The North Carolina Mason

… to attend and proceed in procession …, it is Ordered the attendance on that occasion be dispensed with, and instead thereof, they meet in the Evening at the Lodge Room, sup and spend the evening of this Festival together." According to the minutes of St. John's Lodge at Wilmington, on June 24, 1789, after hearing a sermon by the Reverend Bingham, the brethren "sat down to dinner and spent the Day in Social Festivity." That same day the Grand Lodge, upon Order of Grand Master Richard Caswell, convened its first recorded Feast of St. John. "This being the Anniversary of the St. John the Baptist, and a dinner being prepared at the Court House for the brethren to celebrate the same according to the Ancient usage of Free Masons." Grand Lodge and Lodge records alike illustrate the Feast of St. John the Baptist was regularly celebrated across the state for the first quarter of the 19th century. But, the Morgan Affair and the apex of the Second Great Awakening forced the Masons of North Carolina to rethink and retool their celebrations. The Morgan Affair, where the alleged cowan William Morgan was supposedly killed in upstate New York for, among other things, threatening to print an exposé of Masonic ritual, laid a pall across American Freemasonry for a generation, and nearly eradicated our fraternity in several states. At the same time, American religious life was becoming more evangelical and more temperate. The rough and rowdy frontier was considered irreligious, bawdy, and inebriated. The temperance movement, coupled with the religious revivals of the Great Awakening and the skepticism cast by the Morgan Affair, shunned Masonic social festivities. Nearly a century of toasts and social camaraderie abruptly petered out in the second quarter of the 19th century. While some feasts continued through the 1830s and 1840s, by the time of the Civil War few lodges engaged in Festive Boards or celebrations of any kind, and alcohol was forbidden in North Carolina's Masonic Lodges, save for "ritualistic purposes." "Ritualistic purposes" was a thin thread of acceptance of Freemasonry's festive and social celebrations. Yet, by the 1870s more and more counties were restricting the sale and use of alcohol, and in 1908 North Carolina passed its own prohibition law – 11 years before national prohibition was ratified into the United States Constitution. Despite North Carolina Freemasonry's acceptance of the state's growing temperance movement in the 1830s and 1840s, Masonic celebrations were associated with alcohol use and abuse, though there are few sources to verify the abuse of alcohol at Masonic functions. In fact, most banquets and parties were thrown into a skeptical light and often investigated for alcohol use and abuse. It was during this time that mid-day or afternoon family picnics proliferated public occasions instead of evening dinners and celebratory banquets. It is little wonder why the Masonic Nobles of the Mystic Shrine were for many years after their founding in 1870, aspersed for inappropriate behavior. In fact, the Shrine's acceptance into North Carolina was challenged by the state's Masonic leadership at the turn of the 20th Century, who feared Freemasonry's 75-year turn from L AT E S U M M E R 2 0 2 3 | 19

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