ANTI-MASONS

The Anti-Masonic party, the first third-party movement in the United    
States, arose in response to the disappearance of William Morgan,       
shortly after his release on September 12, 1826, from a Canandaigua,    
New York, jail. Morgan had threatened to publish a book divulging       
the secrets of Freemasonry; opponents of the order asserted that a      
conspiracy among Masons had led to his arrest on trumped-up charges and 
subsequently to his being kidnapped and murdered.                       

The Anti-Masonic movement grew rapidly, drawing its initial following   
from farmers and skilled craftsmen, many of them with ties to           
evangelicalism and the temperance movement. They maintained that the    
Masonic order's secrecy, rituals, and aristocratic character posed a    
threat to republican democracy. Anti-Masonry also provided a vehicle    
for rural people to express their antipathy to the cities, and for      
ordinary people to voice their resentment of the powerful leaders, many 
of them Masons, who dominated the nation's public affairs. From western 
New York, the movement spread through New England, the Mid-Atlantic     
states, and Ohio and Michigan. Anti-Masons elected a governor of Rhode  
Island in 1833, controlled Vermont and Pennsylvania for several years,  
and played a significant part in local politics in both Massachusetts   
and New York.                                                           

In 1831, the Anti-Masonic party nominated William Wirt to run for       
president; in the process, it became the first American political party 
to select a presidential candidate by means of a national convention    
and the first to adopt an official party platform. Wirt carried only    
one state (Vermont) in 1832, but the party continued to grow, offering  
an increasingly general program of reform. As it expanded, it came to   
be dominated by new members more impelled by personal ambition or by a  
general opposition to the Jacksonian Democrats than by Anti-Masonry.    
At its second and final convention (1835), the Anti-Masonic party       
approved a slate for 1836 identical to that of the new Whig party,      
and thereafter it disappeared into the Whig coalition. During its       
brief career, however, Anti-Masonry had played an important part        
in northeastern politics and had helped launch the careers of such      
leaders as William Lloyd Garrison, William H. Seward, Thurlow Weed, and 
Thaddeus Stevens.                                                       

See also Elections: 1832; 
Fraternal Societies; 
Third Parties.olitics in both Massachusetts and New York.