Morgan

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After years of careful study, Stephen Dafoe's recently released, "Morgan: the Scandal That Shook Freemasonry" offers one of the most provocative retellings available of an incident that changed the North American political landscape.

"This book is the story of William Morgan, his associates and the book they proposed to publish," Dafoe explains in his Introduction to "Morgan". "It is the story of how a handful of young, impetuous members of the Masonic fraternity took matters into their own hands to prevent its publication and how their plans took a deadly fork in the road, nearly exterminating the very organization they sought to protect."

Dafoe has spent years studying the primary sources of this story. Those primary sources are key. Contemporary and afterward documentation on the Morgan affair is HUGE in quantity and impressive in its conflicts. It takes a serious scholar to plow thru it all and come up with a well studied, readable tome.

To do this, Dafoe skillfully wields the narrative form. This mode of writing offers the sort of continuity more common histories cannot approach. The reader receives the story as it happens, complete with thoughts and dialogue - culled from contemporary documents - and, for a time, can suspend whatever prior knowledge they may have had.

The reader is there:

- to share the grief between Morgan and his wife, Lucinda, at the lost of their child and the comfort he derives among his Brethren during his salad days in Freemasonry.
- recognize and empathize with those same Brethren who rejected him and yet still sympathize with Morgan for his anguish, which leads to his fatal decision to expose the Secrets of the fraternity.
- in lodge when the state's governor's letter is read out, calling upon the Brethren to "suppress the secrets of Masonry at the expense of blood and treasure"; and promising "if you are detected, you shall be protected. If you are convicted, you shall be pardoned, for I have the pardoning power."
- observing Morgan's initial arrest for stealing clothing he'd actually borrowed, cleared of that and then immediately arrested again on a debt of less than $3
- gazing out the second-floor window with Susan Green as the "armed mob of Masons" march up the street to the office of Morgan's publisher, David Miller, and abducts him in broad daylight.
- is with Miller's equally passionate mob of friends who rescue him from the Masons and, thus, unsilences his pen to shout murder to all the world.
- blinded with Morgan, his eyes too-tightly bound with his own handkerchief, as he's rowed in a boat across the Niagara to Canada; and hears his appeal to his Brothers turned captors: "Gentleman, I am your prisoner, use me with magnanimity"; only to feel a pistol in his chest and a promise "You say one more word, Morgan, and I'll shoot you."
- huddles with Morgan the last hours locked in an unlit, windowless cell in the powder magazine of a fort on the US side of the border with Canada. And then . . .

How does Dafoe handle the conflicting stories of Morgan's death or exile? That much I will not give away. But his message is clear: sometimes good people, with all the best of intentions, do the worst of things. For which all are made to suffer.