Masons took William Morgan from a New York jail in 1826 to stop his exposé, and a stranger's body was buried in his name

William Morgan of Batavia, New York, planned a book revealing the rituals of Freemasonry with publisher David C. Miller. On 11 September 1826 he was in the Canandaigua jail over a small tavern bill. That night a group of Masons took him from the jail to Fort Niagara. He was taken from his cell there and never seen again. Miller published Illustrations of Masonry, and it sold widely. Eli Bruce, sheriff of Niagara County, was removed from office and served 28 months for conspiracy. Loton Lawson, Nicholas Chesebro and Edward Sawyer were also convicted. Elihu Mather was tried for ten days in November 1829 and acquitted. In October 1827 a decomposed body washed up on the Lake Ontario shore at Oak Orchard. At a second inquest Morgan's wife, Lucinda, identified it by its teeth; politician Thurlow Weed sat on the committee. At a third, the wife of Timothy Monroe, a missing Canadian, identified the clothing as her husband's, and that ruling stood. Weed built the Anti-Masonic Party. Its 1832 candidate, William Wirt, carried Vermont's seven electoral votes. Lucinda married silversmith George W. Harris in 1830, and they joined the Latter Day Saints; some historians believe she became a plural wife of Joseph Smith^†. In 1882 the National Christian Association put up a monument to Morgan in Batavia Cemetery, where the Monroe body had been buried^†.