William L. Boyden's Chronology of the Supreme Council, Southern Jurisdiction, 1801-1859

William L. Boyden’s Chronology of the Supreme Council, Southern Jurisdiction, 1801–1859 is a 104-page archival chronology of the formative decades of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite’s Southern Jurisdiction in the United States. The current hardcover edition was published by the Supreme Council in 2025, with an introduction by Arturo de Hoyos and B. Chris Ruli.

Boyden was the longtime librarian of the Supreme Council’s library at the House of the Temple in Washington, D.C., and was a serious Masonic bibliographer and archivist. He is also remembered for devising a classification system specifically for Masonic literature. His chronology appears originally to have circulated as an institutional historical compilation; an earlier form is catalogued as a 1939 work associated with the Supreme Council.

The book is essentially a document-driven skeleton history of the Southern Jurisdiction, built from letters, patents, certificates, charters, and other archival records rather than from a continuous interpretive narrative. The publisher divides the material into four broad periods: 1801–1815, covering the foundation of the Charleston Supreme Council and early expansion; 1815–1825, including the emergence of the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction and the Cerneau controversies; 1826–1844, when the Morgan Affair badly damaged American Freemasonry; and 1844–1859, when Albert G. Mackey became increasingly important and Albert Pike entered the Scottish Rite. The chronology ends in 1859, when Pike was elected Sovereign Grand Commander.