Part 5 of "Enigmatic Code":
Speculative Epilogue: The Possible Link between the Scottish Rite’s “Southern” Code and the Specific Code Used by Joel Poinsett
Because the logic describing the distance of the Scottish Rite’s intrinsic philosophy and the highly conflicted culture at Charleston is so strong, an ambit for further speculation seems to have opened. The question can really be posed soberly, to what extent were the Founders of the Scottish Rite consciously, or perhaps simply by general emphasis, employing an actual developed code? Surely it is one thing to describe the inexorability of cultural circumstance that necessitated a general code-like expression in the ritual. But going further to aver that an actual identifiable strategy was at work, or at least in some way broadly attempted as an ambition, would seem to require some specific confirmation. It is quite surprising and significant to find in the multifarious Antique- and-Curio Shop of the antebellum South, that such did in fact exist.
One of the most famous Freemasons of the period, Joel Poinsett was actually one of the earlier American diplomats to extensively employ an actual code while working as U.S. Minister in Mexico. “Secrecy and intrigue surrounded Poinsett soon after his reception as Envoy Extraordinary on June 1, 1825 in Mexico City and he responded for the first time in code that the British had already won over President Guadalupe Victoria.”/77 Poinsett went on to use this code with regularity until his departure from Mexico in 1829:
“The highly secret code employed by Poinsett had been constructed by the American government officials in 1805 and was used increasingly …after that year. After the War of 1812, the State Department issued this carefully conceived code to its ministers and continued to utilize it until the 1870’s. In fact this particular code, sometimes referred to as “Mr. Monroe’s Cypher” outlived every other official State Department code between 1989 and 1940.”/78
The actual strategy of the code is both beyond the scope of this article, as well as beyond the skills of the present writer to assess. But the facts of this numerically intricate code speak for themselves as to their long- term usefulness and perhaps influence.
What is utterly germane to our argument is that the fact that the whole thrust of Poinsett’s time in Mexico was involved with trying to help bring, “liberal and Enlightenment ideas [that] would give impetus to Mexico’s growth and progress.”/79 Of course, Poinsett’s time in Mexico is rather famous also for controversies involving the Yorkinos and Escoseses. Again, this controversy is outside the realm of our consideration, and especially because it seems to have obscured the more basic fact that Poinsett was involved with an intricate code delivery in the service of explicitly Enlightenment ends, whatever social complications his ideals may have entailed. Clearly, “Poinsett believed very firmly in the…ideals of representative democracy and separation of church and state. “/80
The overriding issue that gives clarity on the matter is that Poinsett felt that Mexico was woefully behind in civic progress, and said somewhat humorously perhaps that they were functioning in the historical world of Emperor Charles V! He concluded personally that there was a doubt “whether this Nation had advanced one step in knowledge and civilization from the time of the conquest…”/81 Trying to resolve the issues of the historical worth of his efforts in Mexico conceptually distracts however from the eidetic fact that all of idealistic strivings were communicated to the American government by way of special cipher. “Poinsett instinctively believed that Mexican political culture was replicating that of the United States after the passing of the Federalists.”/82 No doubt he felt that his communication with Washington were speeding this development, and that his coded communication was part of this evolution. This misassessment of the environment, coupled with the fact that it contradicts some of his other assumptions, shows that Poinsett may have been operating with some of the same conflicted perceptions typical of his hometown Charleston.
But that only heightens our perception of similarity of the underlying issue in his desire for an Enlightenment progress for Mexico, and the actual necessity of delivering insights on said progress by surreptitious means. As we have seen this was a social-psychological set-up that he would have found familiar to his hometown. Thus similar, in our analysis, to the founders of the Scottish Rite, For clearly Poinsett shared many of the same radical opinions that could have been labeled potentially “Illuminist” by local conservative culture. Thus, it is not necessary for us to endorse all Poinsett’s activities in a moral sense to indeed endorse the noble and enlightened sentiments that he entertained and that were communicated to the government in Washington, D. C. by way of code. Though some of Poinsett’s statement about the Mexican people could be construed as xenophobic, still that came from a thoroughly decent Enlightenment program of assumptions which stressed human equality. And it is crucially important to see that though Poinsett left Mexcio under a cloud, even with his own superiors, it happened because he was so honest about what had transpired. As one sharp analyst concludes, “[President] Adams’ suspicion of [Poinsett’s] involvement” was caused by the very forthrightness of “Poinsett’s candid correspondence relating to the charges which were opposed his meddling in political circles…he stated his connection with Mexican Masonry and offered to resign his position” /83 This means that at the very least Poinsett’s activities, including his use of a coded cipher, were not merely a means of willy-nilly obfuscation. It is clear that Poinsett acted with some level of high principle and honesty, even if things turned out poorly. In a sense the fact that things did not work out the way Poinsett desired shows that his efforts at swaying the situation were not that effective, or more specifically that he was not even intending them strongly to do so. In fact, a very old biographical source on Poinsett avers this precisely, with more perspicacity, in many way that more recent efforts to analyze him in my view: “The events that transpired after his departure, must have satisfied them [the Mexican public] that he had in no way been concerned either on one side or the other with the conflicts that occurred.” This was so even though Poinsett had been “accused by the aristocracy and priesthood of intriguing against them”/84 I am not sure whether these observations contain a dark irony or humor later thought in bad taste, and so left out of later assessments of his Mexican period. But certainly we can read the insight, I think rightly, that the Mexican public could observe all this because everything just promptly proceeded to get worse, as they often did in Mexico, and the Enlightenment progress he cherished hardly materialized!
We miss the profound layer of meaning in all this if we do not see that in some ways the conflicted and fraught environment of Mexico mirrored the conflicted environment of his hometown. Poinsett, “Charleston’s Apostle of Liberty”/85 seems to have been oblivious to the historic irony involved in his assessment of Mexican society. As scholars have very broadly noted vis-à-vis the American penchant for denigrating Mexico at this period, at least the Mexicans in fact had proscribed slavery. That Poinsett did not grasp his own irony in all this should hardly surprise us given all the foregoing in this article about the Charleston environment. But let it be noticed that for our purposes Poinsett’s poignant and perhaps subliminal entanglement in the web of these conundrums only makes it more likely that he would have looked on the surreptitious expression – coded expression -- of these ideas in a way similar to those cultural exemplars in Charleston.
When Poinsett got back to Charleston and resumed his bon vivant lifestyle, there is every reason to believe that he would have selectively let others know about the fascinating world of codes he had been involved in. “His breakfasts became a feature of the Charleston social life and invitations were much sought…”/86 To further tantalize us in this direction we have proof of correspondence between Isaac Auld and Poinsett on the subject of botanical specimens./87 This should not surprise us because both Auld and Dalcho were among the founders of the Charleston Botanical Garden./88 Thus they shared a passion that Poinsett shared, which should surprise no one about a man for whom a very beautiful flower is named. It seems to be a justified speculation that sharing this passion these men would have talked widely or shared social engagements in some way. It is hard to believe that such intellectual and well-educated men would not have shared ideas as well. We know that Dalcho shared Poinsett’s intellectual valor for the separation of church and state, which got him in such trouble in Mexico, and almost cost Poinsett his life. Dalcho’s history of the Episcopal Church in South Carolina contains what almost could have been a virtual raison d’etre for Poinsett’s activities in Mexico:
“It is not necessary that the Church should be united with the State. Its Constitution does not require it. Its spiritualities are totally distinct and independent of its civil institutions. ‘The connexion of the church and of the State,’ says the learned Daubigney, ‘appears to be an accidental circumstance, which may, or may not exist….”/89
Of course it only proves again the existential similarity of embeddedness for all these men in the assumptions of southern culture, that Dalcho like Poinsett did not pose the same question of their own society as he was posing of more “Romish” ones, and which Poinsett had posed of Mexico. To wit: Would the bondsmen in South Carolina have thought that Church and State were in fact so distinct and independent when religion was used as a prop for their servitude? But being honest about the incommensurate nature of their beliefs and ideals does not diminish that some of their ideals were noble. And it certainly does not diminish that they could have held ideas that in their social context were not fit for what the respectable people believed. Indeed, to extend the ideas of separation of Church and State to real freedom of belief as the Scottish Rite’s rituals had done was as threatening intrinsically to the slave-oligarchy as Poinsett’s perhaps quixotic Enlightenment quests in Mexico had been to the priestly caste.
Thus this trail leads us to the inevitable speculation that Poinsett and the Founders of the Scottish Rite shared a lot in common. In addition that personally knowing someone who actually had used one of the most sophisticated codes, who also was one of the most famous Brother Masons, would have had an effect on the more general impetus to code we have described. For “Charleston’s Apostle of Liberty” shared some of the same conflicted cultural assumptions as the founders of the Scottish Rite, coming from the same local social system. But more tellingly, they all shared the same noble and striking international ambitions towards liberty, and the instinct to conceptually shelter that fact in potentially inhospitable circumstances. They were all part of an international Brotherhood that prized liberty. Poinsett may have shared their general social complexity, but there is good reason to wonder further if they might have also shared specific information on particular code. And the code was, even in the midst of that complexity, the deepest desire for human freedom.
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank, as always, Larissa Watkins of the House of the Temple Library for her generous help, and specifically for pointing me to the sources that inspired this article. I am deeply grateful to Archivist Mary Jo Fairchild of The South Carolina Historical Society for her helpful discussion with me on Dalcho’s parish when I visited the impressive headquarters of the Society in Charleston. Also, I appreciate the personal assistance given to me by Librarian Dot Glover of the South Carolina Collection Room at the Charleston Public Library where I found several sources quite useful to me. In addition, I wish to thank the Librarians of the special collections of Black Studies and Washingtonia at the Martin Luther King Library, Washington, D.C., for identifying sources that directly influenced the argument I pursued in this article.
Speculative Epilogue: The Possible Link between the Scottish Rite’s “Southern” Code and the Specific Code Used by Joel Poinsett
Because the logic describing the distance of the Scottish Rite’s intrinsic philosophy and the highly conflicted culture at Charleston is so strong, an ambit for further speculation seems to have opened. The question can really be posed soberly, to what extent were the Founders of the Scottish Rite consciously, or perhaps simply by general emphasis, employing an actual developed code? Surely it is one thing to describe the inexorability of cultural circumstance that necessitated a general code-like expression in the ritual. But going further to aver that an actual identifiable strategy was at work, or at least in some way broadly attempted as an ambition, would seem to require some specific confirmation. It is quite surprising and significant to find in the multifarious Antique- and-Curio Shop of the antebellum South, that such did in fact exist.
One of the most famous Freemasons of the period, Joel Poinsett was actually one of the earlier American diplomats to extensively employ an actual code while working as U.S. Minister in Mexico. “Secrecy and intrigue surrounded Poinsett soon after his reception as Envoy Extraordinary on June 1, 1825 in Mexico City and he responded for the first time in code that the British had already won over President Guadalupe Victoria.”/77 Poinsett went on to use this code with regularity until his departure from Mexico in 1829:
“The highly secret code employed by Poinsett had been constructed by the American government officials in 1805 and was used increasingly …after that year. After the War of 1812, the State Department issued this carefully conceived code to its ministers and continued to utilize it until the 1870’s. In fact this particular code, sometimes referred to as “Mr. Monroe’s Cypher” outlived every other official State Department code between 1989 and 1940.”/78
The actual strategy of the code is both beyond the scope of this article, as well as beyond the skills of the present writer to assess. But the facts of this numerically intricate code speak for themselves as to their long- term usefulness and perhaps influence.
What is utterly germane to our argument is that the fact that the whole thrust of Poinsett’s time in Mexico was involved with trying to help bring, “liberal and Enlightenment ideas [that] would give impetus to Mexico’s growth and progress.”/79 Of course, Poinsett’s time in Mexico is rather famous also for controversies involving the Yorkinos and Escoseses. Again, this controversy is outside the realm of our consideration, and especially because it seems to have obscured the more basic fact that Poinsett was involved with an intricate code delivery in the service of explicitly Enlightenment ends, whatever social complications his ideals may have entailed. Clearly, “Poinsett believed very firmly in the…ideals of representative democracy and separation of church and state. “/80
The overriding issue that gives clarity on the matter is that Poinsett felt that Mexico was woefully behind in civic progress, and said somewhat humorously perhaps that they were functioning in the historical world of Emperor Charles V! He concluded personally that there was a doubt “whether this Nation had advanced one step in knowledge and civilization from the time of the conquest…”/81 Trying to resolve the issues of the historical worth of his efforts in Mexico conceptually distracts however from the eidetic fact that all of idealistic strivings were communicated to the American government by way of special cipher. “Poinsett instinctively believed that Mexican political culture was replicating that of the United States after the passing of the Federalists.”/82 No doubt he felt that his communication with Washington were speeding this development, and that his coded communication was part of this evolution. This misassessment of the environment, coupled with the fact that it contradicts some of his other assumptions, shows that Poinsett may have been operating with some of the same conflicted perceptions typical of his hometown Charleston.
But that only heightens our perception of similarity of the underlying issue in his desire for an Enlightenment progress for Mexico, and the actual necessity of delivering insights on said progress by surreptitious means. As we have seen this was a social-psychological set-up that he would have found familiar to his hometown. Thus similar, in our analysis, to the founders of the Scottish Rite, For clearly Poinsett shared many of the same radical opinions that could have been labeled potentially “Illuminist” by local conservative culture. Thus, it is not necessary for us to endorse all Poinsett’s activities in a moral sense to indeed endorse the noble and enlightened sentiments that he entertained and that were communicated to the government in Washington, D. C. by way of code. Though some of Poinsett’s statement about the Mexican people could be construed as xenophobic, still that came from a thoroughly decent Enlightenment program of assumptions which stressed human equality. And it is crucially important to see that though Poinsett left Mexcio under a cloud, even with his own superiors, it happened because he was so honest about what had transpired. As one sharp analyst concludes, “[President] Adams’ suspicion of [Poinsett’s] involvement” was caused by the very forthrightness of “Poinsett’s candid correspondence relating to the charges which were opposed his meddling in political circles…he stated his connection with Mexican Masonry and offered to resign his position” /83 This means that at the very least Poinsett’s activities, including his use of a coded cipher, were not merely a means of willy-nilly obfuscation. It is clear that Poinsett acted with some level of high principle and honesty, even if things turned out poorly. In a sense the fact that things did not work out the way Poinsett desired shows that his efforts at swaying the situation were not that effective, or more specifically that he was not even intending them strongly to do so. In fact, a very old biographical source on Poinsett avers this precisely, with more perspicacity, in many way that more recent efforts to analyze him in my view: “The events that transpired after his departure, must have satisfied them [the Mexican public] that he had in no way been concerned either on one side or the other with the conflicts that occurred.” This was so even though Poinsett had been “accused by the aristocracy and priesthood of intriguing against them”/84 I am not sure whether these observations contain a dark irony or humor later thought in bad taste, and so left out of later assessments of his Mexican period. But certainly we can read the insight, I think rightly, that the Mexican public could observe all this because everything just promptly proceeded to get worse, as they often did in Mexico, and the Enlightenment progress he cherished hardly materialized!
We miss the profound layer of meaning in all this if we do not see that in some ways the conflicted and fraught environment of Mexico mirrored the conflicted environment of his hometown. Poinsett, “Charleston’s Apostle of Liberty”/85 seems to have been oblivious to the historic irony involved in his assessment of Mexican society. As scholars have very broadly noted vis-à-vis the American penchant for denigrating Mexico at this period, at least the Mexicans in fact had proscribed slavery. That Poinsett did not grasp his own irony in all this should hardly surprise us given all the foregoing in this article about the Charleston environment. But let it be noticed that for our purposes Poinsett’s poignant and perhaps subliminal entanglement in the web of these conundrums only makes it more likely that he would have looked on the surreptitious expression – coded expression -- of these ideas in a way similar to those cultural exemplars in Charleston.
When Poinsett got back to Charleston and resumed his bon vivant lifestyle, there is every reason to believe that he would have selectively let others know about the fascinating world of codes he had been involved in. “His breakfasts became a feature of the Charleston social life and invitations were much sought…”/86 To further tantalize us in this direction we have proof of correspondence between Isaac Auld and Poinsett on the subject of botanical specimens./87 This should not surprise us because both Auld and Dalcho were among the founders of the Charleston Botanical Garden./88 Thus they shared a passion that Poinsett shared, which should surprise no one about a man for whom a very beautiful flower is named. It seems to be a justified speculation that sharing this passion these men would have talked widely or shared social engagements in some way. It is hard to believe that such intellectual and well-educated men would not have shared ideas as well. We know that Dalcho shared Poinsett’s intellectual valor for the separation of church and state, which got him in such trouble in Mexico, and almost cost Poinsett his life. Dalcho’s history of the Episcopal Church in South Carolina contains what almost could have been a virtual raison d’etre for Poinsett’s activities in Mexico:
“It is not necessary that the Church should be united with the State. Its Constitution does not require it. Its spiritualities are totally distinct and independent of its civil institutions. ‘The connexion of the church and of the State,’ says the learned Daubigney, ‘appears to be an accidental circumstance, which may, or may not exist….”/89
Of course it only proves again the existential similarity of embeddedness for all these men in the assumptions of southern culture, that Dalcho like Poinsett did not pose the same question of their own society as he was posing of more “Romish” ones, and which Poinsett had posed of Mexico. To wit: Would the bondsmen in South Carolina have thought that Church and State were in fact so distinct and independent when religion was used as a prop for their servitude? But being honest about the incommensurate nature of their beliefs and ideals does not diminish that some of their ideals were noble. And it certainly does not diminish that they could have held ideas that in their social context were not fit for what the respectable people believed. Indeed, to extend the ideas of separation of Church and State to real freedom of belief as the Scottish Rite’s rituals had done was as threatening intrinsically to the slave-oligarchy as Poinsett’s perhaps quixotic Enlightenment quests in Mexico had been to the priestly caste.
Thus this trail leads us to the inevitable speculation that Poinsett and the Founders of the Scottish Rite shared a lot in common. In addition that personally knowing someone who actually had used one of the most sophisticated codes, who also was one of the most famous Brother Masons, would have had an effect on the more general impetus to code we have described. For “Charleston’s Apostle of Liberty” shared some of the same conflicted cultural assumptions as the founders of the Scottish Rite, coming from the same local social system. But more tellingly, they all shared the same noble and striking international ambitions towards liberty, and the instinct to conceptually shelter that fact in potentially inhospitable circumstances. They were all part of an international Brotherhood that prized liberty. Poinsett may have shared their general social complexity, but there is good reason to wonder further if they might have also shared specific information on particular code. And the code was, even in the midst of that complexity, the deepest desire for human freedom.
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank, as always, Larissa Watkins of the House of the Temple Library for her generous help, and specifically for pointing me to the sources that inspired this article. I am deeply grateful to Archivist Mary Jo Fairchild of The South Carolina Historical Society for her helpful discussion with me on Dalcho’s parish when I visited the impressive headquarters of the Society in Charleston. Also, I appreciate the personal assistance given to me by Librarian Dot Glover of the South Carolina Collection Room at the Charleston Public Library where I found several sources quite useful to me. In addition, I wish to thank the Librarians of the special collections of Black Studies and Washingtonia at the Martin Luther King Library, Washington, D.C., for identifying sources that directly influenced the argument I pursued in this article.
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