Secret Combinations Revisited

Daniel C. Peterson writes a wonderful article here about this very interesting subject and we take an excerpt from it here. Read the full article at:

www.maxwellintstitute.byu.edu/publications/jbms/?vol=1&num=1&id=626

It has long been contended by critics of the Book of Mormon that its "Gadianton robbers" are merely nineteenth-century Freemasons, transparently disguised.¹ As one of their chief arguments for that notion, such writers as David Persuitte and Robert Hullinger have pointed out that the Book of Mormon refers to the Gadianton robbers using the same phrase, "secret combination," with which contemporary newspapers referred to the Masons during the great anti-Masonic agitation of the late 1820s.²

One can easily demonstrate, though, that the word "combination" was commonly used, in the nineteenth century and earlier, in the sense of "conspiracy." Thus, its use for the robbers of Gadianton seems to bear little real significance for the question of Book of Mormon authorship, proving at best that the text's English vocabulary is most likely that of a nineteenth-century American. But this was never in doubt.³

However, in a 1989 article, Dan Vogel took the argument even further. "At the time of the Book of Mormon's publication," he claimed, "the term 'secret combinations' was used almost exclusively to refer to Freemasonry."⁴According to this view—which soon tends to lose its modest "almost"—it is the phrase as a whole that uniquely denotes Freemasonry and, so, points to a nineteenth-century origin for the Book of Mormon as well as to the real identity of the (presumably fictional) Gadianton robbers.⁵

The obvious problem with such a view is that it is difficult to see why the joining of a common adjective like "secret" to a common term of the day like "combination" should be regarded as a technical piece of esoteric jargon so distinctive as to constitute a definitive test of authorship or a conclusive refutation of the Book of Mormon's historical authenticity. The evidence supporting Vogel's claim, furthermore, seems to have been drawn from an overly narrow sampling of documents, and to be, simply, too sparse to sustain him. I noted this in 1990:

Vogel's own evidence—which consists of seven anti-Masonic newspaper quotations—merely demonstrates what has been known for many years, that the phrase was indeed sometimes employed in reference to Masons. But this is a far cry from demonstrating that such was itsexclusive use. . . .What is needed, before one can confidently declare that the phrase "secret combination" was never used in non-Masonic contexts in the 1820s and 1830s, is a careful search of documents from that period of American history that have nothing to do with the controversy surrounding the Masons. This has not yet been done.⁶

I made a small effort in that direction for my 1990 article, but the results, while they were interesting and suggested that Vogel was probably wrong, remained inconclusive. A computerized search of available nineteenth-century federal and state court opinions revealed ten occurrences of the phrase "secret combination(s)," not one of which referred to the Masons. Unfortunately, though, the earliest of these dated only to 1850, fully two decades after the publication of the Book of Mormon. This lack of pre-1850 references was, I believe, a merely accidental effect of the fact that court decisions of the first half of the nineteenth century remain largely uncomputerized, and so could not be easily searched. Following a somewhat different research direction, I located a passionate 1831 attack on bar associations, by a Massachusetts journalist named Frederick Robinson, in which such phrases as "secret bar association," "secret brotherhood of the bar," "combination," "conspiracy," "secret society," and "secret fraternity" all appeared in close proximity. It seemed mere bad luck that the precise phrase "secret combination" did not actually occur.⁷