Freemason

Talented Continental Army general who defected to the British; 1741—1801.
Lawyer, politician, writer, militia officer, signer of the Declaration of Independence; 1732—1808.
Signer of the Declaration of Independence from Rhode Island; 1727 - 1820.
Philadelphia printer, writer, scientist, inventor, signer of the Declaration of Independence, diplomat to France; 1706—90.
Continental Army general; key to winning the war in the South; 1742—86.
Boston merchant, signer of the Declaration of Independence, Massachusetts governor; 1737—93.
Continental Army general, chief artillery officer, first Secretary of War; 1750—1806.
French aristocrat, Continental Army officer, like a son to Washington; 1757—1834.
Soldier, lawyer, politician, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; 1755—1835.
Irish-born Continental Army general, formerly a British officer; 1738—75.

What ultimately convinced Americans that they must revolt in 1776 was not that they were naturally and inevitably republican, for if that were truly the case evolution, not revolution, would have been the eventual solution. Rather it was the pervasive fear that they were not predestined to be a virtuous and egalitarian people that in the last analysis drove them into revolution in 1776. It was this fear and not their confidence in the peculiarity of their character that made them so readily and so remarkably responsive to Thomas Paine’s warning that the time for independence was at hand and that delay would be disastrous. By 1776 it had become increasingly evident that if they were to remain the kind of people they wanted to be they must become free of Britain.

Gordon S. Wood
The Creation of the American Republic, 1776—1787 (1969)