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John Quincy Adams ALS Re: Secret Masonic Penalties: "the penalties of…cutting open the left Breast and tearing out the heart and vitals…"
John Quincy Adams ALS Re: Secret Masonic Penalties: "the penalties of…cutting open the left Breast and tearing out the heart and vitals…"
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Adams John Quincy

 

John Quincy Adams Very Lengthy ALS Regarding Secret Masonic Penalties: "the penalties of having their throats cut from ear to ear - of cutting open the left Breast and tearing out the heart and vitals, of severing the body in two, and of smiting off the skulls that they will never reveal to any one"

 

This important and unpublished letter between former President John Quincy Adams and New York publisher William L. Stone was part of a correspondence dialogue between the Anti-Masonic Adams and the Mason Stone, who had refused to ignore the culpability of Masons in the disappearance of William Morgan in 1826 that gave rise to the Anti-Masonic movement in the 1820s and 1830s.

 

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, Autograph Letter Signed, to William L. Stone, December 8, 1832, Washington, D.C. 4 pp., 8" x 10". Fine condition.

 

Complete Transcript

 

William L. Stone Esqr New-York.

Washington 8 Decr 1832

Dear Sir

I promised a further reply to your Letter of the 30th ulto but before commencing upon it must say a word more upon matters antecedent.

In a note appended to your publication of my first Letter, you observe that eight or ten years ago, before you ever heard of Morgan, you proposed a revisal of the obligations, and that the barbarous penalties and language, complained of by me should be expunged. This is another Evidence to me of that rectitude of principle, and soundness of judgment, which have preserved your heart and mind, from that almost universal depravation which it is the character of the Masonic Oaths, Obligations and Penalties generally to produce. It is known to be one of the most ordinary phenomena of insanity, that the sufferer is perfectly rational and intelligent upon every subject but one; and wherever that is touched upon, raving distracted. The Masonic History of the last seven years, has abundantly proved, that the Oaths, Obligations and Penalties, of that Institution, produce upon the immense majority of the men to whom they are administered, and by whom they are taken, a similar partial aberration from moral principle. They lose the moral sense in every thing relating to their Masonic Obligations, and retain it entire, or perhaps little impaired with respect to every thing else. This appears to me to account for the fact so portentously proved in the Morgan Murder transactions, that multitudes of men otherwise of fair characters and blameless lives were deeply and awfully implicated in that horrible Calendar of Crimes. It accounts also for the fact of that desperate adherence of so many otherwise honest men to those barbarous, absurd and abominable Oaths Obligations and Penalties. For it is to them that the high minded men of the fraternity now declare that they will cling to the last gasp of their existence. To this fact I wish to point your special attention. It is against these Oaths, Obligations and Penalties, and against them alone, that the pure and disinterested Spirit of Anti Masonry is arrayed. The abolition of them is the great moral reformation which Anti masonry has undertaken to accomplish, and from which I trust it will not swerve. With the Oaths and Obligations, the Secrets fall of course, and all those being abandoned if the Free Masons wish to continue as a charitable, benevolent and convivial fraternity, no mortal on earth will object to their so doing.

The Oaths, Obligations and Penalties therefore now constitute the only matter at issue between Masonry and Anti Masonry. And I ask you if an aberration of intellect, as well as of moral feeling more monstrous can be imagined, than the inflexible adherence to the determination that they will continue to swear men upon the penalties of having their throats cut from ear to ear—of cutting open the left Breast and tearing out the heart and vitals, of severing the body in two, and of smiting off the skulls that they will never reveal to any one under the Canopy of Heavens Secrets, which have been divulged and proclaimed on the housetops. And this, in the name of the living God! I have endeavored to show that the administration of these Oaths was vicious, when it was to keep secrets that were secret. But now—that they are known to every one who will read—what is it but a blasphemous taking of the name of God in vain?

In your Letter of the 28th ulto you do emphatically declare it as still your earnest desire to destroy “this wretched Structure of Free Masonry,” and I give you the most unqualified credit for sincerity in this declaration. But will you allow me in friendship and in confidence to say, that some of your strictures in your paper, upon the Anti Masons, since the disappointment of the late Elections, has led not me, but some of them, to doubt your attachment to their Cause. I do earnestly wish them to be sensible as I am that your book is the best Anti Masonic book that ever was published. They differed from you with regard to the Candidates for the Presidency and Vice Presidency; but now that the Election is over, cannot you pursue with them the common object; which is to prevail upon the Free Masons to do, that which you urged them to do, even before the fate or the offence of Morgan, had arisen in the Series of Events.

Remember that it is in the power of the Masonic Fraternity to demolish the whole system of political Anti Masonry forever. To effect this object the single thing they have to do, is to cease administering the entered Apprentice’s Oath. It would follow of course that they would administer none of the others. Let them do this, and they will never again have an Anti Masonic Candidate to oppose or defeat them.

To come now to your letter of the 30th ulto I have not received from the Grand Secretary of the Grand Lodge, a copy of the printed minutes of their proceedings in June last. In the great object of prevailing upon the Masons voluntarily to abandon their Idol, I have felt a curiosity to ascertain how far it has a prospect of success.

Having left your Book at my residence at Quincy I am not able from mere recollection to refer to the several circumstances mentioned in your narrative whereas I drew the inference that (the conspiracy for the kidnapping and murder of Morgan, originated in the Chapter at Rochester). But I think you say that (it was there, Morgan had been admitted to the Royal Arch degree), at the proposal of James Ganson. You say it was there also that on the formation of the Chapter the forms of admission had been introduced from the old manuscript of which you gave me a copy—being the forms which had been used by judge Hosmer, in Connecticut. You intimate also that it was from them that Morgan had copied the obligations as they are published in his book. It occurred to me then that (the Chapter at Rochester was the one that he had specially offended) and that which in Masonic Law was responsible for the suppression of his Book. The Masons at Batavia had discovered that he and Miller were preparing for the publication of the Book, which it was their great object to suppress. But Morgan was not one of them. They had excluded him from their Chapter, in a most offensive manner, by getting up a second Petition, without his name, and without assigning any reason for his exclusion after having obtained a Charter for a Chapter by a Petition in which he had joined. He did not belong therefore to the Chapter at Batavia, nor was it there that he had obtained the means of divulging the Secrets—but at Rochester. It was then the Chapter at Rochester which became responsible for the suppression of the Book, and for the punishment of the proposed publisher. (It was the obligation administered to him by them that he was about to violate, and it was for them and them alone to convict and punish him.)

Hence also I inferred the extraordinary agency of James Ganson in the conspiracy—he having been the Sponsor of Morgan at his admission to the Royal Arch degree. The conspiracy embraced two objects—to suppress the book and to punish the author. It is apparent that the transportation of Morgan to Niagara had been previously concerted at the Chapter in Rochester. That by their direction he had been seized at Batavia by a party from Canandaigua, carried there, and lodged in prison, to be exactly in such position that he might at the moment of his liberation, be unlawfully seized and transported whither they should direct. For this direction the nightly journey of Loton Lawson from Canandaigua to Rochester, and his return early the next morning was effected. He was followed by men charged with executing the Instruction of the Chapter; and the Carriages for his transportation to the fort of Niagara had been all prepared and arranged before hand. The Chapters at Batavia and LeRoy, were the informers against Morgan. (The Lodge at Canandaigua undertook to arrest, and deliver him up to the Chapter at Rochester, and they were to consummate the Punishment precisely because it was to and by them that his Masonic vows had been made). Mr Whittlesey informs me of another fact not noticed in your book—That (after Morgan was lodged in the fort at Niagara; another messenger was sent to Rochester and returned thence before he was put to death. That the messenger bore this Order from the Chapter I cannot doubt.)

From the annunciation in your book that you was authorised to state that the Grand Encampment at New York had taken measures for ascertaining what changes had been made in the forms of admission in the Western Encampments subordinate to them, I had hoped that an authentic disclosure of the result would before this have been published. Why you was authorised to excite the expectation of such a disclosure, unless with the intention to fulfill the expectation, I do not enquire. Your book I think mentions some of the innovations as having been introduced from Vermont, by a member of the present Congress. May I enquire who that is, and what the precise terms which he introduced into the obligations were?

                                    I am very respectfully, your friend     J. Q. Adams.

 

Historical Background

 

William Morgan (1774-ca. 1826) was a native Virginian, who worked as a bricklayer and stonecutter. After marrying in 1819, he moved to York, Upper Canada, and became a brewer. When a fire destroyed his business, he moved to Rochester, New York, then to nearby Batavia, where he again worked as a bricklayer and stonecutter. Morgan claimed to have become a Master Mason in Canada and briefly attended a lodge in Rochester. In 1825, he received the Royal Arch degree in Le Roy, New York, a few miles east of Batavia. After being rebuffed by Masons in Batavia, Morgan declared he would publish a book about Freemasons, revealing their secrets, and made arrangements with a local publisher.

 

On September 11, 1826, Morgan was arrested for allegedly not repaying a loan and stealing a shirt and a tie. He was jailed in Canandaigua, but his publisher paid the debt and secured Morgan's release. Morgan was soon rearrested for failure to pay a $2 tavern bill. While the jailer was away, a group of men convinced the jailer's wife to release Morgan. They placed him in a carriage, which arrived two days later at Fort Niagara, nearly fifty miles to the west. Morgan soon disappeared. Some accounts insist he was taken to the middle of the Niagara River by boat and thrown overboard. Others declare that Masons paid him $500 to leave the country.

 

Eventually, Sheriff Eli Bruce of Niagara County, who was a Mason, was tried and convicted of conspiracy for kidnapping Morgan and falsely imprisoning him. He served more than two years in prison. Three other Masons; Loton Lawson, Nicholas Chesebro, and Edward Sawyer, also served sentences for their role in the kidnapping, while other Masons were acquitted.

 

Soon after Morgan’s disappearance, his book Illustrations of Masonry was published and quickly became a bestseller. Public outrage at his kidnapping led to protests against Freemasonry in New York and neighboring states. Since President Andrew Jackson was a Mason, opponents used the discontent to establish an Anti-Masonic Party. In the 1828 presidential campaign, Jackson’s rivals, including John Quincy Adams, denounced the Masons.

 

Newspaper editor and Mason William L. Stone addressed a series of letters to John Quincy Adams between November 1831 and April 1832. Stone published some of Adams' responses in his newspaper and collected his letters to Adams as Letters on Masonry and Anti-Masonry, Addressed to the Hon. John Quincy Adams, published in New York in 1832. In a letter to Richard Rush, Adams described Stone as "the best of witnesses" against Freemasonry because he "testifies under the shackles of all his Masonic obligations, and with the knowledge that he is incurring the vindictive and unforgiving resentment of the Craft."

 

In the 1832 presidential election, in which Andrew Jackson overwhelmingly won re-election over National Republican Henry Clay, Anti-Masonic presidential candidate William Wirt won only 7.8% of the popular vote and carried only Vermont with its 7 electoral votes.

 

In November 1832, Stone published in his newspaper four letters he had received from Adams in August and September regarding Masonry. At Adams' request, he withheld publication of the letters until after the state and national elections.

 

In 1833, the Anti-Masonic Party nominated Adams as its candidate for governor of Massachusetts. In the four-way race, Adams polled second with 29 percent of the vote. Since no candidate won a majority, the state legislature decided the election, but Adams withdrew his name, and the legislature selected National Republican candidate John Davis, who had won 40 percent of the vote.

 

In 1847, Adams published Letters on the Masonic Institution that criticized the Masons. The 284-page book included thirty-one letters written by Adams on the subject between 1831 and 1833, eight of which were to Stone, but it did not include this one.

 

John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) was born in Massachusetts, the son of future President John Adams. He accompanied his father on several diplomatic missions in the 1770s and 1780s and graduated from Harvard College in 1787. He studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1791. Adams served successively as minister to The Netherlands, Portugal, Prussia, Russia, and Britain, from 1794 to 1801 and from 1809 to 1817. He met Louisa Catherine Johnson (1775-1852), the daughter of a poor American merchant, while in Europe, and they married in 1797 in London. He began his career a moderate Federalist but switched to the Jeffersonian Republican Party around the year 1807. He helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812, and was a brilliant Secretary of State (1817-1825), taking the lead role in formulating the Monroe Doctrine. He won the election of 1824, which was decided in the House of Representatives because no candidate won a majority in the Electoral College. Adams' "deal" with House Speaker Henry Clay, whom he named Secretary of State, helped spark the formation of an opposition party around Andrew Jackson. John Quincy Adams served one largely frustrating term as president and lost in the election of 1828 to Andrew Jackson. In the early 1830s, Adams joined the Anti-Masonic Party before becoming a member of the Whig Party. Surprising most observers, Adams stood for election to the House of Representatives in 1831 and served seventeen memorable years, becoming a bulwark for civil liberties and a voice in the emerging anti-slavery movement. He defended the Amistad slaves before the Supreme Court in 1841, and died of a stroke on the floor of the House in 1848.

 

William Leete Stone Sr. (1792-1844) was born in New York to a Presbyterian minister who was a veteran of the Revolutionary War and his wife. Stone became a printer in a newspaper office at the age of seventeen and by the age of twenty was an editor. After editing newspapers and literary journals in New York and Connecticut, Stone became the editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser in 1821, a position he held for the rest of his life. He supported the abolition of slavery and the American Colonization Society. Stone served as the first superintendent of public schools in New York City from 1841 until his death. President William Henry Harrison appointed Stone as minister to the Hague, but President John Tyler recalled him.

 

This item comes with a Certificate from John Reznikoff, a premier authenticator for both major 3rd party authentication services, PSA and JSA (James Spence Authentications), as well as numerous auction houses.

 

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