The United States of Paranoia (15 page)

On the other hand, the Newburgh Conspiracy really happened, though historians don’t agree about the extent to which the soldiers were manipulated by the nationalists. And the part of our opening narrative that is most likely to strike modern ears as odd—the conspiratorial account of the Constitution—is actually the most defensible segment of the tale. It is undeniably true that the Constitutional Convention met in secret, refusing even to publicize the minutes of its debates; that it exceeded its original mission, which was merely to reform the Articles; that some of the delegates intended from the beginning to overshoot those instructions; and that there was no legal basis for allowing the Constitution to take effect with only nine states ratifying it.
29
If the ratification of the Constitution is not usually described in conspiratorial terms today, it isn’t because there is any serious dispute over those facts. It’s because most people are glad the Constitution became law and thus are less likely to dwell on any irregularities in its birth.
30

One sign that the English, and later the Federalists, did not perceive themselves as plotters is the ease with which they persuaded themselves that they were the
victims
of conspiracies, falling frequently into Enemy Below and Enemy Outside theories about their foes. Some Englishmen argued that the Revolution was all a French scheme, with Paris employing “secret emissaries” to spread “dissatisfaction among the British colonists.”
31
Even without dragging France into it, Tories such as Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson believed, in Bailyn’s words, that “the root of all the trouble in the colonies was the maneuvering of a secret, power-hungry cabal that professed loyalty to England while assiduously working to destroy the bonds of authority.”
32

Similarly, the Federalists were filled with fears of revolutionary conspiracies. They looked at Jeffersonian political clubs and saw Jacobins plotting an insurrection, probably under the direction of French foreign agents. The Whiskey Rebellion was taken to be their handiwork, and more revolts were presumed to be on their way. In the last year of the Washington administration, future president John Quincy Adams fretted to his father that the French and their domestic allies were planning the “removal of the President,” which would “be followed by a plan for introducing into the American Constitution a Directory instead of a President, and for taking from the supreme Executive the command of the armed forces.”
33
(The Directory was the name of France’s ruling committee.) With the XYZ Affair of 1798, in which French diplomats demanded a bribe from their American counterparts, and the Quasi-War of 1798 to 1800, in which French and American ships skirmished at sea, the fear of foreign subversion reached new heights. In that soil there sprouted the most infamous of the Federalist conspiracy theories, in which the country was allegedly threatened by a secret society called the Bavarian Illuminati.

The actual Illuminati had been founded on May 1, 1776, by Adam Weishaupt, a professor at the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria; he was motivated mostly by a desire to undermine the influence of the Jesuits. His followers weren’t the first people to call themselves Illuminati: The Spanish
Alumbrados
, French
Illuminés
, and Afghan
Roshaniyya
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had used the label for their religious movements, as had some eighteenth-century French followers of the Swedish spiritualist Emanuel Swedenborg. (Naturally, conspiracy theorists have attempted to link those older sects to the Bavarian order.) Weishaupt’s Illuminati were antiauthoritarian in theory and elaborately hierarchical in practice, with a baroque series of degrees and a careful system of secrecy. Recall Richard Hofstadter’s remark that the John Birch Society adopted a structure similar to the one it imputed to the Communist enemy. Weishaupt did the same thing, establishing a chain of command that outdid the most intricate image of the Jesuits’ secret machinations.

Weishaupt’s group took hold within Freemasonry—a secret society inside a secret society—attracting at least two thousand members before the Bavarian authorities started cracking down. The biggest blow came in 1786, when the police raided the home of Francis Xaver von Zwack, an Illuminatus who had recently held a post in the government. The search turned up a large cache of the order’s papers, including not just its secret symbols and a partial membership roster but a letter in which Weishaupt wrote that he had impregnated his sister-in-law and then procured an abortion. The papers were published, and the group fell into disgrace. Soon Bavaria’s duke declared that anyone caught recruiting new members into the order would be put to death.

That seemed to be the end of it. But rumors continued to circulate that the higher ranks of the Illuminati were still active, and a former member of the organization made a well-publicized though ill-fated effort to launch a similar group under a new name.
34
Continental conservatives whispered that the illuminated underground had infiltrated French Freemasonry and sparked the French revolution of 1789.
35
This idea reached the English-speaking world when the Edinburgh physicist John Robison promoted it in his 1797 book
Proofs of a Conspiracy
. According to Robison, the bloodshed in France was only the beginning: “AN ASSOCIATION HAS BEEN FORMED for the express purpose of ROOTING OUT ALL THE RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS, AND OVERTURNING ALL THE EXISTING GOVERNMENTS OF EUROPE.”
36
At about the same time Augustin Barruel, a French Jesuit exiled to England, offered a more elaborate version of the story in his four-volume
Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism
. And from Robison and
Barruel
the theory filtered to the United States, where Federalists afraid of Jacobin subversion found a new basis for their fears.

One of the first to spread the word was the New England geographer and minister Jedidiah Morse, who proclaimed from the pulpit that a global conspiracy was trying to “subvert and overturn our holy religion and our free and excellent government.”
37
Morse’s sermons laid out the enemy’s plans, including a scheme “to invade the southern states from [Haiti] with an army of blacks . . . to excite an insurrection among the negroes.”
38
But Morse was ready to expose the conspirators before they could destroy the social order: “I have, my brethren, an official, authenticated list of the names, ages, places of nativity, professions, &c. of the officers and members of a Society of
Illuminati
. . . consisting of
one hundred
members.”
39
Prominent figures joined the warnings, notably Yale president Timothy Dwight, who denounced the Illuminati as a threat to chastity, faith, and the family. Eventually, predictably, the scare seeped into partisan politics, as when a Connecticut Federalist attacked Thomas Jefferson as “the very child of
modern illumination
.”
40

The order began to appear in popular culture, too. In 1800, the Maine writer Sally Wood published
Julia and the Illuminated Baron
, a Gothic melodrama set in prerevolutionary France, featuring an Illuminatus who holds a young woman captive and plots against her virtue. Combining anxieties, the book’s villain is both an aristocrat and a Jacobin: “He hated royalty, yet was sometimes so vain as to aspire at the possession of a scepter. He laughed at religion, and he trembled at its power and wished to present it.”
41
Wood’s Illuminati are a depraved band of nature worshippers, seizing pleasures for themselves as they prepare for the coming uprising. At one point in the tale a woman describes their initiation ceremony: “[D]isrobed of all coverings except a vest of silver gauze, I am to be exposed to the homage of all the society present upon a marble pedestal placed behind which sacrifices are to be offered.” She adds, “This sect increases daily. They will in a few years overturn Europe and lay France in ruins.”
42

An important shift happened as the country’s republican institutions matured, particularly once the Federalist Party began its decline in 1801. Before then, Federalist conspiracy theorists generally complained about a Jeffersonian Enemy Below (in collaboration, perhaps, with an Enemy Outside based in France), while Jeffersonian conspiracy theorists generally complained about a Federalist Enemy Above (in collaboration, perhaps, with an Enemy Outside based in England). It was a natural sequel to the revolution-era battle between Enemy Above–fearing insurrectionists and Enemy Below–fearing loyalists. When there were exceptions to the pattern, they usually involved white revolutionaries casting a nervous eye at the people below them in the social hierarchy. (Along with its complaints of kingly oppression, the Declaration of Independence charged London with fomenting “domestic insurrections amongst us.” Pressure from above, pressure from below.)
43

But with Jefferson’s party in power, it was possible for Federalists to see their rivals as an Enemy Above as well. In 1804, a Federalist paper in Virginia, the
Norfolk Gazette and Public Ledger
, complained that a “club in Richmond” intended to impose the “dominion of an unacknowledged aristocracy.”
44
On a national scale, one Massachusetts Federalist protested, “Instead of free republicks united by solemn compact, under a federal government with limited powers, we have become a consolidated empire under the absolute controul of a few men.”
45
Across the ocean, a revolutionary republic in France had decayed into the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte; now the Federalists believed they were watching a revolutionary republic in America decay into the dictatorship of Thomas Jefferson. The alleged entente between the Jeffersonians and the Paris-based Enemy Outside still played a prominent role in Federalist thinking; it’s just that the nature of their American and French foes evolved as each consolidated power. Even the Constitution, once the great Federalist hope, had “under the hands of its enemies, its present masters, been converted as if it were by magic into a formidable engine of tyranny, adapted to carry into effect the cruel system of the French ruler.”
46

That was a fantasy, but it was a fantasy provoked by real events. By buying the Louisiana territory from France, Jefferson had more than doubled the country’s size, leaving Federalists concerned that the nation had grown too large to govern itself; and by imposing an embargo on trade with the British, he had interfered with Americans’ economic freedom in a way that fell especially hard on New England cities, where the Federalists were concentrated. Jefferson was, in other words, working at least part of the time for the expansion of Power. It was natural for his critics to denounce him with the language of Liberty. And it was natural for some of those denunciations to take the form of conspiracy theories.

“These purported conspiracies had no fixed origin and no single aim,” James Banner wrote in his history of the Massachusetts Federalists. “Plots were laid within the cabinet, in midnight caucuses of ‘Jacobin’ malcontents, in Napoleon’s carriage somewhere in Europe. There were conspiracies of ‘internal foes’ and of ‘external enemies.’ There were small conspiracies to seize elections and larger ‘secret and systemic’ foreign intrigues ‘by wicked and artful men, in foreign countries’ to ‘undermine the foundation of [Christian] Religion, and to overthrow its Altars.’ ”
47
Outside and Within, Above and Below: Federalists found something to fear from every direction.

Secret societies play a protean role in the paranoid imagination, their secrecy a mask that might conceal anything. In the Illuminati panic, Masonic orders were cast as an Enemy Outside. After Gabriel’s Rebellion of 1800, on the other hand, Masons were linked to an Enemy Below: Slaves were said to have planned the insurrection under cover of organizing a Masonic lodge.
48
In 1826, thanks to a high-profile crime in Canandaigua, New York, Masons became a symbol of the Enemy Above. The precipitating event was the apparent murder of William Morgan, an itinerant stonemason and former Freemason who had announced his plans to expose the order’s secrets. Morgan subsequently suffered several months of harassment, which culminated when he was abducted and never seen again.

The uproar that followed Morgan’s disappearance included several high-profile trials and grand jury investigations, and the testimony aired in those forums convinced many onlookers that Masonic vigilantes had murdered Morgan, that many Masons had perjured themselves to protect the assassins, and that highly placed Masons had abused their power in an attempt to cover up the crime. In 1828, those onlookers formed an Anti-Masonic Party. When it competed in the presidential election four years later, the party garnered nearly 8 percent of the popular vote and carried the state of Vermont.
49
Former president John Quincy Adams joined the movement, commenting privately in the early stages of the 1832 campaign that the “dissolution of the Masonic institution in the United States” was “really more important to us and our posterity than the question whether [Henry] Clay or [Andrew] Jackson shall be the president.”
50
Anti-Masonic governors were elected in Vermont and Pennsylvania, and many Anti-Masonic activists would later become important figures in Whig and Republican politics, including future secretary of state William Seward, future senator Charles Sumner, future congressman Thaddeus Stevens, and future Whig party boss Thurlow Weed.