I hold it a duty, my brethren, which I owe to God, to the cause of religion, to my country and to you, at this time, to declare to you, thus honestly and faithfully, these truths. My only aim is to awaken in you and myself a due attention, at this alarming period, to our dearest interests. As a faithful watchman I would give you warning of your present danger.[2] Morse’s warning by no means fell upon deaf ears. The “due attention” he claimed for the alarm which he that day sounded was promptly and generally accorded. Soon ministers were preaching, newspaper editors and contributors writing and clearheaded statesmen like Oliver Wolcott, Timothy Pickering, John Adams, and even the great Washington, inquiring, and voicing their serious concern over the secret presence in America of those conspirators whose greatest single achievement, a multitude had come to believe, was the enormities of the French Revolution. It is true that before two years had passed men generally began to admit the baseless nature of the alarm that Morse had sounded. None the less one may not dismiss the incident with the light and easy judgment that it signified nothing more than the absurd fears of a New England clergyman who, under the strain of deep political and religious concern, and after a hasty reading of the latest volume of religious and political horrors that had just arrived from Europe,[3] rushed into his pulpit and gave utterance to preposterous statements which his imagination for the moment led him to believe were justified. The episode has considerably larger and more important bearings. No man could possibly have awakened such wide-spread concern as the minister of Charlestown succeeded in awakening if it had not been true that significant concurrent and related circumstances gave both setting and force to the alarm which with such stout conviction he sounded. What previous influences and events had tended to predispose the public mind favorably to Morse’s alarm? What was the peculiar combination and cast of events which gave the notion of a conspiracy against religion and government in Europe and in America a clear semblance of truth? In what ways, and to what extent, did the alarm affect the lives and the institutions of the people of New England? Finally, what were the grounds, real or imaginary, upon which the charge of an Illuminati conspiracy rested? To answering these questions the following pages are devoted. FOOTNOTES: