Founding Fathers Who Were Freemasons

Far fewer than the myth suggests. Of the fifty-six men who signed the Declaration of Independence, about nine were Freemasons. Of the thirty-nine who signed the Constitution, about thirteen were. The fraternity was woven through the founding generation, and Masons were prominent in the civic life of the new republic, but they never came close to a majority of the men who put their names to the founding documents.

The two everyone remembers are accurate. George Washington was a lifelong Mason who signed the Constitution and presided over the Convention that wrote it, and Benjamin Franklin signed both the Declaration and the Constitution while serving as Grand Master of Pennsylvania. Their prominence is part of why the broader claim took hold, but the careful answer to how many of the Founders were Masons is a minority, not the majority that popular lists imply.

The verified Masons of the founding generation are a distinguished group. George Washington was initiated in Fredericksburg Lodge No. 4 in Virginia and later served as the first Worshipful Master of Alexandria Lodge No. 22. Benjamin Franklin belonged to St. John’s Lodge in Philadelphia, became Grand Master of Pennsylvania in 1734, and printed the first Masonic book in America. John Hancock, the first man to sign the Declaration, was a member of St. Andrew’s Lodge in Boston, the same lodge that produced Paul Revere, who served as Grand Master of Massachusetts, and Joseph Warren, the Grand Master who fell at Bunker Hill in 1775.

The fraternity reached across the early republic. Robert Livingston, who helped draft the Declaration and administered Washington’s oath of office in 1789, was the first Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of New York. James Monroe, initiated as a young Continental officer in 1775, became the fifth president, and John Marshall, the great Chief Justice, was the first Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Virginia. The military side of the Revolution was Masonic as well, through John Paul Jones, the father of the American Navy, the Marquis de Lafayette, and Baron von Steuben, the drillmaster of Valley Forge.

For those counting signatures, the documented numbers are smaller than the legend. Among the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, the firmly documented Masons include Benjamin Franklin and John Hancock, with the full list usually placed at about nine, though several names are debated for want of surviving lodge records. Among the thirty-nine signers of the Constitution, about thirteen were Masons, again led by Washington and Franklin.

The careful scholarship here belongs to Ronald E. Heaton, whose study of the Masonic membership of the signers separated the documented members from the merely suspected. That distinction is the one most online lists ignore. Where a signer’s lodge cannot be found, the honest answer is that his membership is unproven, not that it is confirmed, and a good many names on the popular tallies fall into that gap.

Several of the most important Founders are routinely listed as Masons and were not. Thomas Jefferson, who drafted the Declaration, has no verified lodge record. John Adams was not a Mason. Alexander Hamilton, despite frequent attribution, has no confirmed lodge membership. And James Madison, the father of the Constitution, settled the question himself: asked about Freemasonry in 1832, he stated plainly that he had never been a Mason, and the lodge memberships sometimes claimed for him in Princeton and Virginia have no surviving records to support them.

These men lived in a culture shaped by Freemasonry and shared many of its Enlightenment ideals, from religious liberty to freedom of thought. But sharing ideals is not the same as taking the degrees, and treating proximity as membership is exactly the error this kind of list should avoid.

The overstatement has understandable roots. Masons were the semiofficial celebrants of early American civic life, laying cornerstones in aprons, marching in parades, and greeting Lafayette as a Brother on his grand tour of 1824 and 1825. The reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, with its unfinished pyramid and radiant eye, was widely if wrongly read as a Masonic emblem, though its designers worked through three committees and only Franklin among the first was a Mason. And the genuine prominence of Washington and Franklin made it easy to assume the whole founding generation followed suit.

The reality is more modest and more interesting. Freemasonry was one influential current among many in the founding, a network where men of different colonies could meet and build trust, rather than the hidden hand behind the Revolution. The lodge shaped the founding generation, but it did not run it.