Jedidiah Morse

The president proclaims national days of fasting and humiliation, and the clergy answer the call.

And here the filament glows again, because on the fast day of May, 1798, the Reverend Jedediah Morse of Charlestown, as respectable a pulpit as New England owns, preaches that a secret society called the Illuminati has infiltrated America, atheists and foreign agents burrowed into the lodges and the newspapers and the opposition party, a hidden hand behind every criticism of the government.

Other pulpits take it up.

The theory is a fabrication top to bottom, and it is preached on a day appointed by the president as the news from God.

It's just a code word for rampant socialism.

Other prominent Americans who warned of the Illuminist designs on the infant American republic included the Reverend Seth Payson and the Reverend Jedidiah Morse, a noted geographer, textbook author, and father of inventor Samuel Morse.

But America's constitutional foundations held firm because they were set in the bedrock of sound principles.

Perhaps the most incisive critique of the Rousseauist Illuminist design for perpetual peace was that written by James Madison and published in the National Gazette on February second, seventeen ninety-two.

He's also not saying, What on earth is an Illuminati? He's taking the question seriously enough to distinguish between the spread of ideas and institutional infiltration.

At roughly the same time, Congregational Minister Jedediah Morse was preaching sermons warning Americans about the Illuminati.

Yes, Samuel Morse's father.

The Illuminati had gone from a handful of Bavarian intellectuals to being discussed from American pulpits in about 20 years.

But then if you look at the writings of New Englanders by the early nineteenth century.

Take Jedediah Morse, for example, the great geographer.

He called the North, a, quote, happy state of mediocrity, a hardy race of free, independent Republicans.

And isn't that the image that New Englanders always want of themselves? They don't share anything, but they're free and independent.

When my wife and I first moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, I took a job there once.

We took some baked goods over And we'd been warned about New Englanders and all that, and we delivered baked goods and said, hi, how are you? We're here now.

And the woman said, in effect, why have you brought this? Jedediah Morse describes Southerners, however, as, quote, disconsolate, represented, he said, by, quote, disconsolate wildness and popular ignorance.

Noah Webster, of the great dictionary fame, said famously, O New England, how superior are thy habits in morals, literature, civility and industry.