic obligation in a lodge room in Fredericksburg, Virginia, on November 4, 1752. He was twenty years old. The lodge minute book recorded the transaction with characteristic Masonic practicality: George Washington, Entered Apprentice, two pounds three shillings. The shot heard round the world was still twenty-three years away.
The relationship between Freemasonry and the American founding is one of the most discussed — and most distorted — subjects in popular history. It has attracted both credulous enthusiasts who credit the Craft with designing the republic and determined debunkers who dismiss any connection as myth. The honest account, grounded in what the records actually show, is more interesting than either version.
The Men
Washington's Masonic record is among the most thoroughly documented of any brother in American history. He received all three degrees at the Lodge at Fredericksburg within nine months: Entered Apprentice on November 4, 1752; Fellow Craft on March 3, 1753; Master Mason on August 4, 1753. He later became Charter Master of Alexandria-Washington Lodge No. 22 under the Grand Lodge of Virginia — a position he held until his death. He was buried with Masonic honors in 1799. The George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia, exists specifically to preserve and document that record.
Benjamin Franklin's Masonic life is equally well-attested. He was initiated at St. John's Lodge in Philadelphia around 1730 or 1731, became Grand Master of Pennsylvania in 1734, and that same year published Anderson's Constitutions — the first Masonic book printed in America. In 1778, while serving as American minister to France, he assisted at the initiation of Voltaire into the Lodge of the Nine Sisters in Paris. Franklin was at the intersection of the Enlightenment and the fraternity for the better part of six decades.
Paul Revere was a member of St. Andrew's Lodge in Boston and later served as Grand Master of Massachusetts. Joseph Warren — the physician and patriot who died at the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775 — was Grand Master of Massachusetts at the time of his death. John Hancock is well-attested in lodge records from the same Boston circles. These were not passive members. They held significant office in the fraternity while simultaneously leading the patriot cause.
What the Craft Was — and Was Not
Before drawing lines between Masonic membership and revolutionary politics, it is worth understanding what the lodges of colonial America actually were. They were not political organizations. They took no institutional position on independence. The fraternity remained officially neutral throughout the Revolution — and in practice, Masonic membership cut both ways. Some Masons were Loyalists. The lodge, by design, asked men to set aside the disputes of the outside world when they entered.
What the lodge did provide was something more durable: a framework. Men who gathered in lodge rooms were practicing, week by week, a form of self-governance that would have seemed radical by the standards of the old world. They elected their own officers. They governed themselves by a written constitution. They sat as equals regardless of rank or station outside. The fraternity's structure was, in the language of the time, a republic in miniature.
Historian Steven Bullock, whose Revolutionary Brotherhood is the authoritative scholarly study of Freemasonry in early America, credits the fraternity with providing what he calls a combination of "exclusive honor with inclusive love" — the ability to bind officers and common men together across the social distances that plagued the Continental Army. Masonic field lodges operated within army regiments throughout the war, and Washington himself attended Masonic celebrations and observances in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania during the campaign.
After the War
When the Revolution was won and the new republic took its first institutional steps, the Masonic thread remained visible. At Washington's first inauguration in April 1789, he took his oath of office on a Bible belonging to St. John's Lodge in New York — a choice that was not incidental. On September 18, 1793, President Washington, wearing his Masonic apron, laid the cornerstone of the United States Capitol in a Masonic ceremony. Historian Bullock describes the scene: the brethren assembled in fraternal regalia, formed in grand procession, the ceremony conducted with the plumb, square, and level. It was a public declaration that the fraternity had earned its place in the new order.
Washington wrote to the brethren of King David's Lodge in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790: "Being persuaded that a just application of the principles, on which the Masonic Fraternity is founded, must be promotive of private virtue and public prosperity, I shall always be happy to advance the interests of the Society, and to be considered by them as a deserving brother." That letter was not diplomatic courtesy. It was the settled view of a man who had been a Mason for thirty-eight years.
What the Records Support — and What They Do Not
Popular accounts of Freemasonry and the founding have a tendency to expand beyond what the documents can support. Lists circulate claiming that a majority of the Declaration's signers, or a large fraction of the Constitutional Convention delegates, were Masons. The careful scholarship puts the numbers lower and the certainty lower still. The Scottish Rite Museum of Our National Heritage has identified nine signers of the Declaration with documented Masonic membership. Other names that frequently appear on popular lists — including several prominent founders — lack consistent primary-source verification.
This is worth saying plainly, because the honest version of the story does not need embellishment. The overlap between Masonic membership and revolutionary leadership was real and significant. The values the lodges taught — equality, self-governance, obligation to one's brothers and community — aligned closely with the ideals the founders articulated. Men who had learned those values in lodge rooms carried them into the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention. The fraternity did not write the republic. But it helped form the men who did.
Colorado, 1861
The same pattern held on the frontier sixty years later. When the Masons of Colorado Territory gathered at Golden City in August 1861 to form their own Grand Lodge — fifteen years before statehood — they were doing what Masons had been doing in America since before the Revolution: building the institutions of civil society before the formal institutions of government had arrived. The men who organized Auraria Lodge in a tent in 1858 were not thinking about Lexington and Concord. But they were working from the same tradition.
Centennial Lodge No. 84 stands in that line. The lodge's name honors the centennial of American independence. The building it meets in was designed by a Mason who believed in truth and honesty in all things. The brothers who first walked through the door on Welton Street in 1890 were the inheritors of a fraternal tradition that had been intertwined with American civic life from the beginning. That connection is not mythology. It is history — careful, sourced, and worth knowing.
SOURCES & REFERENCES
George Washington's Mount Vernon, Freemasonry — mountvernon.org
George Washington Masonic National Memorial, George Washington The Mason — gwmemorial.org
Fredericksburg Lodge No. 4 A.F. & A.M., Lodge History — masoniclodge4.org
Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood (University of North Carolina Press, 1996)
Mark Tabbert, A Deserving Brother: George Washington and Freemasonry (GWMNMA, 2022)
Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, Freemasonry — philadelphiaencyclopedia.org