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IN his National Fast Day sermon of 8 May 1798, Connecticut Congregationalist minister Jedidiah Morse addressed the challenges facing America. Forgoing the accusations of willfulness, greed, and depravity with which jeremiadical ministers typically berated their congregations, Morse located the foe as without rather than within. He identified the major obstacle that prevented America from attaining its divinely ordained mission, that is, not as a failure of promise but as an insidious French liberalism that had infected contemporary thought. Nor was the threat merely rhetorical. French agents, controlled by a secret society of "Bavarian Illuminati," had penetrated America's borders, Morse reported. The Illuminati's ultimate aim, he declared, was to undermine America's civic and religious institutions to "prepare the way among us, for the spread of those disorganizing opinions, and that atheistical philosophy, which are deluging the Old World in misery and blood." "Hostile to true liberty and religion," the conspirators were ready to launch an all-out assault on the institutions the founding fathers had so painstakingly established.1
Morse's warning about French treachery resonated with a nation disgusted by the excesses of the French Revolution and concerned about recent political events like the XYZ affair and the Whiskey Rebellion.2 Talk of the Illuminati conspiracy was on the lips and throughout the diaries of New England's elite, including the closest friends of Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), considered by many scholars to be America's first professional author. Brown was then writing his first novel, Wieland; or, the Transformation: An American Tale (1798). That summer, Brown was staying at the home of his friend Dr. Elihu Hubbard Smith. As he records in his diary, Smith was reading anti-Illuminati books and sermons, including those of his fellow correspondents Morse and Timothy Dwight, at the same time as he was reviewing drafts of Wieland and offering suggestions for revision.3 William Dunlap, Brown's friend and, later, biographer, was also pursuing the topic that summer. On 6 August 1798, Dunlap noted that he was reading Timothy Dwight's sermon "against Infidels" and Theodore Dwight's oration about the Illuminati. Later that day, he visited with Brown and discussed the unfinished drafts of Wieland. Just after he completed Wieland, Brown gave Dunlap an early sketch of Carwin the Biloquist, an unfinished prelude to his first novel. Dunlap...