Was Morgan murdered? It’s hard to say for sure. But his body was never recovered, and no one ever heard from him again. In 1827, several men—Loton Lawson, Nicholas Chesebro and Edward Sawyer—were convicted of kidnapping him. They would later hint that they had driven Morgan first to Rochester and then west to the empty Fort Niagara. Some Masons maintained that he had been taken to the Canadian border and told never to return to the United States, but most privately agreed that he had been killed. Greene, who continued to attend lodge meetings, saw that it was “well understood by the members of our lodge that Morgan was dead,” as evidenced by the amount of “rough joking” by his brothers. (“Morgan was taken out in a boat,” one supposedly claimed, “a stone was fastened to him, and the wind blew, and the unfortunate wretch was blown overboard and sunk.”) But no one confessed to the murder itself. With no body and no confession, there could be no trial for murder, no final justice for Morgan. Shortly after Morgan’s disappearance, Miller published the exposé the whistleblower had likely been killed for writing.
Above all, for Greene and the others aghast at what had happened, the greatest horror was that the murder wasn’t the act of a random mob. Instead, as Greene would later write in his memoir, “these men, who were the leaders in this plot against Morgan and Miller, were men of standing and character. They were at the time holding the most important offices in church and state.” The Masons who had allegedly brought down Morgan were judges and justices, sheriffs and constables, military officers of high standing, religious leaders and politicians. “Everything had been considered and determined upon by the very highest authorities in the Masonic councils,” Greene wrote.
The absence of a corpse ended up whetting the public’s appetite for an answer to the mystery. Newly formed societies of amateur sleuths tried to discover what had happened to Morgan. Groups of concerned citizens met in various towns along the alleged route of the abduction. These groups, which came to be called Morgan Committees, were initially only interested in recovering Morgan—or at least his corpse. But well-placed Masons in law enforcement and public office continually frustrated their attempts, and committee members began to see that the problem was wider than just one man’s disappearance. Masons had so thoroughly infiltrated American government—at least at the local level—that they held an effective monopoly on power, preventing the usual mechanism of justice from working.