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5.0 out of 5 stars
You are there, June 15, 2009
After years of careful study, Stephen Dafoe's recently released, "Morgan: the Scandal That Shook Freemasonry" offers one of the most provocative retellings available of an incident that changed the North American political landscape.
"This book is the story of William Morgan, his associates and the book they proposed to publish," Dafoe explains in his Introduction to "Morgan". "It is the story of how a handful of young, impetuous members of the Masonic fraternity took matters into their own hands to prevent its publication and how their plans took a deadly fork in the road, nearly exterminating the very organization they sought to protect."
For anyone who doesn't know already, what became known as "the William Morgan affair" was the September 1826 disappearance of Morgan because he'd authored a detailed expose of Freemasonry. All agree he was abducted by Freemasons and was never heard from again. This spawned nationwide outrage, a backlash against the Craft and a political movement, all of which are still studied today.
It's a story Dafoe told in the 2007 Heredom, Volume 15 of the Scottish Rite Research Society's annual transactions. There, Dafoe gave us "Batavia to Baltimore & Beyond: A Re-examination of the William Morgan Story and It's Effect on Freemasonry."
Prior to that, Dafoe wrote a four-part series on the Morgan affair for quarterly Masonic Magazine, fall 2005 thru summer 2006, "using as many primary sources as I couls lay my hands on."
Those primary sources are key. Contemporary and afterward documentation on the Morgan affair is HUGE in quantity and impressive in its conflicts. It takes a serious scholar to plow thru it all and come up with a well studied, readable tome.
Which is part of what makes "Morgan" quite unique among the histories written of the period. Dafoe clearly did his homework but he didn't just dump his notebook into the pages of this book. In "Morgan", the reader gets more than names, dates and locals. In "Morgan", the reader gets to be "there".
To do this, Dafoe skillfully wields the narrative form. This mode of writing, attempted by only a few historians and poorly handled by most who do try, offers the sort of continuity more common histories cannot approach. The reader receives the story as it happens, complete with thoughts and dialogue - culled from contemporary documents - and, for a time, can suspend whatever prior knowledge they may have had.
In this way, even the most knowledgeable student of the antiMasonic period gets to be something many long to be: a fly on the wall.
The reader is there:
- to share the grief between Morgan and his wife, Lucinda, at the lost of their child and the comfort he derives among his Brethren during his salad days in Freemasonry.
- recognize and empathize with those same Brethren who rejected him and yet still sympathize with Morgan for his anguish, which leads to his fatal decision to expose the Secrets of the fraternity.
- in lodge when the state's governor's letter is read out, calling upon the Brethren to "suppress the secrets of Masonry at the expense of blood and treasure"; and promising "if you are detected, you shall be protected. If you are convicted, you shall be pardoned, for I have the pardoning power."
- reading the appeal for moderation in Henry Brown's letter to the editor in Republican Advocate and watching, helplessly, as it is ignored.
- observing Morgan's initial arrest for stealing clothing he'd actually borrowed, cleared of that and then immediately arrested again on a debt of less than $3
- gazing out the second-floor window with Susan Green as the "armed mob of Masons" march up the street to the office of Morgan's publisher, David Miller, and abducts him in broad daylight.
- is with Miller's equally passionate mob of friends who rescue him from the Masons and, thus, unsilences his pen to shout murder to all the world.
- blinded with Morgan, his eyes too-tightly bound with his own handkerchief, as he's rowed in a boat across the Niagara to Canada; and hears his appeal to his Brothers turned captors: "Gentleman, I am your prisoner, use me with magnanimity"; only to feel a pistol in his chest and a promise "You say one more word, Morgan, and I'll shoot you."
- huddles with Morgan the last hours locked in an unlit, windowless cell in the powder magazine of a fort on the US side of the border with Canada. And then . . .
How does Dafoe handle the conflicting stories of Morgan's death or exile? That much I will not give away.
I will say Dafoe's "Morgan" leaves the reader with a gut wrenching helplessness that the majority of those who lived thru it must have felt at the time. Being there means the reader observes, but cannot change, the events as they unfold. And so watches as the Craft in the United States, by the rash and passionate actions of the Masons who claim to be saving Her, is almost snuffed out in the US.
What is more, Dafoe drives home a powerful lesson here, that there are no real villains or "good guys" in this story. Other historians too often portray the tragedy of Morgan's disappearance and the period that follows as a saga with heroes and villains. Dafoe's "Morgan" tells it as it is and was. There is no one good here who is completely good; and no one bad who is completely bad.
The message is clear: sometimes good people, with all the best of intentions, do the worst of things. For which all are made to suffer.
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