In 1826, William Morgan applied to join the Freemason lodge in Batavia, New York, but the application was strangely rejected, possibly because of some recent financial difficulties. As an accepted mason from a distant lodge, Morgan took great umbrage against the Batavia lodge and decided to publish an expose of the society and reveal its secrets. In order to become a mason, Morgan had taken an oath never to reveal the secrets of the order (upon penalty of death). After quickly writing a manuscript, Morgan found a nearby publisher willing to take on the project.
It’s no secret Masonry played a leading role in our revolution. George Washington was the most influential mason in North America, as well as the wealthiest landowner. Masonry was spread largely through the British military and through the world’s second largest corporation, the British East India Company, whose stock was closely held by the ruling oligarchy of the empire. In the late 1700s, however, the empire was on shaky ground. The East India Company, modeled after (and designed to compete with) the Dutch East India Company, was losing the trade war against the Dutch, who were jousting on the high seas with the British Navy. The British devised a scheme to capture a monopoly in tea away from the Dutch, but that plan backfired and created a huge glut of tea, most of which seemed destined to rot in warehouses. In response, the company got a special exemption from Parliament to ship tea straight to the Colonies for distribution. Even with a small tax, the tea was priced to undersell the smuggled Dutch tea that had greatly undercut the British prices.
There was a masonic lodge in Boston that organized a tea dump that sparked our revolution. What seems odd in hindsight is how this insignificant tax was deployed as a springboard to incite intense hostility against the crown. Wouldn’t it have made more sense just to boycott the English tea rather than destroying it? Strangely, that dumping saved the East India Company a fortune because the insurance company covered the losses. England had the power to crush the Colonial rebellion, but chose not to and soon capitulated after some misguided and poorly planned expeditions. Clearly, England’s attention was on Europe and the East. After the French and Dutch were defeated, the Russians and English engaged in a “great game” to outflank each other through the spread of spies and secret societies, and Masonry played a key role in this game.
The American Revolution was planned and instigated by some of the richest merchants conspiring with the biggest bond holders (bankers), and the purpose was removing English oversight while preserving the economic status quo. Most masonic lodges stayed loyal to the Crown, despite masonry’s celebration of liberty and equality, but the revolt was organized through a handful of rebel lodges. Since there were prominent masons on both sides of the conflict, on Tuesday nights all sides were welcome to gather, even if it was the eve of battle.
But after Morgan announced his book’s imminent publication, the publisher’s printshop mysteriously burned to the ground, and Morgan was railroaded into jail on imaginary charges. The police, judge and jury assembled were all Masons, which created controversy that soon spread like wildfire. Suddenly, some Masons showed up at the jail and bailed Morgan out and he was never seen again.
The outcry over Morgan’s murder created the first third party, the Anti-masonic Party. Meanwhile, citizen investigators began looking into Masonry and discovered another secret society was embedded deeper inside. George Washington had been well aware of the recently-established Illuminati infesting masonry in 1776 and warned of its arrival on our shores in his correspondence. But Washington probably wasn’t aware the Illuminati had been created by Jesuits during a time when a international outcry against Jesuits was sweeping across Europe.
Around this same time, less than 60 miles from where Morgan was murdered, Freemason Joseph Smith announced the discovery of two golden tablets that proved Jesus had visited North America. Upstate New York was undergoing a wave of folk spiritualism, and many fake mediums were claiming magic powers, so Smith didn’t really stick out initially. But having funds and a powerful backer at his disposal helped Smith immensely in building a flock of followers willing to support his vision of an American Zion. Not so strangely, the rituals of Mormonism look a lot like the rituals of Masonry. In a strange twist, Morgan’s widow married Joseph Smith and moved with him to Illinois, where he was murdered by a mob while flashing the masonic sign of distress.
Two other masonic-style lodges soon appeared to quickly exert great national influence, one in New Haven (1832) and the other New York (1843). Both could be suspected as possible Illuminati operations. The New Haven lodge was created by William Russell, cousin to the heir to the North American opium cartel. Russell visited Germany during the summer of his junior year at Yale, and when he returned and discovered Phi Beta Kappa had gone public, created the Order of Skull & Bones, which was soon running Yale. The Boners then moved into strategic positions in finance, education and government.
The New York lodge became known as B’nai B’rith, and was established on the Lower East Side by 12 recently-arrived German Jews. Strangely, these two secret societies would play key roles in the coming Civil War, just as a couple Masonic lodges had played key roles in fomenting the revolution. During the war, the center of American finance moved from Philadelphia to Boston and Wall Street. The war created the Robber Barons, who captured a stranglehold on the economy. A handful of men suddenly owned just about everything and it’s been that way ever since.
After publishing his landmark study of the Constitution in 1913, Charles Beard of Yale University became the most eminent and influential historian in America, and it took decades of nit-picking to bring him down from that perch. He was soon universally ignored inside his profession, a role later reserved for Antony Sutton, who picked up on some of Beard’s style. For both, history was the study of economic interests, not dogmas.
In 1606 some manifestos appeared in Germany opposing the Catholic Church and claiming secret knowledge from the east. Although the Protestant revolution had been ongoing for nearly a hundred years (having been launched in 1516 by an ordained priest at the University of Wittenburg named Martin Luther), these new mystical manifestos drew on Arabic, Judaic and Greek influences, while Luther’s Reformation was based around the Christian Bible.
But in 1776, a new secret society appeared, and it immediately positioned itself as antagonistic to Rosicrucianism. Interestingly, this new secret society was created at a Jesuit university by a Jesuit-trained lawyer who specialized in canon law of the Catholic Church. However, most of the membership never knew his name and a story would be spread on how the Illuminati were actually controlled by a small group of illuminated masters (just like the Rosicrucians supposedly were). This may actually have been the case if Adam Weishaupt was involved with the attempt to remove the recent Papal ban on the Jesuits, who had achieved monopolies of trade on a scale not seen since the Templars.