This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.They signed the Declaration of Independence. They led troops into battle. They helped shape the United States. And many of them were Freemasons.Independence Masons: Brothers of the Square follows the gritty, often contradictory lives of the Masonic Founders who helped create America. From tavern backrooms to blood-soaked battlefields, this book explores how the working tools of Freemasonry played out in the real lives of men who...

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.John Hancock’s oversized signature on the Declaration of Independence is legendary, but the man behind it was far more complex than the bold flourish suggests.A wealthy merchant prince and one of the richest men in the colonies, Hancock used his influence and resources to support the patriot cause. As President of the Continental Congress, he guided the colonies through the early days of revolution. Later, as governor of Massach...

Twenty-two years before Congress ever argued about how thirteen colonies should become one country, the same argument had already happened once — and failed completely.In 1754, Benjamin Franklin brought a plan for colonial union to a room in Albany, New York. Every delegate present signed off on it. Every colonial assembly that received it afterward rejected it outright. Franklin filed the failure away and, decades later, helped write the version that actually stuck. He never fully...

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.Benjamin Franklin stands as one of the most influential Freemasons in history, yet his life was far more complicated than the polished image most people know.This complete four-part series follows Franklin from his beginnings as a runaway apprentice printer and illegitimate son through the deadly fake Masonic initiation scandal that nearly destroyed him. It traces his rise as an “electric philosopher,” civic builder, and eventua...

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.George Walton began as a carpenter’s apprentice in Virginia with nothing but calloused hands and stubborn ambition. He taught himself law by firelight, became a Master Mason in Solomon’s Lodge No. 1, and rose to lead Georgia’s Provincial Congress. At just thirty-three, he became the youngest signer of the Declaration of Independence.This four-episode series follows Walton’s full, gritty journey. After signing, he was shot in the...

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.Richard Stockton was a tall, green-eyed Princeton lawyer and Worshipful Master of St. John’s Lodge who became the first New Jerseyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. He didn’t have to. He already had status, wealth, and a respected position in colonial society. But when the moment came, he chose to risk it all.Stockton left behind the elegance of his Morven estate and used his influence to help turn the College of New J...

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.William Hooper began as a Loyalist. A quiet, Harvard-educated North Carolina lawyer, he initially helped the Crown suppress the Regulator uprising. Then a mob attacked him, and everything changed.Hooper made one of the most dramatic transformations of any signer of the Declaration of Independence. He turned his back on the Crown, signed the Declaration with resolve, and later became known for his principled postwar advocacy for ...

Eleven men who signed the Declaration of Independence were documented or plausible Freemasons. This is their story — told honestly, evidence tier by evidence tier, without rounding up a family legend into a certainty or flattening a complicated man into a hero.Independence Masons follows all eleven of these men from their earliest recorded years — a runaway printer's apprentice, an orphaned carpenter who taught himself law by firelight, a Quaker merchant who broke with his own chur...

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.Matthew Thornton became the last man to sign the Declaration of Independence — not because he was late to the cause, but because he refused to be excluded from it.An Irish immigrant who arrived in New Hampshire as a boy, Thornton rose to become a respected physician, judge, and militia leader. When he finally reached the Continental Congress in November 1776, months after most signers had already put their names on the document,...