The freedom of Black freemasonry; or why have Americans always been weird?

I wrote recently about anti-racism. This is a more encouraging take on the same issue. 

For obvious reasons, a lot of thinking about anti-racism comes from the US. My concern is that the weight and noise of American anti-racism gives it an impact on the discourse of other countries, particularly the UK, that it does not deserve. As I shall try to show below, we should not forget that the US really is different from the UK - and has been since well before there even was a United States.

The Atlantic, a magazine of the American liberal establishment, spends a lot of time in its March 2021 edition looking into forgotten, overlooked or lost corners of Black American history. And very interesting it is too. But as I read one article, I thought it showed just how longstanding the weirdness of America is when it comes to racial issues. 

Here is the article. It's about Prince Hall, who was a free African American, born in about 1735 (not that he was free then), lived in Massachusetts and died in 1807.  

Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1780, so you might think that it was pretty enlightened by the standards of the time. But you'd be wrong. 

Hall was a freemason and keen on freemasonry. Why? Well, here's one good reason: someone "had been visited by a group of free Black men who had been kidnapped in Boston and had recently been emancipated and returned to the city. They were escorted to his house by Hall, and they told the story of their emancipation. One of the men who had been kidnapped was a member of Hall’s Masonic lodge. Carried off to the Caribbean and put on the auction block, the kidnapped men found that the merchant to whom they were being offered was himself a Mason. Mutual recognition of a shared participation in Freemasonry put an end to the transaction and gave them the chance to recover their freedom." So, at the very least, joining the freemasons appears to have been a good insurance policy against being kidnapped and enslaved. (I pause to observe: what sort of moral code is it to think that it's fine to have people as slaves so long as those people are not freemasons?) 

How did Hall get into freemasonry? Not as easily as you might think. "Although Hall and his fellows were most likely inducted into Freemasonry in 1775, they were never able to secure a formal charter for their lodge from the other lodges in Massachusetts: Prejudice ran strong. Hall and his fellows had in fact probably been inducted by members of an Irish military lodge, planted in Boston with the British army, who had proved willing to introduce them to the mysteries of the order. Hall’s lodge functioned as an unofficial Masonic society—African Lodge No. 1—but received a formal charter only after a request was sent to England for a warrant. The granting of a charter by the Grand Lodge of England finally arrived in 1787." 

The American author of the article does not make the point, but it stands out to this British reader: surely that nugget of history tells us something about the moral code of the English-speaking world at the time? The Irish were happy to have a Black freemason, and the Grand Lodge of England was happy to have Black freemasons, but the freedom-loving, Tea Partying, modern advanced liberals of Massachusetts were not. (I don't know who was in charge of Grand Lodge of England in the 1780s, but by the 1810s it was the likes of the Prince Regent and the Duke of Sussex, so I'm guessing it was a pretty Establishment affair in the late 18th century as well.) 

I don't think it's a good idea to judge the past by the standards of the present, but I don't see anything unfair about judging the past by the standards of the past. And by the standards of the past it seems that even Massachusetts was, as we now say, problematic.

Here's another bit from the article, this time talking about a parade in which the Black freemasons of Boston liked to participate in the 1820s: "An unattributed column in the New-England Galaxy and Masonic Magazine complained about the annual parade in recognizably racist tones: "This is the day on which, for unaccountable reasons or for no reasons at all, the Selectmen of Boston, permit the town to be annually disturbed by a mob of [African Americans] … The streets through which this sable procession passes are a scene of noise and confusion, and always will be as long as the thing is tolerated. Quietness and order can hardly be expected, when five or six hundred [African Americans], with a band of music, pikes, swords, epaulettes, sashes, cocked hats, and standards, are marching through the principal streets. To crown this scene of farce and mummery, a clergyman is mounted in their pulpit to harangue them on the blessings of independence, and to hold up for their admiration the characters of “Masser Wilberforce and Prince Hall.”" (I am sorry that the author of that piece, presumably a freemason himself, could not express himself in appropriately brotherly terms towards Hall: perhaps he thought it was enough merely not to try to buy or sell him.) 

The Atlantic helpfully explains, for the American reader, who this mysterious "Wilberforce" character is, but does not point out the irony, in an article describing Hall as a "forgotten Founding Father", of a crowd in Boston praising a politician from the former colonial oppressor. 

Now, I am prepared to imagine that respectable opinion in the non-American English-speaking world in the 1820s regarded Wilberforce as a kind of irritating do-gooder, some Bono or Thunberg who has to be endured rather than celebrated. (The 1820s, you will recall, fell between the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833. We're a generation or two on from the 1770s.) But even if that is right, there is something peculiarly unpleasant about the open racism of that article. One finds it hard to imagine that it would have been acceptable in polite society in London.

But this is not about Wilberforce. The point is much wider. I immediately thought of Dr Johnson's great line: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of [African Americans]?" (If you know that quotation then you might want to know that I made the same change to it as I made to the quotation from the newspaper above.) 

And here the plot thickens ... I wanted to check the quotation so I googled it - and I immediately obtained yet further confirmation of my thesis. The search result I went to was this, an article in the New York Times dating from 1984 that says that Dr Johnson "loathed slavery, at a time when very few voices were raised against it". Hmm. Johnson's bon mot was in an article that resulted in him being burned in effigy (in Massachusetts!) in 1775. But a few years earlier, in 1772, the law of England had been stated by Lord Mansfield in the Somerset case: "The state of slavery is .... so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. [I.e., unless a statute said otherwise, there could be no slavery in England.] Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged." 

I think this is worth reflecting on for a moment. An educated American plainly felt able to say, in America's newspaper of record, that "very few" voices were raised against slavery in the 1770s - despite the fact that the common law of the metropolis to which the American colonies were still subject at that time regarded slavery as "odious". Sure, "very few" voices in a distant land of dissidents and oddballs might have raised their voices against it, but back in the country busily ruling the waves, building a world-wide empire and standing against Napoleon, lots of people were. Mansfield was not some wacky judge off on a frolic: he was a Scottish nobleman, former Attorney General, the Lord Chief Justice and one of the greatest commercial judges. Slavery was despised by Dr Johnson (a famous Tory), William Wilberforce, William Pitt (Tory Prime Minister), the British Parliament in 1807 - and so on. In the United Kingdom, being against slavery was not the province of a "very few". It was a normal, mainstream, Establishment opinion. 

None of this is to say that the UK was a perfect, non-racist society in the late 1700s. No perfect society has ever existed and 18th century England is not an exception to that rule. The point I am making is that being opposed to slavery was entirely commonplace among the richest, educated and most cultured people of the English-speaking world. It had the same status that being opposed to global warming has today: one might complain that the Establishment is not doing all that it might to eradicate the problem, or insinuate that its opposition is insincere, half-hearted and qualified, but one cannot say that the position is merely the fringe view of a "very few voices", not supported by the rich or powerful. Everyone who is anyone has to pay at least lip service to the principle.

But that is not how history looks to Americans. When they look at the 18th century they see the equivalent of the climate-change deniers running the show. That is weird. Americans need not know that they are weird (they are rightly concerned with their own history), but the rest of us must. We must not assume that the history of a country which went to great lengths to break away from the UK is the same as the history of the country it rejected.

I say that not simply so we do not misunderstand the past but rather that so we do not mis-diagnose the present. Let's be clear: the US was an outlier in the 18th century when it regarded the "odious" as permissible; it was an outlier in the 19th century when it fought a vicious civil war about slavery; and it was an outlier in the 20th century when British people were appalled at the segregation of American GIs when they saw it at close quarters. So it is not surprising if it needs to be an outlier now in dealing with that history. There is at least a grain of truth in the 1619 Project's idea that the US suffers from an original sin of racism that requires exceptional attention to be paid and exceptional steps to be taken in remediation or expurgation. But that's not true of everywhere.

The US is a great source of new ideas, tirelessly hyped and then attractively marketed and packaged for export. That's a good thing. (This is an interesting take on the comparison with Europe in this regard.) But we should remember that we need no more adopt American solutions for social problems than we need adopt American sports to fill our social lives. Let's let them have their exceptionalism from time to time.