The Architects of America: Freemasons and the Growth of the United States

Therefore thus saith the Lord God, Behold I lay in Zion
for a foundation stone, a tried stone, a precious cornerstone,
a sure foundation.

—Isaiah 28:16/17

Seventeen thirty-three isn’t notable in either the story of the British or American people. For England, the year lies in the relatively directionless period between the political upheavals of the previous century and the industrial revolution that characterized the latter half of the eighteenth. Across the Atlantic, 1733 again fell between two stools, equidistant from the hit and miss experimentalism of the later East Coast settlements of the sixteen hundreds and the full blooded revolutionary fervor that was to rip America from British rule fifty years in the future. Superficially, this appeared not to be a time of fantastic change in the Anglo-Saxon world, for there were no wars, battles or revolutions—scientific, social or political—to invest the thirty-third year of the eighteenth century with anything approaching the pivotal feel of, for example, ten sixty-six, seventeen seventy-six or nineteen forty-five.

Even so, the absence of a world-changing event does not mean that a specific year is a void, with nothing occurring during its twelve months to mark its place in history. Something of note always happens in each

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