Brothers & Friends: In January, I attempted to lay out the origins of English ritual as created by William Preston, arguably the greatest masonic scholar of the late 1700's. This month we will cross the Atlantic to the newly formed United States of America and I will try to help you understand how the American ritual we practice today came to be as a result of the work of another Masonic Scholar, Thomas Smith Webb.
Thomas Webb was born in 1771 and at age 16 was apprenticed to a printer in Boston. He later moved to Keene NH where he was made a Mason in Rising Sun Lodge. In 1793 he moved to Albany NY, a center for Freemasonry and established a business there. By that time he had become intrigued by the craft's beauty and relevance but found that there was no standard for its practice. He took it upon himself to create one and in 1797 published the first edition of “The Freemason's Monitor”. His primary source was William Preston's “llustrations of Masonry”. Webb cherished the Englishman's work but found it too long and in some cases not appropriate to American culture. For the next 20 years he he amended and adapted his work while spreading it throughout the Northeast. He and his disciples formed Schools of Instruction teaching “Webb Work” using the monitor as the standard. The result of his labors is the remarkable uniformity we see in the American Masonic Ritual today.
The Monitor does not actually spell out any of the esoteric (secret) parts of the ritual, nor did Preston's Illustrations, but does prescribe a format for each degree and the opening and closing of the lodge. In describing how the work should be conducted it also includes large blocks of text that would be recognized by any Mason today. While adapting Preston's work to American Freemasonry Webb also reduced the number of sections in the three degrees from 22 to 8. In addition the Monitor also includes chapters on how to operate the lodge, masonic law, music, Masonic history and just about everything else one would need to know as a Freemason.
As if that weren't enough and though it falls outside my Masonic experience, he also provides the same guidance for all the York Rite degrees and is commonly considered to be the father of the York Rite.
Finally as mentioned in last month's column, I have electronic copys of Web's work as well as Preston's and would be willing to share it with anyone interested in exploring the work of these two remarkable Freemasons.
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The Preston and Webb books are available elswhere on this site under 'Historic Documents'. They are large (17 meg) documents so if you have dialup internet access it will take some time for download.