If the Illuminati were beginning to corrupt the United States, according to Morse, they had gone much further already in Europe. The evil society’s greatest triumph to date, Morse wrote, was its recent work to hatch the French Revolution and disguise it as a mild, moderate event following the model of the American Revolution. With France’s increasing radicalism, anticlericalism, and disorder, it seemed obvious to Morse that the French Jacobins, the political faction that seized control of the nation in 1792, were simply Illuminati by another name.
Morse got most of this story from a book written by a Scottish academic named John Robison, who in turn took many of his ideas from the abbé de Barruel, a French priest. Robison’s book provided rich source material for Morse’s imagination. It was full of dramatic details, such as an account of the Illuminati possessing “tea for procuring abortion” as well as a mysterious “composition which blinds or kills when spurted in the face.” The Illuminati, according to Robison, defended suicide and discouraged patriotism and property owning. Claiming to worship human reason above all else, they practiced a blinkered ethics in which the means always justified the ends, as long as those ends were the growing power of the organization.
These accounts of the Illuminati were, of course, utterly false. Though a group of Enlightenment intellectuals led by Adam Weishaupt, calling themselves the Illuminati, had existed briefly in Bavaria in the 1770s, they were defunct by the 1790s. They endorsed tolerance and rationalism, but not the kind of extreme amoral worldview attributed to them. There is no evidence that the Illuminati ever held anywhere near the power that its critics claimed. There is certainly nothing to suggest that the reach of the Illuminati extended across the Atlantic to the United States. Nevertheless, in the months following Morse’s dramatic speech, the Illuminati conspiracy theory became an immediate sensation in the United States and Canada.
This was not a fringe conspiracy theory championed by uneducated outsiders. Quite the opposite: Many of the nation’s leading figures put their reputations behind it—both in public and in private correspondence. In one private letter, former President George Washington wrote that he was “satisfied” that the Illuminati had spread their “Doctrines” to the United States. First lady Abigail Adams read Robison’s book and recommended it to friends. New England’s preachers were among the most consistent promoters of the Illuminati conspiracy theory, both from their pulpits and behind closed doors, at a time when religious leaders commanded the respect of large audiences. So why did these well-informed, well-educated individuals fall for it?