jan 3, 1800 - Thomas Jefferson strongly defended Adam
Weishaupt [(Founder of the Illuminati)
against John Robinson, Barruel & Morse]
as an "Enthusiastic Philanthropist" (0054)
Description:
The letter lately forwarded by TJ was likely the one he received from Joseph Priestley on 12 Jan.; see his letter to Priestley of 18 Jan. Book: Joseph Priestley’s recently completed A Comparison of the Institutions of Moses with Those of the Hindoos and Other Ancient Nations; with Remarks on Mr. Dupuis’s Origin of All Religions, the Laws and Institutions of Moses Methodized, and an Address to the Jews on the Present State of the World and the Prophecies Relating to It (Northumberland, Pa., 1799); see John Towill Rutt, ed., Life and Correspondence of Joseph Priestley, 2 vols. (London, 1831–32), 2:423, 425.
The Abbé Augustin Barruel, a Jesuit, had written Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme to expose what its author saw as dangerously conspiratorial origins of revolutionary thought in Europe. First published in French in 1797–98, the book appeared in the United States in 1799 in an English translation published by Cornelius Davis (see Evans, Nos. 35153–6). In translation the volumes of the work were called The Antichristian Conspiracy, The Antimonarchical Conspiracy, and The Antisocial Conspiracy, the last of which continued into a fourth volume. Sermons given by Jedidiah Morse on fast days in Massachusetts in 1798–99 warned Americans of the dangers of the Illuminati. John C. Ogden, the indefatigable opponent of the New England religious, cultural, and political establishment, responded to those jeremiads with a pamphlet, A View of the New England Illuminati, and with articles published in the Philadelphia Aurora. Ogden labeled Morse and his elitist associates the only secret organization or “Illuminati” to be feared in the United States. The founder of the order of the Illuminati was Adam Weishaupt, an academic of Ingolstadt, Bavaria. Weishaupt had studied at a Jesuit seminary, but the society he formed in 1776 was anticlerical, emphasized natural religion and the perfectibility of humankind, and incorporated elements of freemasonry. The order elicited strong opposition from Jesuits and was officially suppressed in Bavaria in 1784 (Dictionnaire, 5:627–8; Alan V. Briceland, “The Philadelphia Aurora, the New England Illuminati, and the Election of 1800,” PMHB, 100 [1976], 3–36; Henry Garland and Mary Garland, The Oxford Companion to German Literature [Oxford, 1976], 416, 926; Erwin L. Lueker, Lutheran Cyclopedia, rev. ed. [St. Louis, 1975], 403, 811; for Morse’s sermons, see Evans, Nos. 34148, 34151, 35838).
Robinson: John Robison, professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, was the author of Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. The book was first published in 1797 and appeared in several editions by the end of the next year, including impressions in Philadelphia and New York (Evans, Nos. 34477, 34478; DSB, 11:496–7).
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Details on history that were left out. The goal is not to ch...
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