Hauntings: Americanisms in Andrés Cassard and Albert Pike, 1850 –1870

Abstract

In the early 1850s, the imperial path traced by the United States influenced Caribbean politics. What Rodrigo Lazo identifies as “fili-bustering culture” in the Caribbean, specifically in relation to Cuba, coincides with the decades of Masonic expansion in the Americas.² Masonic expansion, that is, the role that US Scottish Rite Masonic lodges played as they opened sister lodges across the Caribbean, has been associated by Dominique Soucy to a direct form of imperial-building open to the languages and influences of US Manifest Destiny. Histories of Masonic expansion reflect a form of intervention that shares forms of internationalism proper in Masonic codes and alliances.³ While it is true that founding daughter lodges in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and the Dominican Republic coincided with US earlier imperial ventures—such as the purchase of Louisiana (1803), the Mexican American War (1848), and the failure of US to annex Cuba by the terms of the Ostend Manifesto in 1855—I see these Masonic interventions as part of a “softer” imperial formation that is linked to territorial expansion or war. 4 Equality before Masonic law gave these diverse group of brothers a sense of international fraternalism. At the same time, it exposed them to rituals and forms of civic associations in the United States.

Si la muerte no nivelara a los hombres, habría constantes revoluciones en el campo de los muertos.

—Andrés Cassard ¹

[If death would not be great the equalizer of men, we will have daily revolutions in the afterlife]