America's Prophet

by Bruce Feiler

  Hoderath then set the stage for the inauguration. “More than two hundred years ago, everything we see around us in lower Manhattan was entirely different.” Trinity Church had yet to be rebuilt following the fire that swept through the city in 1776. The Canyon of Heroes, the section of Broadway later devoted to ticker-tape parades, was a street of fashionable houses. The meeting under a grove of buttonwood trees that led to the New York Stock Exchange was still several years away. Yet the city’s population was 33,000, more than that of Philadelphia or Boston. Its size and centrality contributed to its being chosen the first capital.

  Washington personally oversaw every detail of his installation. After learning of his election while in Mount Vernon on April 14, the general paid a final visit to his ailing mother, then proceeded by coach toward New York, switching to horseback in some towns to lead parades spontaneously organized in his honor. He recrossed the Delaware under a triumphal arch supported by thirteen pillars and surrounded by women and children dressed in white. From New Jersey, he traveled via water on a red, white, and blue barge, manned by thirteen pilots in white. As he entered New York Harbor, twenty singers rowed up alongside him and regaled him with a version of “God Save the Queen”:

  Joy to our native land!

  Let ev’ry heart expand

  For Washington’s at hand

  With Glory crown’d!

  On the morning of April 30, thousands flocked to the old city hall on Wall Street, which had been renovated and rechristened Federal Hall. Washington proceeded to the second floor to meet with the House and Senate. Careful to leave his military uniform behind, he was clad “in a full suit of dark-brown cloth of American manufacture, with a steel-hilted dress sword, white-silk stockings, and silver shoe-buckles. His hair was dressed and powdered in the fashion of the day.” As one observer wrote, the great man seemed agitated and nervous “more than ever he was by the levelled cannon or pointed musket.” Outside, the roofs of the houses were crowded, and the throngs were so dense “it seemed as if one might literally walk on the heads of the people.” All eyes were focused on the balcony. “In the centre of it,” one observer wrote, “was placed a table, with a rich covering of red velvet; and upon this a crimson-velvet cushion.” The stage was set for the inaugural swearing-in of the president of the United States.

  George Washington being inaugurated with his hand on Genesis 49-50 of a Masonic Bible, Federal Hall, New York, April 30, 1789. Colored engraving, 19th century. (Courtesy of The Granger Collection, New York)

  But there was a problem. Washington had nothing to rest on that cushion. There was no Bible. The Constitution does not require taking the oath of office on a Bible. John Adams had not used a Bible when he was sworn in as vice president nine days earlier. But the Bible’s role in oath taking goes back as far as Augustine, and incoming kings and queens in Britain had taken their coronation oaths on Bibles for centuries.

  For the most part, Washington was not particularly religious. Historian Joseph Ellis called him a “lukewarm Episcopalian and a quasi-Deist.” Even religious scholar Michael Novak and his daughter Jana, who argue in Washington’s God that the president believed in the Hebrew notion of God, conclude that he wasn’t exactly a Christian. He never took Communion; he rarely knelt during prayer; he did not use Christian names for God such as Redeemer or the Trinity; and in decades of private correspondence he referred to Jesus only once or twice.

  But he did believe in Providence, a deity that acted in history to free the Americans from bondage under the British. As he stated in his Thanksgiving Proclamation of October 1789, all Americans must unite in rendering unto Almighty God “our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation.” Four years later, after Benedict Arnold’s treason was uncovered hours before he did serious damage, Washington wrote that the providential train of circumstances “affords the most convincing proof that the Liberties of America are the object of divine Protection.” And Washington clearly knew his Hebrew Bible. In a letter to the Jews of Newport, he acknowledged the shared roots of Jews and Christians: “May the Children of the Stock of Abraham who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants.” His decision to be inaugurated with the Bible under his fingers and the Constitution on his lips guaranteed that these two achievements of the written word would be linked in the office of the presidency for generations to come.

  Geoffrey Hoderath picked up the story. “After consulting with Washington, Chancellor Robert Livingston, the Grand Master of Masons of the State of New York and one of five drafters of the Declaration of Independence, who was to administer the oath of office, hurriedly sent Worshipful Brother Jacob Morton to nearby Saint John’s Lodge to retrieve its altar Bible. Washington might have been playing a clever game. There were twenty-three churches in New York City. If he were to swear on a specific Bible, that church might get precedence. Instead he used a Masonic Bible, which is nondenominational. We are fortunate to have that Bible here today.”

  Hoderath gestured to the right of the pulpit, where three men in suits, aprons, and Secret Service demeanors stood holding a square metallic suitcase. With its shiny faces and bulging locks, the case looked like the kind of device James Bond might use to carry a portable satellite dish, a machine gun, and a spillproof container of shaken vodka martinis. The men put on white gloves and opened the top. They pulled out a sizable King James Bible, with a flaking leather front and two locks on its side. It had been printed in London in 1767 by Mark Baskett, the same printer who published the Book of Common Prayer that Jacob Duché defaced on July 4, 1776.

  The Washington Bible, as it came to be called, is the most illustrious Bible in the country, and arguably the most famous single book in American history. At least four other presidents used it in their inaugurations: Warren Harding, Dwight Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush. The Masons carried it to Washington, D.C., in 2001 for the inauguration of George W. Bush, but rain prevented its use. The Bible was present at the funerals of Andrew Jackson and Zachary Taylor and was used at the dedication of the Washington Monument, the laying of the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol, and the centennial celebration of the White House and Statue of Liberty. The Bible is owned by Saint John’s Lodge and is used in Masonic rituals, though it spends most of its time on display at the Federal Hall museum on Wall Street, a onetime customs house built on the spot of the demolished first capitol. A gallery contains the original balcony railing and the purported slab where the president stood. I had visited Federal Hall a few months earlier and stumbled onto the tale of how the Bible was nearly destroyed one morning two centuries after it first gained fame.

  At 7:45 A.M. on September 11, 2001, janitor Daniel Merced showed up for work at Federal Hall, less than a thousand feet from the World Trade Center. A first-generation Hispanic American, Daniel asked his colleague to sweep the building’s front steps, and then he went to change. Just before nine o’clock, Daniel looked out the door and noticed the steps were covered in office paper, fax-transmittal forms, and debris. It was a jolt. “Didn’t you sweep the steps?” he asked his colleague. Stepping outside, he cried out, “Look, there’s smoke!” Daniel thought 120 Broadway was on fire and rushed to find his cousin, who worked there. Along the way he ran into a colleague, who told him, “A plane hit the World Trade Center.” They hurried back to Federal Hall, and as they got inside, the building shook. “‘Lock the doors,’ our supervisor said. ‘Another plane hit the World Trade Center.’ At that point we knew what it was.”

  Later that hour, after securing the building and speaking with his wife, Daniel headed outside to begin walking home. “That’s when the first tower fell,” he said. “I saw the dust. It looked like it was alive. Soon I was covered in it.” He made it back to the front door, and he and his colleagues decided to use Federal Hall as a shelter. They ushered victims inside and offered them water. Then, disaster. The second tower fell. This time the
blast blew out the windows and filled the building with soot and rubble. That’s when Daniel Merced thought, “The Bible!”

  He ran to the front desk and retrieved the key to the display case. He had never opened the case before and had never touched the Bible. “I was shocked, really,” he said. “It didn’t feel old and fragile. It was kind of strong for a book that old.” He quickly placed the book in the carrying case, raced downstairs, opened the museum’s vault, and secured the Bible in the safest place in Federal Hall. “Every now and then I’ll walk by the case today,” he said, “and I’ll think about what I did. Nobody else thought about the Bible that day. I’m proud of what I did for my country.” He smiled. “People often ask, ‘When something happens, what will I save?’ Then something happened, and I saved Washington’s Bible.”

  BACK IN SAINT Paul’s chapel, Geoffrey Hoderath was ready for the main event. “When Washington stepped onto the balcony, he was met with rousing cheers. Back then, the cheer was ‘Huzzah!’ I would like you to give it a try. ‘Three cheers for the president of the United States!’”

  The audience huzzahed on cue. As they did, the Very Worshipful Mason playing the president-elect strode onto the pulpit, wearing a brown suit and powdered wig. The Mason playing the secretary of the Senate took the Bible and held it open, while Washington repeated the oath of office specified in the Constitution: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Some witnesses say that the president added the words “So help me God,” before bending to kiss the Bible.

  When the original ceremony was over in 1789, Jacob Morton marked the page where Washington rested his hand: Genesis 49:13 through 50:8. These chapters come at the very end of the first book of Moses. Abraham’s grandson Jacob, who is dying in Egypt, has gathered his sons for a blessing. He enjoins them to return his bones to Hebron, where his grandfather is buried. Jacob dies and is mummified in the manner of an Egyptian nobleman. Then, in a passage rarely remembered, Joseph—Jacob’s favored son, who is serving as the second-highest official in Egypt—confronts the pharaoh and asks that he be allowed to return to the Promised Land to bury his father. And the pharaoh agrees. “Go up, and bury thy father.” In this peaceful precursor to the Exodus, Joseph departs for Canaan, taking along the senior members of the pharaoh’s court as well as Joseph’s household and brothers. “It was a very great company,” the Bible says.

  It’s possible, as legend holds, that Washington selected this passage randomly. But there’s reason to doubt this. Washington obviously knew his Bible and planned every detail of his inauguration. Genesis is the first of more than seventy books in the Mason’s Bible, which includes the Apocrypha. Genesis 49 begins about one-twentieth of the way through the text. If you’re looking for a random passage, why reach for a page so obviously near the front? If you’re just letting the book fall open, what are the chances that it settles so close to the beginning? Or, more likely, if you believe you’re standing at the beginning of a grand experiment in democracy, if you’re conscious that every gesture you take, every thread you wear, every word you utter will be remembered forever as the first statement by the first president on his first day in office, wouldn’t you reach for the first book of the Bible, with its epic founders and stories of Creation?

  If Washington’s random selection wasn’t so random after all, what message was he trying to send? At first glance a passage about death, mummification, and burial hardly seems appropriate for a new beginning. But the closing chapters of Genesis are not merely about endings; they are about reconciling past rivalries and preparing for a future nation, two themes ripe for the Revolutionary generation. In the passage, as Jacob dies, he gathers his rivalrous sons and beseeches them to honor his blessing. After Jacob is buried, the sons who once sold Joseph into servitude in Egypt run to their brother and announce that their father urged Joseph to forgive them. Jacob had said no such thing.

  Joseph’s response is telling. “Have no fear,” he says. “Am I a substitute for God? Besides, although you intended me harm, God intended it for good, so as to bring about the present result.” At the height of his power, Joseph, the prime minister of Egypt and now de facto leader of Israel, declares, I am no God. I am no king. I am your brother. We may have fought amongst ourselves in the past, but now we stand, removed from our father and cut off from our fatherland, and we must work together. For George Washington, the consensus leader of God’s New Israel, the man who repeatedly stepped between the feuding founding brothers and urged them toward reconciliation, Genesis 49 and 50 may have been a private message, but it was a powerful statement of fraternal harmony.

  Even more, by insisting that he is no substitute for God, Joseph stresses the limits of his own leadership, a theme Washington emphasized throughout his career, from the Continental Army to the Constitutional Convention to the presidency. Jacob, in the blessing he gives Joseph, accentuates his debt to God, “in whose ways my fathers walked…who has been my shepherd from my birth to this day…who has redeemed me from all harm.” Washington echoed these words in his inaugural address, given just minutes later. “No People can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand which conducts the Affairs of men more than the People of the United States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency.”

  On the first day of the American presidency, Washington used the first book of Moses to send a message of humility.

  “Three cheers for George Washington!” the faux Robert Livingston cried. “The president of the United States.”

  And the two hundred people gathered in lower Manhattan rose to their feet and cheered, “Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!”

  AFTER THE CEREMONY I lingered in the chapel for a few minutes and visited the pew where Washington is said to have worshiped following the inauguration. Framed above it is the oldest known painting of the Great Seal, dating from the eighteenth century. Nearby is the so-called Bell of Hope, donated by the mayor of London to honor the remarkable survival of Saint Paul’s on September 11, 2001, when the collapsing towers across the street filled the facility with soot and debris. A plaque explained that the bell was cast by Whitechapel Foundry, “the same foundry that cast Big Ben and the Liberty Bell.”

  As I was preparing to leave, a man walked up behind me and grabbed my upper arm. Before I could react, he spun me around. “Who are you?” he asked, not exactly menacing but not welcoming, either.

  I was startled. I collected myself and explained that I had reached out to the Masons repeatedly, that I had heard about this event. He cut me off. “Wait here,” he said. “I need to speak to the Grand Master and our public relations representative.”

  “Your PR rep?” I repeated.

  He shrugged, as if to say the Masons had been getting a lot of negative publicity lately, then said, “The Da Vinci Code.” He huddled with some colleagues, returned, and jabbed his finger in my face. “You’re coming to lunch.”

  The next thing I knew I was huddled onto a bus with fifty Masons, driven to the bottom of Manhattan, and led up four flights to the top of Fraunces Tavern, where Washington bade farewell to the Continental Army in 1783. Revolution-era flags hung from the rafters, and a huge deli buffet was spread across the room. Had I really penetrated the inner sanctum of America’s Most Secret Society only to find it filled with Oscar Mayer bologna and Vlasic pickles?

  Over the next few hours I got acquainted with Masonry. The white aprons are a symbol of purity and a tribute to the stonemasons who helped build Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. A third of U.S. presidents have been Masons, along with thirty Supreme Court justices. When I began probing about Masonry and the Bible, I was told, “There’s someone you should meet.”

  A few days later I walked through the revolving door of a building on Sixth Avenue and Twenty-third Stre
et. On the wall was a giant mural depicting the all-seeing eye in a pyramid, flanked by seven men from ancient Egypt and six from colonial America. “Hmm,” I thought, thirteen. After a short elevator ride, the doors opened on more frescoed walls and four marble muses.

  I was greeted by Tom Savini. A forty-something man who looked like an insurance salesman (albeit one with an earring), Tom is a historian of comparative religion, a lapsed Catholic, and a Mason. He showed me around the boardroom, which contained a gilded statue of Washington in an apron and the two-story marble sanctuary, complete with gilt-edged ceiling and thronelike chairs. The entire edifice struck me as one part Buckingham Palace, one part Trump Tower. We settled in the library, and I asked Savini if he thought Masonry was a religion.

  “I would call it a catalyst for religion. It’s a belief system that focuses individuals on principles and patterns of living that Masonry believes are fulfilling and lead to a better society. And yet it doesn’t fill in the details. Masonry tells you to worship a Supreme Being, but it doesn’t ask you what you call that being. It reveres what it calls the Volume of Sacred Law but it doesn’t tell you what that volume should be.”

  The origins of what is now called speculative Freemasonry began in western Europe in the late seventeenth century. Though the movement claims roots in antiquity, it exploded when middle-class men adopted traditions from medieval stone layers. The heart of Freemasonry is an elaborate allegory that stretches back to Mount Sinai. After handing down the Ten Commandments, God instructs Moses to place the tablets inside the Ark of the Covenant. Later, when the Israelites conquer Jerusalem, the ark is transferred to its permanent home in Solomon’s Temple. But the Masons introduce a dimension of intrigue into the biblical story. The “master workman” of the temple, Hiram Abiff, is murdered for refusing to reveal some mysterious password. He’s buried under green moss. Those who discover his body utter, “Thanks be to God, our Master has got a Mossy House.” A shortened version of that statement, Macbenah, became the Mason password.