This event, and the fact that Morgan was never seen alive again, would spark one of the first episodes of political hysteria in our county’s history.
As the apparent details of this obscure crime became more known to the wider public, a conspiracy theory started to coalesce around it with many believing that there was a Masonic plot to overthrow American society from the very people who were elected to serve them.
Such was the fervor around this so-called plot that it would birth the first-ever third political party, the Anti-Masonic Party.
Soon citizens would begin to talk openly about withholding their vote from any man associated with any Masonic fraternity and the Anti-Masonic Party would begin to garner support as their suggestions that the Mason’s were a group of secretive, sinister, elitist, and anti-democratic men who had only their own agenda and not that of the nation as a whole.
