Latest / The Masonic Roundtable - Freemasonry Today for Today's Freemasons / The Masonic Roundtable - 0569 - William Morgan Returns!

Transcript

The Masonic Roundtable - 0569 - William Morgan Returns! · The Masonic Roundtable - Freemasonry Today for Today's Freemasons

• 0:20
  Speaker: Hello and welcome back to the Masonic Roundtable, a weekly
• 0:22
  Speaker: program where Masons from around the world get together to talk
• 0:25
  Speaker: about Masonic news and opinions in a friendly and social manner.
• 0:29
  Speaker: As a reminder, the thoughts and opinions expressed here are
• 0:32
  Speaker: solely the opinions of the participants, and we do not
• 0:36
  Speaker: represent any Grand Lodge statements or positions.
• 0:38
  Speaker: So make sure you keep your conversations open for the
• 0:40
  Speaker: public and on the level and to interact with us.
• 0:43
  Speaker: We love seeing you live every
• 0:44
  Speaker: Thursday night in Facebook and
• 0:46
  Speaker: YouTube land.
• 0:47
  Speaker: So hello!
• 0:48
  Speaker: The comments are always good,
• 0:49
  Speaker: but remember your comments may
• 0:51
  Speaker: show up in the show and if you
• 0:52
  Speaker: can't catch us live, catch us in
• 0:54
  Speaker: the replay or in your favorite
• 0:55
  Speaker: podcast app.
• 0:56
  Speaker: You know me, John Stewart, past
• 0:58
  Speaker: master of the Patriot Lodge,
• 0:59
  Speaker: number nineteen fifty seven in
• 1:01
  Speaker: Fairfax, Virginia.
• 1:03
  Speaker: Next up for his introduction is Spin the Wheel.
• 1:07
  Speaker: We've got Joe.
• 1:08
  Speaker: We've got a Joe sighting.
• 1:09
  Speaker: You just totally threw me off because you never go to me next.
• 1:13
  Speaker: And I don't even know what to say.
• 1:14
  Speaker: Now, who am I?
• 1:16
  Speaker: I'm Joe Martinez.
• 1:18
  Speaker: Uh, let's see, past master of Manasseh Lodge number one eighty
• 1:20
  Speaker: two in Manassas, Virginia.
• 1:22
  Speaker: And, uh, as always, damn glad to be here.
• 1:25
  Speaker: Whew.
• 1:26
  Speaker: All right, spin the wheel.
• 1:28
  Speaker: And we landed on Jason Richards.
• 1:31
  Speaker: Hello.
• 1:33
  Speaker: Jason Richards here past master of Acacia Lodge, number sixteen
• 1:36
  Speaker: in Clifton, Virginia.
• 1:37
  Speaker: Glad to be here.
• 1:41
  Speaker: Glad to have you.
• 1:41
  Speaker: All right.
• 1:42
  Speaker: And spin the wheel.
• 1:44
  Speaker: You guessed it.
• 1:46
  Speaker: Fourth time's a charm.
• 1:47
  Speaker: Robert Johnson.
• 1:48
  Speaker: How's it going?
• 1:49
  Speaker: It's going great.
• 1:50
  Speaker: Glad to be here.
• 1:51
  Speaker: Um, I am excited for this particular show.
• 1:57
  Speaker: And also to, you know, share some virtual fellowship with,
• 2:02
  Speaker: uh, with you guys.
• 2:03
  Speaker: So glad to be here.
• 2:06
  Speaker: Especially happy to share some
• 2:08
  Speaker: virtual fellowship with the one,
• 2:10
  Speaker: the only, the returning, the
• 2:12
  Speaker: amazing, the awesome Steve
• 2:14
  Speaker: Harrison.
• 2:14
  Speaker: Woo woo.
• 2:17
  Speaker: Hi, guys.
• 2:18
  Speaker: Hi, Steve.
• 2:20
  Speaker: Hi, Steve.
• 2:20
  Speaker: Who are you?
• 2:23
  Speaker: Who am I?
• 2:24
  Speaker: Yes.
• 2:24
  Speaker: Who are you?
• 2:25
  Speaker: Let me check.
• 2:26
  Speaker: Um.
• 2:27
  Speaker: Pass.
• 2:28
  Speaker: Master.
• 2:28
  Speaker: Liberty Lodge, liberty, Missouri.
• 2:30
  Speaker: And a few other things.
• 2:33
  Speaker: And all around.
• 2:34
  Speaker: Great guy.
• 2:35
  Speaker: So it's wonderful having you back on here.
• 2:37
  Speaker: We still need to get that part two of our generation's episode.
• 2:41
  Speaker: We need to pick right up where we left off.
• 2:45
  Speaker: You are.
• 2:45
  Speaker: We've been talking about it forever.
• 2:48
  Speaker: All right.
• 2:49
  Speaker: So, uh, let's see.
• 2:50
  Speaker: Let's go over to the patrons who support the show.
• 2:54
  Speaker: You guys are amazing.
• 2:55
  Speaker: Thank you so much for all the free Masonic education that's
• 2:59
  Speaker: been sponsoring for years.
• 3:00
  Speaker: And it all goes to keeping the lights on, upgrading the
• 3:05
  Speaker: equipment, getting new tech.
• 3:08
  Speaker: And we appreciate it.
• 3:10
  Speaker: So thank you so much.
• 3:10
  Speaker: If you want to support, head
• 3:11
  Speaker: over to patreon dot com slash
• 3:13
  Speaker: Masonic Roundtable.
• 3:16
  Speaker: That'll keep us going till twenty forty.
• 3:18
  Speaker: That website will be open until
• 3:19
  Speaker: twenty forty or whichever comes
• 3:21
  Speaker: first.
• 3:22
  Speaker: That's right.
• 3:24
  Speaker: Alrighty.
• 3:24
  Speaker: Alrighty.
• 3:25
  Speaker: Um, now we go to everyone's
• 3:29
  Speaker: favorite segment, especially
• 3:31
  Speaker: Joe's.
• 3:31
  Speaker: At this time of year, it's the tarot card of the.
• 3:38
  Speaker: Tarot card of the week.
• 3:48
  Speaker: So.
• 3:50
  Speaker: Terrible.
• 3:53
  Speaker: It's terrible.
• 3:54
  Speaker: Jason, what have you got?
• 3:56
  Speaker: All right.
• 3:57
  Speaker: Tonight we have the one.
• 3:58
  Speaker: The only the.
• 3:59
  Speaker: Into the void.
• 4:01
  Speaker: The black Cat tarot.
• 4:05
  Speaker: Look at that.
• 4:05
  Speaker: Are you superstitious, Jason?
• 4:07
  Speaker: Um, no. Black cat crossing your path.
• 4:10
  Speaker: Is that a good sign?
• 4:11
  Speaker: Bad sign?
• 4:11
  Speaker: As someone who grew up with cats and has three of my own at
• 4:16
  Speaker: present, my cats are typically.
• 4:21
  Speaker: Good luck.
• 4:23
  Speaker: Um, let's see if this card is.
• 4:26
  Speaker: Ah, today we have the six of wands.
• 4:32
  Speaker: Interesting.
• 4:34
  Speaker: Six of wands would be like your, uh, your victory card, right?
• 4:40
  Speaker: This is the this is the horseback rider with the laurels
• 4:45
  Speaker: on their head.
• 4:47
  Speaker: Returning.
• 4:48
  Speaker: Celebration.
• 4:49
  Speaker: Success.
• 4:49
  Speaker: Achievement.
• 4:50
  Speaker: Recognition.
• 4:54
  Speaker: May or may not have anything to do with William Morgan's death.
• 4:58
  Speaker: We'll find out.
• 4:59
  Speaker: Yeah, well, here's here's the clarification card.
• 5:05
  Speaker: Oof!
• 5:06
  Speaker: Oofed with the nine of wands.
• 5:11
  Speaker: Wands.
• 5:12
  Speaker: Very action oriented card, that's for sure.
• 5:14
  Speaker: Action oriented six being victory nine.
• 5:18
  Speaker: Being almost dead buddy.
• 5:22
  Speaker: A punch in the area.
• 5:24
  Speaker: I'm not dead yet.
• 5:27
  Speaker: He's not dead.
• 5:28
  Speaker: He's resting.
• 5:30
  Speaker: Yes.
• 5:32
  Speaker: You see, he's taking a long nap.
• 5:34
  Speaker: All right, well, that'll be retirement plan.
• 5:38
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 5:41
  Speaker: This is gonna be a fun episode.
• 5:43
  Speaker: Um, because the last time I believe we had Steve Harrison
• 5:47
  Speaker: on, uh, he was promoting some new research that he had done.
• 5:51
  Speaker: Let me find it.
• 5:52
  Speaker: Get out my copy of The Imperfect Storm.
• 5:57
  Speaker: Let's zoom in on that so you can see that.
• 6:00
  Speaker: Um, probably the best
• 6:03
  Speaker: researched, uh, book tome, which
• 6:07
  Speaker: is built off of decades of other
• 6:10
  Speaker: other books, um, which include
• 6:12
  Speaker: new discoveries in the Capture,
• 6:17
  Speaker: Death and Disappearance of
• 6:20
  Speaker: William Morgan.
• 6:21
  Speaker: And so tonight, um, is a very
• 6:24
  Speaker: special anniversary that I'll
• 6:26
  Speaker: let Steve introduce in a little
• 6:27
  Speaker: bit.
• 6:28
  Speaker: And yeah, we're going to get to the bottom of it.
• 6:30
  Speaker: Tonight is the night we're gonna find out what actually happened
• 6:35
  Speaker: to William Morgan.
• 6:37
  Speaker: So brace yourself Steve.
• 6:41
  Speaker: Who is William Morgan and what's
• 6:43
  Speaker: what's this whole thing all
• 6:44
  Speaker: about?
• 6:45
  Speaker: Let's start at the beginning.
• 6:47
  Speaker: To be succinct about it, About William Morgan was.
• 6:50
  Speaker: We don't know too much about him
• 6:52
  Speaker: before he came to Batavia, New
• 6:55
  Speaker: York.
• 6:56
  Speaker: And I've got Alexa listening to us here.
• 7:00
  Speaker: Um, William Morgan, as I said, we don't know much about him
• 7:05
  Speaker: before he came to New York.
• 7:07
  Speaker: We know a lot about him.
• 7:08
  Speaker: Once he reached Batavia, New York.
• 7:11
  Speaker: He was married to a woman named Lucinda Pendleton.
• 7:15
  Speaker: And they arrived there together.
• 7:17
  Speaker: And when they arrived, he got a
• 7:20
  Speaker: pretty good job in New York
• 7:23
  Speaker: because one way or another, he
• 7:25
  Speaker: passed himself off as a
• 7:27
  Speaker: Freemason.
• 7:28
  Speaker: Most people do not believe he was actually a Freemason, but he
• 7:33
  Speaker: did receive the Royal Arch degree in Leroy, New York.
• 7:38
  Speaker: And that's where he got this job.
• 7:40
  Speaker: And probably because the Masons helped him get it.
• 7:43
  Speaker: It was just a small segment of his life, just a few months that
• 7:48
  Speaker: he was probably at his happiest.
• 7:51
  Speaker: He was with his family.
• 7:52
  Speaker: He had a good job.
• 7:54
  Speaker: He was part of the Masons.
• 7:56
  Speaker: He actually became, um, a very well versed mason and was
• 8:02
  Speaker: teaching people the ritual.
• 8:04
  Speaker: And I think he probably thought he was part of the group.
• 8:08
  Speaker: But he had some faults.
• 8:10
  Speaker: He was clearly, uh, an alcoholic.
• 8:14
  Speaker: Uh, he could not handle his finances.
• 8:18
  Speaker: And he had a very gruff personality that just rubbed
• 8:22
  Speaker: people the wrong way.
• 8:24
  Speaker: I don't like that.
• 8:26
  Speaker: Yes.
• 8:28
  Speaker: I thought you me for a second, but.
• 8:32
  Speaker: Things kind of started to fall apart as his personality, his
• 8:37
  Speaker: drinking and his finances caught up with him.
• 8:41
  Speaker: People began to suspect that he was not a Freemason.
• 8:46
  Speaker: And, um, the breaking point was when they had built a Royal Arch
• 8:54
  Speaker: Lodge in Leroy, but you know, it was ten miles away or so.
• 8:59
  Speaker: However, the.
• 9:01
  Speaker: That was a long trip in those days, and the brothers in
• 9:05
  Speaker: Batavia decided that they wanted their own Royal Arch, so they
• 9:11
  Speaker: petitioned for it.
• 9:13
  Speaker: Morgan's name was on the petition, and, um, that meant he
• 9:18
  Speaker: would automatically become a member of the Lodge or the Royal
• 9:23
  Speaker: Arch in Batavia.
• 9:25
  Speaker: A lot of people didn't want that to happen, so they circulated a
• 9:29
  Speaker: secret petition and took his name off of it.
• 9:33
  Speaker: And things just really fell
• 9:36
  Speaker: apart between William Morgan and
• 9:39
  Speaker: the Masons from that point,
• 9:42
  Speaker: Morgan threatened to write a
• 9:46
  Speaker: book revealing all the secrets
• 9:49
  Speaker: of the Masons, and this included
• 9:53
  Speaker: not only the first three
• 9:54
  Speaker: degrees, but the Royal Arch as
• 9:57
  Speaker: well.
• 9:57
  Speaker: There were exposés about the Morgan or I'm sorry about, uh,
• 10:03
  Speaker: the many secrets and all over the place, really.
• 10:08
  Speaker: I think there were at least six in circulation in the United
• 10:12
  Speaker: States and Great Britain, so it really shouldn't have been that
• 10:16
  Speaker: big of a deal.
• 10:17
  Speaker: But the Masons really got upset
• 10:19
  Speaker: that he was going to include the
• 10:21
  Speaker: Royal Arch.
• 10:22
  Speaker: So after being fired from his job and, uh, pretty much a
• 10:28
  Speaker: pariah with the Masons, uh, he threatened to write this book.
• 10:32
  Speaker: And of course, the Masons didn't
• 10:34
  Speaker: like that, and they really came
• 10:37
  Speaker: after him.
• 10:37
  Speaker: They retaliated with all kinds of threats, and they even
• 10:43
  Speaker: attacked his old friends and they had him arrested.
• 10:51
  Speaker: Took all of his materials and eventually and John said, this
• 10:59
  Speaker: is a kind of a significant day.
• 11:02
  Speaker: We are at the bicentennial of William Morgan.
• 11:06
  Speaker: Two hundred years ago tonight,
• 11:08
  Speaker: William Morgan was in jail in
• 11:12
  Speaker: Batavia, ready to start the
• 11:14
  Speaker: journey from which he would be
• 11:16
  Speaker: kidnapped and ultimately
• 11:18
  Speaker: disappear.
• 11:20
  Speaker: And, uh, I guess in a nutshell, that's kind of it.
• 11:24
  Speaker: You could say, uh, Morgan got upset at the Masons, threatened
• 11:29
  Speaker: to write this book, the Masons got upset at Morgan, and
• 11:34
  Speaker: everything just exploded from that point on.
• 11:38
  Speaker: Was this, um, a debtor's prison?
• 11:41
  Speaker: In a way, yes.
• 11:42
  Speaker: Okay.
• 11:43
  Speaker: He he was in prison for a debt.
• 11:47
  Speaker: Or at least that's what they said he was in there for.
• 11:51
  Speaker: They put him in prison that
• 11:53
  Speaker: weekend so that they could raid
• 11:56
  Speaker: his apartment and get his
• 11:57
  Speaker: materials.
• 11:59
  Speaker: They had the sheriff of that
• 12:02
  Speaker: county just go off on the
• 12:05
  Speaker: weekend.
• 12:05
  Speaker: And it.
• 12:06
  Speaker: It took the sheriff to accept bail to get him out of jail.
• 12:11
  Speaker: So they purposely kept him in jail over the weekend and got
• 12:17
  Speaker: the materials from his, um, office or his apartment.
• 12:22
  Speaker: And um, the, the charge that he was under was that he owed, uh,
• 12:29
  Speaker: at the time seven hundred and fifty dollars from a man he had
• 12:33
  Speaker: lived with previously.
• 12:36
  Speaker: And, uh, it doesn't sound, I mean, seven hundred and fifty
• 12:40
  Speaker: dollars in our money, which amounted to like twenty five
• 12:44
  Speaker: bucks in their money.
• 12:46
  Speaker: Oh, wow.
• 12:46
  Speaker: That's the equivalency.
• 12:47
  Speaker: That's inflation adjusted.
• 12:49
  Speaker: Okay, interesting.
• 12:50
  Speaker: Um, and, uh, remind me, also didn't his, uh, printing press
• 12:57
  Speaker: like, um, catch fire?
• 13:00
  Speaker: He hired David Miller to be his printer.
• 13:05
  Speaker: And the Masons, they were arsonists.
• 13:09
  Speaker: They they set the print shop on fire.
• 13:12
  Speaker: It didn't burn all the way down, but he had an annex across the
• 13:15
  Speaker: street that did.
• 13:16
  Speaker: So, uh, so here's a question with all of, I think most people
• 13:22
  Speaker: know, like, did we do it?
• 13:23
  Speaker: Did we not do it?
• 13:24
  Speaker: But when we roll back to like,
• 13:25
  Speaker: let's say some of the precursor
• 13:27
  Speaker: stuff like the print shop, do we
• 13:31
  Speaker: know Masons actually torched the
• 13:33
  Speaker: print shop?
• 13:34
  Speaker: We absolutely do.
• 13:36
  Speaker: Uh, They even think they found the man who did it.
• 13:39
  Speaker: He. He was never charged for it, but, uh.
• 13:44
  Speaker: Yes.
• 13:45
  Speaker: The Masons tried to burn down the print shop where the book
• 13:49
  Speaker: was being printed, and when.
• 13:53
  Speaker: It doesn't look good so far.
• 13:54
  Speaker: Then they kept him in jail.
• 13:57
  Speaker: Uh, they had a warrant.
• 13:58
  Speaker: They put him in jail, which satisfied the warrant.
• 14:02
  Speaker: So when they went to get his papers, that was theft.
• 14:06
  Speaker: The Masons really aren't the good guys in this, uh, account.
• 14:14
  Speaker: Question for you, Steve.
• 14:15
  Speaker: Um, you when you were recounting
• 14:17
  Speaker: how this all started, you were
• 14:19
  Speaker: talking about how people started
• 14:22
  Speaker: to think that he wasn't really a
• 14:23
  Speaker: mason.
• 14:24
  Speaker: Was that a lot before all the,
• 14:27
  Speaker: you know, the arrests started
• 14:28
  Speaker: and and then as we get close to
• 14:30
  Speaker: the, um, you know, to the
• 14:32
  Speaker: disappearance and stuff like
• 14:33
  Speaker: that, was it a long time
• 14:34
  Speaker: Progressing, or was it a more
• 14:36
  Speaker: recent thing?
• 14:38
  Speaker: Not very long.
• 14:39
  Speaker: Uh, I mean, he had been truly in with the in crowd, if I can use
• 14:44
  Speaker: that term with the Masons.
• 14:46
  Speaker: But again, his personality, his debts and all that, they began
• 14:50
  Speaker: to to move away from him.
• 14:52
  Speaker: But it was not a really long time.
• 15:00
  Speaker: All right.
• 15:01
  Speaker: So, um, so he disappears on this night two hundred years ago, he
• 15:08
  Speaker: was in jail on this night two hundred years ago.
• 15:11
  Speaker: They got up the next morning and they took him to Canada.
• 15:14
  Speaker: Canandaigua, New York, where
• 15:17
  Speaker: they had more charges against
• 15:20
  Speaker: him.
• 15:20
  Speaker: And they really fought to get him in jail.
• 15:25
  Speaker: This is interesting.
• 15:26
  Speaker: They, uh, they had accused him of stealing a coat.
• 15:31
  Speaker: The guy he he borrowed it from did not show up.
• 15:35
  Speaker: So the magistrate there found him innocent.
• 15:38
  Speaker: And the minute that happened, the Masons pulled another
• 15:42
  Speaker: document out of their pocket.
• 15:44
  Speaker: Charging him with a debt of two dollars.
• 15:47
  Speaker: Um. Morgan couldn't pay, and he
• 15:51
  Speaker: tried to pay by giving his coat
• 15:53
  Speaker: to them.
• 15:54
  Speaker: They wouldn't accept it, so they threw him in jail.
• 15:57
  Speaker: He was actually arrested.
• 15:59
  Speaker: Now, the strange thing was, once he was in jail, after they had
• 16:04
  Speaker: fought him, fought so hard to get Morgan in jail, they turned
• 16:08
  Speaker: right around and tried to convince the jailer's wife.
• 16:13
  Speaker: The jailer wasn't there, but
• 16:14
  Speaker: they tried to convince her to
• 16:17
  Speaker: release Morgan into their
• 16:19
  Speaker: custody.
• 16:20
  Speaker: I mean, it just doesn't even
• 16:22
  Speaker: make sense until you realize
• 16:24
  Speaker: what the Masons wanted to do was
• 16:27
  Speaker: to have Morgan released into
• 16:29
  Speaker: their custody.
• 16:30
  Speaker: So it didn't look like a kidnapping.
• 16:33
  Speaker: So that was, I guess, September eleventh on that date.
• 16:40
  Speaker: And that is the date that he was in jail.
• 16:44
  Speaker: And they got him out finally,
• 16:47
  Speaker: that Morgan realized he was now
• 16:50
  Speaker: being kidnapped.
• 16:51
  Speaker: He more or less went with them to Canandaigua willingly.
• 16:54
  Speaker: And then when they got him out of jail like that and were
• 16:58
  Speaker: pushing him across the street into a carriage.
• 17:01
  Speaker: Uh, he screamed murder and the whole town heard it.
• 17:05
  Speaker: And yeah, I was going to ask, was this like in daylight when
• 17:09
  Speaker: all this happened?
• 17:09
  Speaker: It was in the evening or the evening of the eleventh.
• 17:13
  Speaker: Okay.
• 17:13
  Speaker: Yes.
• 17:14
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 17:14
  Speaker: Okay.
• 17:15
  Speaker: And then they took a journey to Fort Niagara.
• 17:20
  Speaker: The whole journey from Batavia to Canandaigua, back to Fort
• 17:24
  Speaker: Niagara, which is on the Niagara River at the border of Of Canada
• 17:30
  Speaker: was one hundred and sixty miles in those days.
• 17:34
  Speaker: That was a huge journey.
• 17:36
  Speaker: But that's that is how he
• 17:37
  Speaker: finally wound up at at Fort
• 17:40
  Speaker: Niagara.
• 17:41
  Speaker: They had.
• 17:42
  Speaker: They had made a deal with
• 17:44
  Speaker: Canadian Freemasons that they
• 17:48
  Speaker: would hand.
• 17:48
  Speaker: Morgan over to them.
• 17:51
  Speaker: And when they went over to do it, they took Morgan over there.
• 17:55
  Speaker: The Canadian Masons refused.
• 17:58
  Speaker: And so they had to take Morgan
• 18:00
  Speaker: back to Fort Niagara, put him in
• 18:03
  Speaker: the powder magazine there, and
• 18:06
  Speaker: it is pretty well accepted that
• 18:09
  Speaker: they had no intention of killing
• 18:12
  Speaker: Morgan.
• 18:13
  Speaker: And yet now he's a big millstone around their neck, and they
• 18:17
  Speaker: don't know what to do with him.
• 18:22
  Speaker: Wow.
• 18:23
  Speaker: Any other, um, details or facts that you guys are curious about?
• 18:28
  Speaker: the scenario before we jump into the updated presentation.
• 18:35
  Speaker: So when you say they put him in a powder powder magazine, it was
• 18:40
  Speaker: a concrete building that with walls that were ten feet thick.
• 18:45
  Speaker: It was said to be bomb proof.
• 18:47
  Speaker: And so this is like gunpowder stored.
• 18:52
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 18:53
  Speaker: Okay.
• 18:54
  Speaker: Gotcha.
• 18:55
  Speaker: Alright.
• 18:55
  Speaker: It's a bunker.
• 18:56
  Speaker: Yep.
• 18:57
  Speaker: It really was.
• 19:02
  Speaker: All right.
• 19:04
  Speaker: Well, let's figure out what happened next.
• 19:07
  Speaker: So Steve's done some amazing
• 19:11
  Speaker: follow on work just in time for
• 19:13
  Speaker: this anniversary.
• 19:14
  Speaker: Let's let's dive deep.
• 19:15
  Speaker: Let's go for it, Steve.
• 19:17
  Speaker: I started kicking this around.
• 19:19
  Speaker: I don't know, a few months ago that, um, we you really every
• 19:26
  Speaker: fact I could find about Morgan is in that book.
• 19:31
  Speaker: And yet, to be honest, the book really cannot come to any
• 19:36
  Speaker: conclusion about what happened to William Morgan.
• 19:39
  Speaker: We delve into every single scenario we possibly can.
• 19:46
  Speaker: There are hundreds of sightings.
• 19:49
  Speaker: There are major theories about where he might have gone.
• 19:54
  Speaker: If the Masons did not kill him.
• 19:57
  Speaker: And so all of the facts on that are there.
• 20:01
  Speaker: Um, I really thought when I started this project that there
• 20:06
  Speaker: was a possibility that he really had gone to the Cayman Islands.
• 20:11
  Speaker: And, uh, that's what got me started in thinking I could
• 20:15
  Speaker: write a book about this.
• 20:17
  Speaker: There were a series of letters from a guy named I. Dwight
• 20:21
  Speaker: Hunter to the Grand Master of Michigan at the time, named
• 20:26
  Speaker: Morgan Smead in the early nineteen fifties, and Hunter
• 20:31
  Speaker: claimed that he was married to Morgan's granddaughter and that
• 20:36
  Speaker: he knew he was down there.
• 20:37
  Speaker: And he told an amazing, detailed, frankly fascinating
• 20:43
  Speaker: story about how Morgan came down there, started a family and had
• 20:49
  Speaker: a pretty good life.
• 20:51
  Speaker: And he.
• 20:52
  Speaker: He wrote a series of.
• 20:54
  Speaker: Hunter wrote four letters.
• 20:56
  Speaker: Smead responded once, and that's how all the detail came out.
• 21:02
  Speaker: Uh, I. Dwight Hunter contacted
• 21:04
  Speaker: Morgan Smead, Grand Master of
• 21:06
  Speaker: Michigan because he knew that
• 21:08
  Speaker: Morgan Smead had come from
• 21:10
  Speaker: Batavia.
• 21:11
  Speaker: So that answered all that.
• 21:13
  Speaker: And, um, so were exonerated then.
• 21:16
  Speaker: So we're good.
• 21:18
  Speaker: Uh, in a manner of speaking.
• 21:21
  Speaker: All right.
• 21:22
  Speaker: What I. What I wanted to do was get my hands on those letters.
• 21:28
  Speaker: I won't even go through the search that I took.
• 21:32
  Speaker: But they wound up at the University of Michigan in a
• 21:36
  Speaker: library up there.
• 21:38
  Speaker: And, uh, when I finally
• 21:40
  Speaker: discovered where they were, we
• 21:42
  Speaker: were in the middle of the
• 21:43
  Speaker: pandemic and they were
• 21:44
  Speaker: completely closed.
• 21:46
  Speaker: So I had to wait until they opened.
• 21:48
  Speaker: And then I went up there and I
• 21:50
  Speaker: got, uh, the box that had the
• 21:53
  Speaker: letters in it, uh, that mainly
• 21:55
  Speaker: were the, the letters of Charles
• 21:59
  Speaker: Fey, who was a Michigan
• 22:00
  Speaker: Freemason.
• 22:01
  Speaker: And I went through them and, and copied all of them.
• 22:04
  Speaker: And they're all in the book.
• 22:06
  Speaker: The whole, the whole group of them.
• 22:09
  Speaker: That is the really the detailed
• 22:12
  Speaker: story of William Morgan in the
• 22:15
  Speaker: Caribbean.
• 22:16
  Speaker: The kicker is, and I'm giving away spoilers here from the book
• 22:22
  Speaker: the man in the Caribbean was not named William Morgan.
• 22:26
  Speaker: He was named Ward Morgan.
• 22:29
  Speaker: His story is kind of fascinating.
• 22:31
  Speaker: But as we look at the percentages, um, there's still
• 22:37
  Speaker: some, uh, idea that he went just a small idea that he went there,
• 22:43
  Speaker: but it's really not true.
• 22:46
  Speaker: I think everybody on this panel at one time, we got together and
• 22:50
  Speaker: talked about going down there.
• 22:52
  Speaker: And, uh, the thing is, it was
• 22:55
  Speaker: it's on the United States do not
• 22:58
  Speaker: travel list.
• 22:59
  Speaker: And I really didn't want to go on my own.
• 23:02
  Speaker: And I know we all had that conversation and we had some
• 23:07
  Speaker: interest in funding it.
• 23:08
  Speaker: It would have been very expensive.
• 23:10
  Speaker: Uh, but that did not come through.
• 23:13
  Speaker: So what I did, I hired, uh, forensic genealogy company and
• 23:20
  Speaker: worked with them to suss out the identity of the person who was
• 23:26
  Speaker: in the Caribbean.
• 23:27
  Speaker: And it was not William Morgan.
• 23:30
  Speaker: But that story is so fascinating that it really kind of makes a
• 23:34
  Speaker: good story in the book anyway.
• 23:37
  Speaker: Also, while I was up in
• 23:39
  Speaker: Michigan, I discovered more than
• 23:42
  Speaker: just those Morgan letters in
• 23:44
  Speaker: those boxes that I was going
• 23:46
  Speaker: through.
• 23:47
  Speaker: And one of the things I discovered was a book and some
• 23:51
  Speaker: associated paper about how the Anti-masons actually took
• 23:58
  Speaker: William Morgan to the Tonawanda Indian Reservation, and he lived
• 24:04
  Speaker: out his life there.
• 24:06
  Speaker: So I did follow up on that
• 24:08
  Speaker: theory, and it would just say
• 24:12
  Speaker: it's a very interesting story as
• 24:14
  Speaker: well.
• 24:15
  Speaker: Plausible.
• 24:18
  Speaker: You'll find out.
• 24:22
  Speaker: I love being left in suspense.
• 24:24
  Speaker: So shall we go through the, uh, the little PowerPoint thing?
• 24:29
  Speaker: You can drive.
• 24:30
  Speaker: Yep.
• 24:31
  Speaker: So it suddenly dawned on me
• 24:34
  Speaker: sometime a few months ago that
• 24:37
  Speaker: although we really could not
• 24:39
  Speaker: pinpoint exactly what happened
• 24:42
  Speaker: to William Morgan in the book,
• 24:45
  Speaker: even though a lot of facts were
• 24:47
  Speaker: there, that we live in the day
• 24:50
  Speaker: and age of artificial
• 24:52
  Speaker: intelligence.
• 24:53
  Speaker: So the premise, can they see this?
• 24:57
  Speaker: Well, but you've also got listeners.
• 25:00
  Speaker: The premise we came up with was
• 25:03
  Speaker: to find out if artificial
• 25:05
  Speaker: intelligence could take all of
• 25:08
  Speaker: the data in the book, The
• 25:10
  Speaker: Imperfect Storm, and only from
• 25:13
  Speaker: that book, not don't go on the
• 25:15
  Speaker: internet or we're in for a big
• 25:17
  Speaker: journey.
• 25:17
  Speaker: So only from the imperfect storm to find out what happened to
• 25:23
  Speaker: William Morgan at the.
• 25:26
  Speaker: When they unlocked that powder
• 25:27
  Speaker: magazine and took him out of
• 25:29
  Speaker: there.
• 25:30
  Speaker: So that's what this first slide shows.
• 25:32
  Speaker: That was our premise.
• 25:36
  Speaker: I primarily used Claude and
• 25:39
  Speaker: Gemini to go through this and
• 25:43
  Speaker: see if we could get any, any way
• 25:47
  Speaker: of figuring out what happened to
• 25:49
  Speaker: Morgan from the facts that were
• 25:51
  Speaker: there.
• 25:52
  Speaker: And I will say that was one thing that I remember reading,
• 25:55
  Speaker: um, the manuscript.
• 25:57
  Speaker: You're very detailed to be objective as possible.
• 26:00
  Speaker: Like you told the story, you said, here's fact A, here's fact
• 26:02
  Speaker: B, and you were very careful not to insert bias.
• 26:08
  Speaker: And so that's from, from just like a, a data driven guy.
• 26:12
  Speaker: Like I loved how, you know how clean your your hypotheses were.
• 26:18
  Speaker: I just really refused to do any speculation in the book.
• 26:22
  Speaker: Um, in fact, in this little journey I took with AI, even
• 26:26
  Speaker: Claude asked me, well, why didn't you just speculate?
• 26:30
  Speaker: I said, no, I just want facts, Claude.
• 26:34
  Speaker: And of course, and you know how AI is.
• 26:37
  Speaker: It's came back and said, oh, that's a very perceptive way to
• 26:41
  Speaker: write a book, Steve.
• 26:42
  Speaker: That's a very handsome question, Steve.
• 26:44
  Speaker: Oh, yes.
• 26:46
  Speaker: I was just great.
• 26:47
  Speaker: So the question that I posed to
• 26:51
  Speaker: Claude and to Gemini is the, you
• 26:55
  Speaker: know, the gun to the head
• 26:57
  Speaker: question.
• 26:58
  Speaker: If somebody put a proverbial gun to your cyberspace generated
• 27:04
  Speaker: head and you had to choose one and only one outcome of the
• 27:09
  Speaker: Morgan affair, what happened to William Morgan, and we're going
• 27:14
  Speaker: to reveal that right now.
• 27:16
  Speaker: This is what mainly this comes from, Claude.
• 27:19
  Speaker: Uh, what Claude thought happened to William Morgan.
• 27:24
  Speaker: And we are going to let the spirit of William Morgan come
• 27:29
  Speaker: back after two hundred years to tell you what happened to him.
• 27:36
  Speaker: And here we go.
• 27:38
  Speaker: Let's see.
• 27:39
  Speaker: Hopefully, you should be able to hear that.
• 27:42
  Speaker: Now, I recollect the cold.
• 27:45
  Speaker: First that powder magazine down at Fort Niagara.
• 27:50
  Speaker: It held the damp of that lake
• 27:52
  Speaker: right down in them stone walls,
• 27:54
  Speaker: and I sat in the dark a good
• 27:56
  Speaker: long while.
• 27:58
  Speaker: Felt like a lifetime, though it weren't but a few days I could
• 28:02
  Speaker: hear voices, some muffled.
• 28:05
  Speaker: Like careful like they was keeping him from me a purpose
• 28:10
  Speaker: told myself they wanted money.
• 28:13
  Speaker: Told myself Millard pay whatever ransom they was asking that
• 28:18
  Speaker: David Miller and my friends back in Batavia was already raising
• 28:22
  Speaker: up an alarm, that Lucinda knowed I was gone, and wouldn't rest
• 28:26
  Speaker: till somebody answered for it.
• 28:28
  Speaker: I didn't know they'd already gone, and decided my fate with
• 28:32
  Speaker: little slips of paper.
• 28:34
  Speaker: Eight men, I'm told, though I never did see their faces clear.
• 28:40
  Speaker: They folded up eight scraps, three of them marked with a
• 28:45
  Speaker: single letter, and let chance pick which of them was going to
• 28:49
  Speaker: carry it out.
• 28:50
  Speaker: Walked off from each other for looking.
• 28:53
  Speaker: So, as none of them alone had to carry the whole weight of it.
• 28:58
  Speaker: That there's it's own kind of cowardly, I reckon.
• 29:01
  Speaker: Spread in a murder thin enough so no one man's got a hold.
• 29:05
  Speaker: All of it hisself.
• 29:07
  Speaker: When they come for me that last time I noticed, you know,
• 29:12
  Speaker: somehow for anybody tells you a man don't gotta be no fool to
• 29:18
  Speaker: feel the shape of his own end.
• 29:20
  Speaker: And walking toward him in the dark.
• 29:22
  Speaker: I asked him by what right, what court, what law, what God give
• 29:29
  Speaker: him the authority to end a man's life for writing down what he
• 29:33
  Speaker: seen with his own two eyes.
• 29:36
  Speaker: I weren't no threat to no nation.
• 29:38
  Speaker: I ain't betrayed no country.
• 29:40
  Speaker: I'd only told the truth about a society of men who'd made their
• 29:45
  Speaker: oaths matter more in honesty.
• 29:47
  Speaker: I spoke of my wife, of my girls, asked how they was going to eat,
• 29:53
  Speaker: who was going to provide, whether them men had wives and
• 29:57
  Speaker: youngins of their own, and could picture them asking that same
• 30:02
  Speaker: question come morning.
• 30:04
  Speaker: I don't know if any of it reached them.
• 30:06
  Speaker: None.
• 30:07
  Speaker: They give me a half hour alone
• 30:10
  Speaker: to settle myself, and in that
• 30:12
  Speaker: quiet I thought on everything
• 30:14
  Speaker: and nothing.
• 30:15
  Speaker: My mama back in Culpeper.
• 30:18
  Speaker: The smell of that printing shop, the sound of Lucinda's voice.
• 30:23
  Speaker: Then hands bound mine up behind
• 30:25
  Speaker: my back, cloth stuffed in my
• 30:28
  Speaker: mouth, and they led me
• 30:30
  Speaker: stumbling.
• 30:31
  Speaker: I reckon, though I try not to
• 30:33
  Speaker: recollect the stumbling down to
• 30:36
  Speaker: a boat.
• 30:37
  Speaker: Weights rope the small slap of oars on still water.
• 30:41
  Speaker: Somebody told me to stand.
• 30:43
  Speaker: I didn't want to stood up
• 30:45
  Speaker: anyway, because some part of me
• 30:47
  Speaker: still believed Mininum might buy
• 30:50
  Speaker: one more minute and one more
• 30:52
  Speaker: minute still felt like something
• 30:54
  Speaker: worth having.
• 30:55
  Speaker: I didn't see who pushed me.
• 30:58
  Speaker: Just recollect that black water
• 31:00
  Speaker: rising up to meet me, and how
• 31:03
  Speaker: strange and quiet it was down
• 31:05
  Speaker: Under.
• 31:06
  Speaker: Quieter in that magazine,
• 31:08
  Speaker: quieter in any silence I ever
• 31:11
  Speaker: knowed.
• 31:12
  Speaker: And then nothing at all.
• 31:15
  Speaker: What I'd want you to know two hundred years on is only this I
• 31:19
  Speaker: told the truth as I seen it, and it cost me everything I had.
• 31:24
  Speaker: I hope in the end that was worth something to somebody.
• 31:31
  Speaker: William Morgan.
• 31:34
  Speaker: Um. I'm getting feedback.
• 31:40
  Speaker: Okay, let's try again.
• 31:45
  Speaker: Okay.
• 31:46
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 31:47
  Speaker: Can you hear me now, Steve?
• 31:48
  Speaker: Okay, so that's William Morgan statement.
• 31:53
  Speaker: Uh, after I tinkered around with, especially Claude.
• 31:58
  Speaker: Uh, but before we got to that
• 32:00
  Speaker: statement, there were other
• 32:02
  Speaker: things that, It a sort of a
• 32:05
  Speaker: journey I wanted to take with
• 32:07
  Speaker: it.
• 32:08
  Speaker: And I started out that just
• 32:11
  Speaker: initially, I just went to both
• 32:13
  Speaker: of those AI models and I asked,
• 32:17
  Speaker: okay, tell me what happened to
• 32:19
  Speaker: William Morgan?
• 32:21
  Speaker: Both of them.
• 32:22
  Speaker: Both of them said, the Masons killed Morgan.
• 32:26
  Speaker: And, uh, for if you can see the
• 32:29
  Speaker: screen, the statements are
• 32:30
  Speaker: there.
• 32:31
  Speaker: I don't need to read them because they both they were very
• 32:34
  Speaker: consistent that the Masons killed Morgan and that's it.
• 32:39
  Speaker: So I wanted to be able to look at certain scenarios.
• 32:46
  Speaker: And I looked at what may be the five big outcomes that could
• 32:53
  Speaker: have happened because of all the information and all the
• 32:57
  Speaker: documentation that was there about these different scenarios.
• 33:03
  Speaker: one being the Masons killed,
• 33:05
  Speaker: Morgan, one being the Masons
• 33:08
  Speaker: released him.
• 33:09
  Speaker: The story was that they gave him five hundred dollars, sent him
• 33:13
  Speaker: off to some farm land.
• 33:15
  Speaker: They had given him in Canada.
• 33:19
  Speaker: There was.
• 33:20
  Speaker: They sent him to upstate and let him run around free in a farm.
• 33:25
  Speaker: Some.
• 33:26
  Speaker: Yes, I get.
• 33:29
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 33:30
  Speaker: Like like your pet dog.
• 33:32
  Speaker: Like your puppies?
• 33:32
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 33:34
  Speaker: Um, there were those, all the
• 33:37
  Speaker: documentation I have talked
• 33:38
  Speaker: about, about Morgan going to the
• 33:41
  Speaker: Cayman Islands.
• 33:42
  Speaker: And I felt I had to include that.
• 33:45
  Speaker: Just reams of information about Morgan going to Smyrna, which is
• 33:52
  Speaker: is Izmir, Turkey, and different stories about his life there and
• 33:58
  Speaker: eye witnesses and all that.
• 34:00
  Speaker: And then, as I said, when I was
• 34:03
  Speaker: looking through the letters, I
• 34:06
  Speaker: found a good deal of information
• 34:09
  Speaker: about the Masons actually just
• 34:11
  Speaker: taking him down the road to the
• 34:13
  Speaker: Tonawanda Indian Reservation and
• 34:16
  Speaker: letting him live out his life
• 34:18
  Speaker: there.
• 34:20
  Speaker: So these are the big ones.
• 34:21
  Speaker: There were other sightings on
• 34:24
  Speaker: the East Coast in Boston, and I
• 34:27
  Speaker: think we could sort of include
• 34:28
  Speaker: those.
• 34:29
  Speaker: And just that they released Morgan.
• 34:32
  Speaker: Uh, I don't I definitely don't think he escaped, but these are
• 34:36
  Speaker: the ones I wanted to look at.
• 34:38
  Speaker: Um, sort of as the gestalt of
• 34:41
  Speaker: everything that he was involved
• 34:44
  Speaker: in.
• 34:44
  Speaker: Possibly after they let him go or killed him.
• 34:49
  Speaker: There you are.
• 34:51
  Speaker: So I asked that question that we
• 34:55
  Speaker: saw at the first, and I said,
• 34:57
  Speaker: okay, you think they killed
• 34:59
  Speaker: Morgan?
• 35:00
  Speaker: Can you give me percentages on this?
• 35:03
  Speaker: Good.
• 35:03
  Speaker: Yeah, because, you know, it was
• 35:04
  Speaker: when you say words like, oh,
• 35:06
  Speaker: they likely did it or it's
• 35:07
  Speaker: possible.
• 35:08
  Speaker: Okay, that's still there's still some wiggle room in that.
• 35:11
  Speaker: So I'm glad you followed up.
• 35:12
  Speaker: You need a confidence score.
• 35:14
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 35:15
  Speaker: Um, and that's why I call what you just heard.
• 35:19
  Speaker: The audio that you just heard is the gun to the head theory,
• 35:23
  Speaker: because when you start to see it broken down, Claude only said
• 35:29
  Speaker: there was a forty five percent chance that they killed him.
• 35:33
  Speaker: Based on all the facts in the
• 35:35
  Speaker: book, uh, the that they released
• 35:38
  Speaker: him was a fifteen percent
• 35:39
  Speaker: chance.
• 35:41
  Speaker: It gave a five percent chance to the Caymans, the lowest.
• 35:44
  Speaker: But we really do know he was not there.
• 35:48
  Speaker: It gave a twenty percent chance to the fact that he may have
• 35:52
  Speaker: gone to Smyrna, and a fifteen percent chance that they just
• 35:57
  Speaker: took him over to the Indian reservation and left him there.
• 36:01
  Speaker: So I took that information from
• 36:05
  Speaker: Claude, and then I asked Gemini,
• 36:08
  Speaker: what do you think Gemini really
• 36:12
  Speaker: thought?
• 36:12
  Speaker: They killed him seventy five
• 36:13
  Speaker: percent with the rest of those
• 36:16
  Speaker: percentages.
• 36:17
  Speaker: The only one that I think is
• 36:19
  Speaker: really meaningful is they
• 36:21
  Speaker: thought there was a fifteen
• 36:22
  Speaker: percent chance that they let him
• 36:24
  Speaker: go, or they released him under
• 36:27
  Speaker: whatever circumstances.
• 36:29
  Speaker: And there they are together.
• 36:31
  Speaker: Uh, on this particular slide, I
• 36:34
  Speaker: got to change it because it
• 36:36
  Speaker: noticed that, uh, uh, Claude
• 36:41
  Speaker: gave it a forty five percent
• 36:42
  Speaker: chance.
• 36:43
  Speaker: But if you look at the graph, that's not forty five percent.
• 36:46
  Speaker: But here's Claude versus Gemini.
• 36:50
  Speaker: What they thought happened to
• 36:52
  Speaker: Morgan and the predominant
• 36:54
  Speaker: theory remains that they
• 36:56
  Speaker: murdered him.
• 36:57
  Speaker: So. We looked at the assumptions and I said, well, I wonder how
• 37:07
  Speaker: it breaks down.
• 37:09
  Speaker: And Claude was very helpful with this.
• 37:10
  Speaker: I'll tell you, um, if you look at the assumptions that it used
• 37:15
  Speaker: for each of the specific scenarios and figured out if the
• 37:22
  Speaker: assumptions that had made were true or false.
• 37:26
  Speaker: And these relate to, um, the sightings, dozens and dozens of
• 37:32
  Speaker: reports of sightings.
• 37:34
  Speaker: And you as the reader believe,
• 37:36
  Speaker: are you skeptical about them or
• 37:38
  Speaker: do you believe those sightings
• 37:40
  Speaker: were true?
• 37:41
  Speaker: Do you believe in other evidence that he survived, such as the
• 37:46
  Speaker: trips he took or the places that people said they saw him?
• 37:51
  Speaker: Do you believe that kind of stuff?
• 37:54
  Speaker: There was a body that washed up on the shores of well, directly
• 37:58
  Speaker: north of Batavia, at a place called Oak Orchard Creek in
• 38:03
  Speaker: eighteen twenty seven.
• 38:05
  Speaker: And that body had quite a
• 38:08
  Speaker: history once they got it back to
• 38:10
  Speaker: Batavia.
• 38:11
  Speaker: The coroner said, um, this is Morgan, and buried him.
• 38:16
  Speaker: The townspeople wanted a full
• 38:19
  Speaker: blown inquest, so they dug him
• 38:21
  Speaker: back up, and they had an inquest
• 38:24
  Speaker: that involved people that had
• 38:27
  Speaker: known Morgan.
• 38:28
  Speaker: Uh, his wife, Lucinda, actually testified there and said the
• 38:33
  Speaker: body was Morgan.
• 38:35
  Speaker: And they finally that inquest
• 38:38
  Speaker: concluded, yes, that body is
• 38:40
  Speaker: Morgan.
• 38:40
  Speaker: And they buried it again.
• 38:42
  Speaker: Then a few weeks later, a woman
• 38:45
  Speaker: named Mrs. Monroe, spelled M o n
• 38:48
  Speaker: r o, said that her husband had
• 38:51
  Speaker: gone missing about six weeks
• 38:53
  Speaker: prior and she thought it might
• 38:55
  Speaker: be him.
• 38:57
  Speaker: During that inquest, she
• 39:00
  Speaker: identified down to the colour of
• 39:04
  Speaker: thread in his socks that she had
• 39:07
  Speaker: darned.
• 39:08
  Speaker: Uh. What that body was wearing and the body that they had dug
• 39:14
  Speaker: out was, I guess, what you would call a fresh body.
• 39:18
  Speaker: In other words, if they had drowned Morgan, that would have
• 39:21
  Speaker: been a year before.
• 39:23
  Speaker: And this was not a body that had been dead for a year.
• 39:27
  Speaker: So another one of the assumptions.
• 39:30
  Speaker: Do you trust the eighteen twenty seven body as being Morgan?
• 39:35
  Speaker: Well, after Mrs. Monroe spoke, they buried him again.
• 39:39
  Speaker: So that poor guy was brought up and buried three times.
• 39:44
  Speaker: And, uh, do you trust that body?
• 39:47
  Speaker: Uh, the next one is.
• 39:49
  Speaker: Do you distrust the body and the way they call it on the on the
• 39:55
  Speaker: slide Kings hand off.
• 39:56
  Speaker: That was William King who kind of masterminded everything.
• 40:00
  Speaker: If you think they killed Morgan.
• 40:02
  Speaker: And do you believe that he handled it such that, as William
• 40:07
  Speaker: Morgan said, uh, there were three people in the boat and
• 40:10
  Speaker: they pushed him overboard.
• 40:12
  Speaker: And how they identified those people with lots and, uh,
• 40:17
  Speaker: everything he did to hand that body off to the people who
• 40:21
  Speaker: finally allegedly did the deed on William Morgan.
• 40:26
  Speaker: And then there was another one,
• 40:28
  Speaker: though I, I could notice as I
• 40:32
  Speaker: was going through this, there
• 40:33
  Speaker: was a second body and I could
• 40:36
  Speaker: tell that Claude was just
• 40:40
  Speaker: completely ignoring that body
• 40:42
  Speaker: and was really excited about the
• 40:44
  Speaker: eighteen twenty seven body, and
• 40:47
  Speaker: I just thought it was all out of
• 40:49
  Speaker: proportion.
• 40:50
  Speaker: So I went back to Claude and I asked him about the eighteen
• 40:53
  Speaker: eighty one body, which was buried in a quarry just off the
• 40:59
  Speaker: Tonawanda Indian Reservation.
• 41:02
  Speaker: And that is supposed to be where the Masons.
• 41:06
  Speaker: The ante Masons may have taken him after they let him out of
• 41:10
  Speaker: the powder magazine.
• 41:12
  Speaker: So we were looking at all that stuff.
• 41:14
  Speaker: And then you get this colorful, complex graph that shows in each
• 41:21
  Speaker: case, when he was murdered, released, went to the Caymans,
• 41:26
  Speaker: went to Smyrna or Tonawanda.
• 41:29
  Speaker: Uh, what do you think?
• 41:32
  Speaker: It's true.
• 41:33
  Speaker: And whether that information and the way you look at it adds more
• 41:38
  Speaker: or less to the possibility that each one of those scenarios is
• 41:44
  Speaker: the one that happened.
• 41:45
  Speaker: So we're overlapping Scenario with evidence.
• 41:48
  Speaker: Yes.
• 41:49
  Speaker: Yes.
• 41:50
  Speaker: Or and and sometimes, John.
• 41:52
  Speaker: Just straight out belief.
• 41:54
  Speaker: Do you believe that the eighteen
• 41:57
  Speaker: twenty seven body was William
• 42:00
  Speaker: Morgan?
• 42:00
  Speaker: And if you're looking at the graph, you can see on the left,
• 42:04
  Speaker: if you did, it's the blue line and you're you really believe
• 42:09
  Speaker: they murdered him?
• 42:10
  Speaker: However, if you look at the other graphs where they don't
• 42:13
  Speaker: believe it so much, it really changes what you think about
• 42:18
  Speaker: what happened to him.
• 42:20
  Speaker: And I looked at these results,
• 42:22
  Speaker: and I could still see that
• 42:26
  Speaker: Claude was not taking the body
• 42:31
  Speaker: from eighteen eighty one
• 42:33
  Speaker: seriously.
• 42:34
  Speaker: There's just no thought of it.
• 42:36
  Speaker: So I brought it up with Claude.
• 42:38
  Speaker: Um, I thought he was making too much emphasis on the eighteen
• 42:42
  Speaker: twenty seven body and, uh, Mrs. Monroe's testimony, which should
• 42:49
  Speaker: detract that that body was Morgan's and that they were
• 42:54
  Speaker: making no emphasis on the eighteen eighty one body where,
• 42:58
  Speaker: by the way, they had dug it up, took it to a doctor, and he
• 43:03
  Speaker: identified the body as Morgan.
• 43:05
  Speaker: And I said, yes, really, really quick.
• 43:09
  Speaker: Anybody who watches any sort of
• 43:11
  Speaker: like crime show knows that just
• 43:15
  Speaker: weeks of a body being in the
• 43:19
  Speaker: water.
• 43:20
  Speaker: Right?
• 43:21
  Speaker: Uh, the fish eat his face off.
• 43:25
  Speaker: You're absolutely correct.
• 43:26
  Speaker: Now, so so the, like, the fresh body is not a chance.
• 43:33
  Speaker: Well, except for one thing it brings to mind if Morgan.
• 43:41
  Speaker: If that was Morgan's body and it was a body that had been dead no
• 43:45
  Speaker: more than six weeks.
• 43:47
  Speaker: And we're a year after they took him out of the powder magazine.
• 43:51
  Speaker: What did the Masons do with Morgan, or what did Morgan do on
• 43:55
  Speaker: his own for that year?
• 43:57
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 43:58
  Speaker: And it just gets pretty confusing.
• 44:00
  Speaker: But, uh, anyway, um, there there
• 44:05
  Speaker: were credible reports about that
• 44:07
  Speaker: body and the quarry off of, uh,
• 44:10
  Speaker: Tonawanda.
• 44:11
  Speaker: Eli Parker was a Seneca, Native
• 44:15
  Speaker: American who was a good friend
• 44:17
  Speaker: of Ulysses S Grant, who had
• 44:20
  Speaker: Parker draft the surrender
• 44:23
  Speaker: document from the south to the
• 44:25
  Speaker: north.
• 44:26
  Speaker: And when Lee surrendered to Grant, Eli Parker was inside the
• 44:32
  Speaker: room with those people.
• 44:34
  Speaker: And very few people were going to do that.
• 44:37
  Speaker: The history accounts for him as a very credible person, and he
• 44:43
  Speaker: is the one that really brought out this story about Tonawanda.
• 44:48
  Speaker: And then, uh, the Batavia Town
• 44:51
  Speaker: photographer who had been
• 44:53
  Speaker: photographing the Native
• 44:56
  Speaker: Americans there, um, actually
• 45:00
  Speaker: wrote a book about the story
• 45:01
  Speaker: that I found in with those, uh,
• 45:04
  Speaker: letters.
• 45:05
  Speaker: So, um, the one thing that
• 45:09
  Speaker: wasn't mentioned and we should
• 45:11
  Speaker: mention now, William Morgan had
• 45:14
  Speaker: what your dentist today would
• 45:16
  Speaker: call Hypodontia.
• 45:17
  Speaker: He had two rows of teeth, two
• 45:20
  Speaker: full rows of teeth in his upper
• 45:23
  Speaker: palate.
• 45:24
  Speaker: Back then, they just called it double teeth.
• 45:27
  Speaker: The article, something you could
• 45:28
  Speaker: easily identify in a corpse you
• 45:30
  Speaker: could easily identify in a
• 45:32
  Speaker: corpse.
• 45:33
  Speaker: Um, and there were claims that the eighteen twenty seven body
• 45:36
  Speaker: had double teeth there.
• 45:39
  Speaker: The newspaper articles about the
• 45:42
  Speaker: eighteen eighty one body did not
• 45:44
  Speaker: mention it.
• 45:45
  Speaker: That doesn't mean the corpse didn't have it.
• 45:48
  Speaker: It just means it wasn't mentioned.
• 45:50
  Speaker: So the question, Steve.
• 45:53
  Speaker: Um, back to the eighteen eighty one body, was anything.
• 45:59
  Speaker: Anything about the eighteen eighty one body?
• 46:01
  Speaker: Was it was there any mention?
• 46:04
  Speaker: I'm trying to find the right
• 46:05
  Speaker: words to say this, that it was
• 46:08
  Speaker: Morgan in the eighteen twenties,
• 46:10
  Speaker: or was it an older William
• 46:12
  Speaker: Morgan?
• 46:13
  Speaker: You know what I mean?
• 46:14
  Speaker: Like, was it one that had perhaps lived for a bit and or
• 46:19
  Speaker: is it a sixty year old body?
• 46:21
  Speaker: Oh, they were convinced that it
• 46:23
  Speaker: was, uh, William Morgan of the
• 46:26
  Speaker: eighteen twenties.
• 46:29
  Speaker: And, uh, the thing, you know, we cannot talk about every detail
• 46:33
  Speaker: here, but the thing that got them was he was found with a
• 46:38
  Speaker: scrap of paper that that mentioned a guy by the name of
• 46:41
  Speaker: Henry Brown, who was a prominent Mason in the eighteen twenties.
• 46:47
  Speaker: And they found words like, I don't know, liar.
• 46:51
  Speaker: Masons kill.
• 46:53
  Speaker: The paper was pretty well rotted.
• 46:55
  Speaker: But that's when they took it to
• 46:56
  Speaker: Doctor Phillips, who had a
• 46:58
  Speaker: microscope.
• 46:59
  Speaker: And they were able to glean some
• 47:03
  Speaker: of the wording off of that
• 47:04
  Speaker: paper.
• 47:05
  Speaker: So yes, they thought it was
• 47:07
  Speaker: William Morgan of the eighteen
• 47:09
  Speaker: twenties.
• 47:11
  Speaker: And so we're we're looking at at things like that.
• 47:15
  Speaker: And I just felt in a, in a
• 47:19
  Speaker: sentence, they were giving too
• 47:20
  Speaker: much emphasis to the eighteen
• 47:22
  Speaker: twenty seven body, not enough
• 47:24
  Speaker: emphasis to the eighteen eighty
• 47:26
  Speaker: one body.
• 47:27
  Speaker: And I told, uh, Mr. Claude that that's what I thought.
• 47:34
  Speaker: And again, if you can see the
• 47:35
  Speaker: graph in front of us, it's the
• 47:37
  Speaker: same one as before, but now the
• 47:40
  Speaker: probability of them taking him
• 47:42
  Speaker: to Tonawanda has gone way up to
• 47:45
  Speaker: sixty percent.
• 47:47
  Speaker: Is that so?
• 47:48
  Speaker: That puts a new wrinkle in this whole thing.
• 47:52
  Speaker: I told Claude that I thought
• 47:55
  Speaker: that was a very colorful graph
• 47:57
  Speaker: and a little too confusing, and
• 48:00
  Speaker: said, okay.
• 48:01
  Speaker: Will you now take all the data that we just went through and go
• 48:04
  Speaker: back to that nice, simple, understandable graph that now
• 48:10
  Speaker: takes all of this into consideration and tell me what
• 48:13
  Speaker: you think may have happened and give it to me in percentages.
• 48:18
  Speaker: Well, now we've gone from, what
• 48:22
  Speaker: was it, forty five percent on
• 48:25
  Speaker: murdered down to thirty five
• 48:26
  Speaker: percent.
• 48:28
  Speaker: The rest of them remain somewhat low, but Tonawanda has gone up
• 48:34
  Speaker: to thirty two percent.
• 48:36
  Speaker: So think about that.
• 48:39
  Speaker: Murdered Morgan is thirty five percent.
• 48:44
  Speaker: Taking him to the Indian
• 48:45
  Speaker: reservation is now thirty two
• 48:47
  Speaker: percent.
• 48:48
  Speaker: It's almost a tie.
• 48:51
  Speaker: And if I said let's just look at
• 48:53
  Speaker: those two, it took all the
• 48:55
  Speaker: percentages from everything
• 48:56
  Speaker: else.
• 48:57
  Speaker: The bottom line was that Claude came up with the fact that, yes,
• 49:04
  Speaker: the murder, the Morgan.
• 49:06
  Speaker: I'm sorry the Masons did murder
• 49:10
  Speaker: Morgan, but only by four
• 49:12
  Speaker: percentage points, because
• 49:14
  Speaker: there's a great amount of
• 49:15
  Speaker: evidence now that he was taken
• 49:18
  Speaker: to the Tonawanda Indian
• 49:20
  Speaker: Reservation.
• 49:22
  Speaker: And in Claude's words, it's fifty two percent murder, forty
• 49:27
  Speaker: eight percent Tonawanda.
• 49:29
  Speaker: And I quote a near coin flip, Lip, but murder still edges out.
• 49:36
  Speaker: And so when we gave him the gun
• 49:39
  Speaker: to the head question, he had to
• 49:42
  Speaker: say murder.
• 49:43
  Speaker: And that's why you heard what you heard.
• 49:46
  Speaker: But look how close we are to the fact that they may have taken
• 49:51
  Speaker: him to that reservation, which makes a lot more sense than him
• 49:55
  Speaker: carting off to Smyrna or the Caymans or any place else.
• 49:59
  Speaker: It is interesting that, like,
• 50:01
  Speaker: okay, so he goes to a
• 50:02
  Speaker: reservation that is sort of near
• 50:05
  Speaker: the area.
• 50:06
  Speaker: Um, but in the same like it's
• 50:11
  Speaker: crazy to me that we don't, if
• 50:13
  Speaker: that's the case, we don't have
• 50:14
  Speaker: evidence of, say, his wife going
• 50:16
  Speaker: to visit him or like some sort
• 50:20
  Speaker: of account of, oh, he's over on
• 50:23
  Speaker: the Indian reservation now, you
• 50:25
  Speaker: know, like, how can you like
• 50:28
  Speaker: Joe?
• 50:29
  Speaker: Uh, you can't go see Barb anymore.
• 50:31
  Speaker: I'm going to put you on an Indian reservation.
• 50:33
  Speaker: You can't.
• 50:33
  Speaker: You can't let anybody know you're alive six miles away.
• 50:36
  Speaker: I don't think she'd complain very much, but.
• 50:41
  Speaker: It's crazy to me, too, RJ.
• 50:43
  Speaker: It's, um.
• 50:46
  Speaker: He was so close.
• 50:47
  Speaker: And, um.
• 50:50
  Speaker: But don't forget, this is all Claude's work, not mine.
• 50:53
  Speaker: Sure, sure.
• 50:54
  Speaker: Yeah, I would I would like to say one more thing that is
• 50:57
  Speaker: completely off the subject, but I had that note on there.
• 51:00
  Speaker: Mhm.
• 51:02
  Speaker: The book?
• 51:03
  Speaker: Yes.
• 51:05
  Speaker: Uh, the book is just full of names.
• 51:08
  Speaker: And people would tell me, man, there are just too many names to
• 51:13
  Speaker: remember this book.
• 51:14
  Speaker: So one thing that I have done is
• 51:17
  Speaker: I created a glossary of names
• 51:20
  Speaker: and who they were and why
• 51:21
  Speaker: they're significant.
• 51:23
  Speaker: There are many, many, many pages of these names.
• 51:27
  Speaker: And it's it is available on tiny URL and the code for it.
• 51:33
  Speaker: There is imperfect storm names, no spaces.
• 51:38
  Speaker: It's free.
• 51:39
  Speaker: If you're going to read the
• 51:40
  Speaker: book, I highly recommend getting
• 51:43
  Speaker: that.
• 51:44
  Speaker: If you have read the book, you
• 51:45
  Speaker: might want to get it as a
• 51:47
  Speaker: refresher.
• 51:50
  Speaker: I love it.
• 51:51
  Speaker: Yeah, because I'm one of those that if I read a book and it's
• 51:54
  Speaker: got more than three names I need to like, I need a map, I need
• 51:57
  Speaker: something drawn out for me.
• 51:58
  Speaker: So, uh, that's that's great.
• 52:00
  Speaker: That's amazing.
• 52:01
  Speaker: Uh, so.
• 52:04
  Speaker: We did it.
• 52:06
  Speaker: We did it.
• 52:06
  Speaker: And by, by that, I mean, the Masons killed him.
• 52:11
  Speaker: Well, the gun to the head theory says it.
• 52:18
  Speaker: Well, you know, the that's not going to get taken out of
• 52:21
  Speaker: context and show up on Reddit.
• 52:23
  Speaker: No, not at all.
• 52:24
  Speaker: At all.
• 52:25
  Speaker: And so so the interesting thing
• 52:27
  Speaker: here, though, is also this idea
• 52:28
  Speaker: that I think a lot of the
• 52:31
  Speaker: documents that you were working
• 52:33
  Speaker: with, Steve, hadn't been widely
• 52:36
  Speaker: circulated.
• 52:38
  Speaker: If they had been, it had been many, many, many years.
• 52:43
  Speaker: Do you think that.
• 52:48
  Speaker: Someone fifty years ago, sixty years ago could have looked at
• 52:53
  Speaker: this evidence, came to the conclusion that we did it and
• 52:59
  Speaker: then wanted to tell the world.
• 53:01
  Speaker: And then maybe like a Grand Lodge or somebody said, you
• 53:04
  Speaker: can't do that.
• 53:08
  Speaker: Boy, I now I feel like AI gosh, RJ, that's a perceptive
• 53:13
  Speaker: question, you know.
• 53:17
  Speaker: Well, it's interesting that you said fifty or sixty years ago
• 53:21
  Speaker: because that puts us right at what, the nineteen fifties or
• 53:25
  Speaker: that's a little after the nineteen fifties, but that's
• 53:28
  Speaker: when all those Grand Cayman letters started coming in, and I
• 53:33
  Speaker: never could figure out why they didn't just send somebody down
• 53:35
  Speaker: there and figure out what was going on, because there were
• 53:39
  Speaker: people alive then that could have told him easily, no, that
• 53:43
  Speaker: guy's name was Ward.
• 53:45
  Speaker: When I was working with that family, uh, that the modern
• 53:51
  Speaker: family, today's family that were still making the claims that
• 53:55
  Speaker: that was William Morgan.
• 53:57
  Speaker: There was a split within that family.
• 54:00
  Speaker: I worked with one man that in
• 54:02
  Speaker: the book I called John Doe, and
• 54:04
  Speaker: I had to do that because that
• 54:06
  Speaker: family was giving us their
• 54:08
  Speaker: entire history, their genetics,
• 54:09
  Speaker: the whole bit as we tried to go
• 54:12
  Speaker: through this.
• 54:13
  Speaker: Uh, he has since died, but I think John Doe is still
• 54:18
  Speaker: appropriate because his sister stepped in and helped us.
• 54:22
  Speaker: But at one point from an ant.
• 54:28
  Speaker: We got a text and even the ant
• 54:30
  Speaker: today or then in twenty twenty
• 54:34
  Speaker: five, or whenever twenty twenty
• 54:36
  Speaker: four said that guy's name was
• 54:39
  Speaker: Ward.
• 54:40
  Speaker: And then I hired that genetics company and they nailed it.
• 54:45
  Speaker: So long winded answer, they could have certainly proven that
• 54:51
  Speaker: it was not war.
• 54:52
  Speaker: Morgan in the Caribbean.
• 54:55
  Speaker: Uh, Smyrna would have been a lot harder.
• 54:59
  Speaker: The information about Tonawanda would have been out by then, and
• 55:04
  Speaker: I think some people would have heard it, but I found no
• 55:08
  Speaker: evidence that they did.
• 55:10
  Speaker: I just found the book and some
• 55:12
  Speaker: papers that were written by, uh,
• 55:15
  Speaker: the Batavia photographer William
• 55:18
  Speaker: Wakeman.
• 55:23
  Speaker: Wow.
• 55:25
  Speaker: So given the interest of time, we're going to go around one
• 55:31
  Speaker: last time for the final question, which is if we did it,
• 55:36
  Speaker: what does that change like?
• 55:38
  Speaker: Does that change the narrative?
• 55:39
  Speaker: Does that change conspiracy theories?
• 55:43
  Speaker: Does that change perception?
• 55:47
  Speaker: Or does nothing change?
• 55:50
  Speaker: So I'll start with Jason.
• 55:54
  Speaker: Um, what does it change.
• 55:59
  Speaker: Um. I think it.
• 56:11
  Speaker: Changes a little bit how we look at the Anti-Masonic period of
• 56:14
  Speaker: the eighteen thirties.
• 56:17
  Speaker: Um, we saw, you know, we, have seen that, as you know, very
• 56:24
  Speaker: politically motivated with the Anti-Masonic party and probably,
• 56:29
  Speaker: you know, still, still was.
• 56:32
  Speaker: But, um, I think a lot of Masons are like, yeah, everybody just
• 56:40
  Speaker: made up that story.
• 56:41
  Speaker: You know, we didn't kill William Morgan.
• 56:43
  Speaker: Um, and so I think it.
• 56:49
  Speaker: Yeah, it, I think colors how we view the Anti-Masonic period of
• 56:54
  Speaker: the eighteen thirties.
• 56:59
  Speaker: All right.
• 56:59
  Speaker: Joe, do you agree?
• 57:01
  Speaker: What changes.
• 57:05
  Speaker: Well, I actually don't.
• 57:09
  Speaker: I like Jason's reasons.
• 57:10
  Speaker: I don't think it changes how.
• 57:14
  Speaker: The Anti-Masonic movement came
• 57:18
  Speaker: and went because I. If it wasn't
• 57:20
  Speaker: William Morgan's disappearance,
• 57:22
  Speaker: something else would have
• 57:23
  Speaker: triggered the.
• 57:24
  Speaker: The rapid growth of the first
• 57:26
  Speaker: third party here in the United
• 57:28
  Speaker: States.
• 57:28
  Speaker: Right.
• 57:29
  Speaker: Um, and I don't think it would
• 57:32
  Speaker: have changed the conspiracy
• 57:35
  Speaker: theorists that surround
• 57:36
  Speaker: Freemasonry.
• 57:37
  Speaker: Right.
• 57:37
  Speaker: And all the things that they say.
• 57:39
  Speaker: Um, regardless of his
• 57:41
  Speaker: disappearance and AI, you know,
• 57:43
  Speaker: stating that that he was
• 57:45
  Speaker: murdered by Masons, um, in
• 57:49
  Speaker: general, that entire movement,
• 57:51
  Speaker: you know, did more damage than
• 57:53
  Speaker: one single person's, uh,
• 57:55
  Speaker: outcome, I think could, could
• 57:57
  Speaker: ever have.
• 57:57
  Speaker: Right.
• 57:58
  Speaker: It completely shut down masonry.
• 58:00
  Speaker: Um, membership collapsed.
• 58:02
  Speaker: Um, people turned against masonry, you know, it became a,
• 58:06
  Speaker: a platform by, by which, you know, people ran for office.
• 58:10
  Speaker: Um, but I think that's the, the lesson for us today, right?
• 58:14
  Speaker: No organization is protected by secrecy.
• 58:18
  Speaker: or circling the wagons when something goes wrong, right.
• 58:21
  Speaker: Um, institutions survive for different reasons.
• 58:25
  Speaker: So. And at the end of the day, you know, just because
• 58:28
  Speaker: somebody's a mason doesn't mean they're a great person.
• 58:31
  Speaker: And we've been saying that for God knows how many years.
• 58:33
  Speaker: Um, yeah.
• 58:34
  Speaker: You can have.
• 58:35
  Speaker: Yes.
• 58:36
  Speaker: Audible gasp um, so you can have
• 58:39
  Speaker: bad people that still do bad
• 58:41
  Speaker: things that wear trappings of
• 58:43
  Speaker: good people.
• 58:44
  Speaker: So, you know, I think that's if
• 58:47
  Speaker: it were, if AI were to be proven
• 58:49
  Speaker: correct, I think that's what you
• 58:51
  Speaker: would find, uh, more to be the
• 58:53
  Speaker: case.
• 58:54
  Speaker: Fair point.
• 58:57
  Speaker: Robert.
• 58:58
  Speaker: What changes, if anything?
• 59:02
  Speaker: I think part of me your question brings up, uh, it was Rick
• 59:08
  Speaker: Berman and Hiram wrote sort of a rebuttal to Susan Summers and,
• 59:14
  Speaker: uh, all the other fella who wrote that, uh, seventeen
• 59:18
  Speaker: seventeen verses seventeen twenty one, uh, whole thing
• 59:22
  Speaker: about the Grand Lodge formation.
• 59:24
  Speaker: Um, and he had a really good paper.
• 59:27
  Speaker: Uh, I would just say that it
• 59:29
  Speaker: felt to me like he kind of said,
• 59:32
  Speaker: well, even if it is true, so
• 59:35
  Speaker: what?
• 59:38
  Speaker: And so in this, if we killed Morgan, is it a so what?
• 59:46
  Speaker: I'm not so sure.
• 59:47
  Speaker: It's just a. So what I think I think for us it there's a new
• 59:55
  Speaker: sort of responsibility.
• 59:57
  Speaker: We have, uh, as Masons as, as an organization that is trying to
• 1:00:01
  Speaker: get out in front of everything, especially like over in Europe,
• 1:00:05
  Speaker: uh, or in the UK.
• 1:00:07
  Speaker: Um, they're dispelling things, but at the same time, you have
• 1:00:12
  Speaker: to own your own history.
• 1:00:16
  Speaker: And when I think about this, this in the probability that
• 1:00:19
  Speaker: that we did this, if we accept that it turns an urban legend
• 1:00:25
  Speaker: into history, and in that we have a responsibility to have,
• 1:00:33
  Speaker: uh, institutional Masonic organization, the institution of
• 1:00:36
  Speaker: masonry has to, in this sense, um, adopt, I think transparency,
• 1:00:43
  Speaker: uh, to, to that.
• 1:00:45
  Speaker: Yep.
• 1:00:45
  Speaker: It happened.
• 1:00:46
  Speaker: It was crazy.
• 1:00:46
  Speaker: It was rogue Masons, right?
• 1:00:48
  Speaker: It's just like rogue rogue CIA agents took out JFK read it.
• 1:00:54
  Speaker: Um, but I don't think it changes our daily operations.
• 1:00:59
  Speaker: Right.
• 1:01:00
  Speaker: It remains Masons today remain the same.
• 1:01:04
  Speaker: Um, and it's just like any other day.
• 1:01:07
  Speaker: Now we know and we can tell the story.
• 1:01:13
  Speaker: We can say, hey, pick up this
• 1:01:15
  Speaker: book if you want to really read
• 1:01:16
  Speaker: what's Up?
• 1:01:17
  Speaker: You know, you can get a pretty good idea of what happened.
• 1:01:20
  Speaker: We still don't know, but it kind of looks this way.
• 1:01:24
  Speaker: And maybe that's okay.
• 1:01:28
  Speaker: Yeah, very nuanced for sure.
• 1:01:30
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 1:01:31
  Speaker: How about you, Steve?
• 1:01:31
  Speaker: Since you're the you're the
• 1:01:33
  Speaker: messenger here tonight, how do
• 1:01:35
  Speaker: you think that that changes
• 1:01:37
  Speaker: things?
• 1:01:38
  Speaker: I think if we had killed Morgan
• 1:01:41
  Speaker: or if we did it, I don't know if
• 1:01:46
  Speaker: it's the kind of change you're
• 1:01:47
  Speaker: looking for.
• 1:01:48
  Speaker: I think the Anti-Masonic period
• 1:01:50
  Speaker: would have been even more
• 1:01:52
  Speaker: intense and probably lasted
• 1:01:55
  Speaker: longer.
• 1:01:57
  Speaker: And I mean, you know, in some respects it lasted until today.
• 1:02:01
  Speaker: So I think that would have happened.
• 1:02:04
  Speaker: But I also think I want to make it clear this is not what that
• 1:02:10
  Speaker: book is about.
• 1:02:12
  Speaker: I know there are people that think it's just another Morgan
• 1:02:15
  Speaker: book, and if that were the case, I wouldn't have written it.
• 1:02:19
  Speaker: But we try to look at things
• 1:02:21
  Speaker: exactly like what your question
• 1:02:24
  Speaker: is asking.
• 1:02:26
  Speaker: Uh, how did the Anti-Masonic
• 1:02:29
  Speaker: period develop and how did all
• 1:02:34
  Speaker: of this get started in the first
• 1:02:37
  Speaker: place?
• 1:02:37
  Speaker: We haven't talked about the
• 1:02:39
  Speaker: history of the Grand Lodge of
• 1:02:41
  Speaker: New York that split into two
• 1:02:45
  Speaker: grand lodges and as a result,
• 1:02:48
  Speaker: stopped being very selective
• 1:02:52
  Speaker: about the people who were
• 1:02:54
  Speaker: members.
• 1:02:54
  Speaker: And they selected people that
• 1:02:56
  Speaker: would come in and be thieves and
• 1:02:59
  Speaker: arsonists and kidnappers and
• 1:03:02
  Speaker: perhaps murderers.
• 1:03:04
  Speaker: Um, and to me, the really
• 1:03:07
  Speaker: important question since it has
• 1:03:09
  Speaker: died down a bit, is we as
• 1:03:13
  Speaker: Masons.
• 1:03:14
  Speaker: What did we learn from this?
• 1:03:16
  Speaker: And you know, it's the old saying, don't do something
• 1:03:21
  Speaker: permanently stupid just because you're temporarily upset.
• 1:03:26
  Speaker: And that's what those guys back then did.
• 1:03:31
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 1:03:32
  Speaker: Well said.
• 1:03:34
  Speaker: All right.
• 1:03:35
  Speaker: Um, as for me, you know, the
• 1:03:38
  Speaker: thought that was going through
• 1:03:39
  Speaker: my mind to echo what everyone
• 1:03:41
  Speaker: else has been saying, is that we
• 1:03:42
  Speaker: have new, new pieces of evidence
• 1:03:44
  Speaker: for history.
• 1:03:45
  Speaker: Right.
• 1:03:45
  Speaker: And from a Masonic context, it's
• 1:03:47
  Speaker: like first finding out that the
• 1:03:50
  Speaker: forget me not was not really a
• 1:03:52
  Speaker: true story or or the friend to a
• 1:03:55
  Speaker: friend monument masonry in
• 1:03:58
  Speaker: Pennsylvania.
• 1:03:59
  Speaker: Great story.
• 1:04:00
  Speaker: But now we know better.
• 1:04:03
  Speaker: And you know, we have a
• 1:04:04
  Speaker: responsibility to take that
• 1:04:06
  Speaker: information and knowledge going
• 1:04:07
  Speaker: forward.
• 1:04:09
  Speaker: Um, another thing that kind of
• 1:04:10
  Speaker: crossed my mind was, um, I'm a
• 1:04:13
  Speaker: big Ken Burns documentary fan
• 1:04:15
  Speaker: and I think a couple of years
• 1:04:16
  Speaker: ago, he did, uh, three or four
• 1:04:19
  Speaker: part series on PBS about Ben
• 1:04:21
  Speaker: Franklin.
• 1:04:22
  Speaker: And at the time, uh, they had uncovered new documents that
• 1:04:28
  Speaker: proved that he owned at least up to two slaves.
• 1:04:32
  Speaker: And so this was like new
• 1:04:34
  Speaker: information throughout all Ben,
• 1:04:35
  Speaker: Ben Franklin's history that had
• 1:04:37
  Speaker: been documented, always
• 1:04:38
  Speaker: suspected.
• 1:04:38
  Speaker: But now, now there was proof.
• 1:04:40
  Speaker: And so they spent some time in the in the show just saying that
• 1:04:44
  Speaker: like, hey, we have to like wrap our tradition over with this new
• 1:04:49
  Speaker: veneer of, of history and take it for the, for all that it is.
• 1:04:55
  Speaker: Right?
• 1:04:55
  Speaker: It's, it's just that becomes part of the color of this, uh,
• 1:05:01
  Speaker: this story that's told.
• 1:05:03
  Speaker: And we need to just kind of add it to the gestalt, to use a good
• 1:05:07
  Speaker: word like Steve used earlier.
• 1:05:09
  Speaker: Um, to to just say that now we
• 1:05:11
  Speaker: have the responsibility to make
• 1:05:13
  Speaker: sure that that information gets
• 1:05:14
  Speaker: carried forward.
• 1:05:16
  Speaker: We, we get out of hypothetical and proverbial and storytelling
• 1:05:20
  Speaker: and into more fact based, uh, evidence and, you know, learning
• 1:05:24
  Speaker: from it, as Steve said.
• 1:05:26
  Speaker: So with that, you know, I really
• 1:05:28
  Speaker: hope that you guys take
• 1:05:29
  Speaker: everything you heard here
• 1:05:29
  Speaker: tonight, go buy a copy of, of
• 1:05:32
  Speaker: the book.
• 1:05:32
  Speaker: Because as Steve said, it covers
• 1:05:34
  Speaker: a heck of a lot more than, uh,
• 1:05:36
  Speaker: William Morgan.
• 1:05:37
  Speaker: So, um, and again, chef's kiss for the, the editorial style of
• 1:05:42
  Speaker: how, how you wrote it, it was just very engaging, um, very,
• 1:05:45
  Speaker: very evidence based.
• 1:05:46
  Speaker: And, and I enjoyed every bit of it.
• 1:05:48
  Speaker: So with that, I want to thank
• 1:05:50
  Speaker: you all very much for watching
• 1:05:51
  Speaker: and keep searching for more
• 1:05:52
  Speaker: light.
• 1:05:53
  Speaker: Have a good night.
• 1:05:54
  Speaker: Wow.