“An ingenious Mechanick” was how Mr. Mathias’s dog-powered sawmill was first described in April of 1828 to the Antimasonic conspiracy theorists who read Thurlow Weed’s newspaper. A reprinted article from the Troy, New York Sentinel told of how four trained dogs ran on a hamster-wheel contraption, twelve to fifteen feet in diameter, powering a circular saw to a “great velocity.” The high-speed saw that turned timber into the marketable commodities of window sashes and blinds showed the possibilities of dog-powered machines, a novelty in the budding age of water wheels and steam engines despite humanity’s twenty-thousand-year history of domesticated canine labor. Just three years earlier, in 1825, New York City newspapers advertised a “cutting machine, (turned by dog power)” in a sheriff’s sale. The slightly used dog-powered machine sparked no comment or excitement in city newspapers. But the story of Mathias’s “ingenious Mechanick,” which essentially was the same type of device, caused a fervor that saw the Troy woodshop’s machine featured in newspapers across the country and across the Atlantic.

“Dog Mill.” The Anti-Masonic Enquirer (Rochester, NY), 8 April 1828. Rochester Public Library Local History Division Historic Newspapers Collection (digitized). http://www.libraryweb.org/~digitized/newspapers/anti-masonic_enquirer/vol.1.pdf.

This new curiosity about an alternative form of energy, the use of dogs to power machines, fit broadly within a new cultural milieu of innovation, possibility, and human mastery of the non-human world sweeping agricultural science. In 1828, Mathias’s dog mill challenged readers to envision these possibilities on King Street in downtown Troy, a street without access to flowing water, offering a vision of productive urban industry untethered from the restrictions of geography. But can the Troy dog mill help historians understand the political conspiracy theorists, the Antimasons?^[1]

Historians’ discussions of the Antimasons and other political conspiracy theorists often are reduced to Richard Hofstadter’s famous diagnosis of the “paranoid style” of American politics. But despite the Antimasons’ famous preoccupation with ferreting out Freemasons, they, too, contributed to the cultural zeitgeist in science and technology. When Mr. Mathias’s dog mill appeared in the Anti-Masonic Enquirer it breached partisan political divides; the Sentinel, the original printer of the article, was a pro-Mason newspaper of the opposing political party. The Sentinel ran weekly ads for the local Masonic lodge and was a pro-Jackson, Democrat voice in Troy. In contrast, the Antimasons, with newspapers like the Rochester Anti-Masonic Enquirer, were part of an anti-Jackson political coalition. The Sentinel’s and the Enquirer’s shared interest in the Troy dog-mill, though divided by political party, perhaps indicated a common commitment to the American god of gain, hope in the revolutionary possibilities of technology, or, at the very least, a shared awe in the spectacle of dogs milling wood. Jacksonian partisan differences frequently boiled down to a disagreement over how that commitment to capitalist development should play out.^[2]

Matthias’s dog mill gives a glimpse of what the Antimasonic political vision had in common with their avowed political enemies. A look at the consensus shared by the two great partisan adversaries of the late 1820s perhaps brings the Antimasonic movement into view beyond their paranoid style of politics. Looking beyond Antimasons’ conspiratorial rhetoric suggests that taking conspiracy theories as just one part of their political agenda may offer a new way to see the turbulent reformulation of national politics in the late 1820s.

Endnotes

^[1] For canine domestication and machine power in nineteenth-century New York State, as well as the interest of the Troy dog mill in London newspapers, see Andrew A. Robichaud, Animal City: The Domestication of America (Cambridge, MA, , 2019), 160–63. For agricultural science and capitalism in nineteenth-century New York, see Emily Pawley, The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North (Chicago, 2020). For the dog-powered cutting machine, see New York American, Jan. 22, 1825, and New York Evening Post, Jan. 24, 1825.

^[2] Consideration of the Antimasons and other politicized conspiracy theories often revolves, at some level, around Richard Hofstadter’s famous diagnosis of the “paranoid style” in American politics. See Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics, By Richard Hofstadter,” Harper’s Magazine, Nov. 1, 1964. Some historians of the Antimasons who have considered the class dimensions of the movement have looked at the apparent incongruence between the agrarian rhetoric of the Antimasons and its urban, middle-class base. See Kathleen Smith Kutolowski, “Antimasonry Reexamined: Social Bases of the Grass-Roots Party,” Journal of American History 71, no. 2 (1984), 269–93. In Paul Johnson’s classic study of Rochester, Antimasons appear as manifestations of the changing capitalist society and evangelical religion, the view offered proposes to take Antimasons as the subject and examine how their broad spectrum of interests can be understood. See Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium : Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837, American Century Series (New York, 1978). Historians of the “market revolution” and Jacksonian party politics have both found that Jacksonian parties major differences often revolved around the role of the state in the market; for examples see John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001); and, Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York, 2003). For the Sentinel’s politics and Masonic advertising, see Troy Sentinel, Apr. 4, 1828.