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PART II. RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR


Sovereign Silences and the Voice of War in the American Conflict over Slavery

DAVID F. HOLLAND


Various students of constitutional law have proposed a negative relationship between the possibility of formal amendment and recourse to informal construction. They suggest that if formal amendatory appeal to the sovereign People seems excessively difficult, a constitutional culture will more readily tolerate expansive interpretations or simple political action as mechanisms of change and clarification. Conversely, if the processes of amendment sufficiently allow the People to clarify or alter their own original charter, a constitutional culture will manifest less willingness to let judges and politicians put words in their mouths. The basic thrust of such constitutional logic is that, where reasonably possible, sovereigns will speak for themselves.1 1
      Historians tend to be wary of such ahistorical suppositions. Actual human history seems so rarely to comply with the demands of human logic. But historians are also notoriously opportunistic, selectively raiding other disciplines for tools that promise to bring some order to the particular chaos they study. For my own work on the history of American religious culture, I see some value in these concepts of constitutional change. If nothing else, they provide a useful vantage point from which to reconsider the internal logics of certain religious mentalities. With equal parts wariness and opportunism this essay appropriates the substance of these constitutional assumptions and applies it to nineteenth-century Americans' religious confrontation with slavery. 2
      The essential features of that confrontation have grown increasingly clear. Recent scholarship on "the Civil War as a theological crisis" notes both the cultural pressure to maintain strict fidelity to the scriptural text during the antebellum debate over slavery and the zeal with which Americans of all theological stripes then looked to the war as a transcendent message from God. It was as if the nation collectively turned its primary focus from close constructions of the Bible to considerations of wartime providences in its search for heaven's will.2 The application of constitutional logic to this historical narrative helps explicate a culture that could sustain both a ponderous textual conservatism and a remarkable openness to substantive change, at times with little sense of contradiction. 3
      In this case such a borrowing of explanatory tools seems especially justified by a scholarly literature positing points of comparison between constitutional and scriptural cultures.3 As with American constitutionalism, nineteenth-century American Christianity cherished both a created text and a sovereign Creator. The People were to the Constitution what God was to the Bible. The manifest difficulties of determining the entity—and knowing the will—of the People and God famously led the historian Edmund Morgan to characterize them both as "fictional" sovereigns; but Morgan's work also establishes the very real historical presence of even the most fictive rulers. Assertions of their sovereignty created powerful logical necessities.4 Although both these sovereigns could appear markedly more taciturn than they had been in past times—when they first handed down, respectively, the Constitution and the Bible—they were both held to be as present and as powerful as ever. A potentially destabilizing Lawgiver always lurked behind, or reigned above, the stabilizing law.5 Elements of the Christian tradition therefore contained the same relational dynamics between living sovereign and historical text that the aforementioned constitutional theories seek to explicate. Perhaps no moment in American religious history exposed those dynamics quite like the sectional crisis, in which believers devoutly pored over their foundation text and then scanned the horizon for ongoing messages from a living God. 4
      Histories of religious thought have noted both the narrow biblicism and vibrant providentialism of early Americans.6 These two features of the American religious landscape have in some ways become its most characteristic (and caricatured) elements. On these features, the work of historian Mark Noll is especially useful because it skillfully integrates both into a common explanatory framework that sheds much light on the theological culture of the antebellum United States and the debate over slavery.7 What the aforementioned theories of constitutional change add to this story is a chance to consider the mutually reinforcing relationship between these two impulses. If the theories hold true, the assertion of an active and expressive God—a providential sovereign ever at liberty to speak for itself—could sustain, reinforce, and even at times compel a restrictive reading of the sacred text, which might generate an even greater need to assert God's expressive capabilities, and thus the two impulses would feed on each other over time. Over the course of American religious history, liberal theologians sometimes chided their more conservative contemporaries that in their perceived bibliolatry they acted "as if God were dead," but these constitutional theories suggest that one source of their regulative fidelity to the historic text may have been that their God was still so very much alive.8 5
      By bringing together these constitutional concepts and this religious history, this essay seeks to better understand both. It also offers an altered perspective from which to view the Civil War's place in American religious history. In this view, the war served as a "scriptural moment," a phrase I have adapted from Bruce Ackerman's "constitutional moment," wherein the source of higher law inserted itself into the conversation with all the authority by which it originally handed down the foundational text. As Ackerman's work suggests, belief in such moments can offer an alluring recourse for those seeking to retain a firm commitment to a written higher law, and devotion to the sovereign source of that law, while responding to changing circumstance.9 Mark Noll, for one, has noted and lamented that antebellum Americans chose to let battlefield victories resolve the theological crisis over slavery rather than confront the hermeneutical narrowness that did so much to spawn the crisis in the first place; borrowing from constitutional theory, this essay pursues the internal logic of such a choice. Along the way, it considers why warfare may be more effective as a "scriptural moment" than other kinds of human experiences. 6
   

Sovereigns Silent and Unbound

 
The circumstantial evidence for a relationship between actively expressive sovereigns and strict applications of the text is suggestive. English non-conformists, who have been characterized as the "hotter sort" of providentialists, were also the creators of a "regulative" approach to worship—arguably the Reformation's most constrained mode of scriptural application.10 While it is difficult to establish a clear causal link between these two religious inclinations, they do suspiciously seem to keep the same company. 7
      Some of the features of that relationship have at times appeared more clearly, as in the winter of 1845 when two devoted Baptists—South Carolina's Richard Fuller and Rhode Island's Francis Wayland—exchanged a series of letters on slavery. In the course of this exchange Wayland, then serving as president of Brown University, explicitly demonstrated a causal connection between an aura of unamendability and the appeal of loose construction. He began by challenging Fuller's claim that the Old Testament proved the propriety of American slavery. Unlike such noted abolitionist authors as Theodore Dwight Weld, Wayland refused to interpret away the obvious presence of slavery among God's ancient chosen people; no honest reading of the text, Wayland held, could deny "so plain a matter of record." Where he differed with Fuller was on the assumption that "[w]hatever God sanctions to any men at any time he sanctions to all men at all times." Wayland insisted that both reason and scripture refuted that premise; rather, they confirmed the notion that "God reveals his will in different degrees, at different times, and to different people." This principle of progressive revelation—the power of divine amendment—allowed Wayland to accommodate change while retaining a relatively simple reading of the text. His concluding thoughts on the Old Testament suggested his inclination toward aspirational rather than strict constructions—in part because he held God's ultimate moral law to be essentially unamendable—but his belief in the amendability of the Hebrew scripture meant that he did not have to belabor complicated questions of interpretation. The New Testament—as the final amendment to God's Word—was another matter entirely for Wayland. It was precisely because the New Testament was designed to cap the canon, to complete the law for "the whole race ... for all time," that it demanded more liberal modes of interpretation. In order to apply to all future circumstances, the text should be read more for principle than precept and its obvious aspirations for equity and charity should serve as the guiding interpretive lights. At that point in the biblical story when the era of divine amendment had passed, Wayland's mechanism of legitimate change necessarily became a more supple and sophisticated reading of the scripture.11 His reasoning suggests the contours of the relationship between expressive sovereigns and applied texts. 8
      In contrast to constitutionalism, any silence by the Bible's author must always be voluntary. God's omnipotence meant that if he had wanted to say more he certainly could have. The mechanisms of clarifying amendment were, in that sense, always easy. The undeniable expressive ability of the sovereign lent particular potency to arguments from silence, a fact of which abolitionists took full advantage. As one anonymously authored pamphlet put it, "If the Israelites held slaves, they had a warrant from the true owner [God]. When the American slaveholder produces such a warrant for slaveholding, all will admit his claims." If southerners loosely applied the ancient rights to their own situation because they assumed God had spoken on the subject of slavery once and for all, the abolitionists' counterarguments implicitly invoked a deity capable of much more discretion and therefore a historical text of much more limited meaning. The rhetoric of such arguments—made by a number of disputants, including Francis Wayland—rarely makes it clear whether they meant God should speak today to warrant American slavery, or whether they meant the foresight of God could have placed such warrants in the ancient canon, but the sense could clearly drift in the direction of the former. As Vermont's Starksborough and Lincoln Anti-Slavery Society put it, "When the slave-holders of the present day have obtained of the same Author of Rights a license to deal in the bodies and souls of men, then, and not till then, will we admit any comparison of Hebrew bondage with American slavery."12 The sovereign's continuing presence, the unavoidable and voluntarily unused ability to speak beyond the explicit meanings of the text, served to restrict that text's acceptable elasticity. In this way it was the abolitionists—at least when they were emphasizing that God's decrees could change over time and place—who insisted on the narrower application of biblical verses. 9
      One proslavery response to that argument was simply to declare that God's laws never fundamentally changed, and therefore once the principle of slavery had been established moderns could stretch it to cover their particular circumstances. Throughout the debate, God's essential unchangeableness sat in tension with heaven's ongoing expressive powers. If appeals to the former paved the way for more elastic applications of the Bible, the latter worked against such. In tacit recognition of the power of the abolitionists' arguments about mutable laws and restrictive applications, slavery's apologists invoked the modern messages of providence—contemporary signs from a living God that heaven approved of their peculiar institution— to provide the ongoing "special warrants" their opponents demanded. That so many benighted Africans had found the light of the gospel in the New World strongly implied a divine endorsement of American slavery.13 Such invocations of "providence as revelation," which were often discouraged but frequently practiced in the Reformed tradition, suggest an impulse to evade the undesired consequences of inelastic hermeneutics not by developing a looser interpretive norm but by adjusting the standard of what constituted an authentic statement from the sovereign.14 10
   

Precedents of Change

 
As outraged abolitionists tried to infer the outright sin of slavery—a malum in se—from scriptural material, and panicked Southerners attempted to make particular ancient allowances of slavery fit their distinct labor system, both sides were vulnerable to claims of textual manipulation. And yet, because they confronted the status quo, the onus of change fell largely to the opponents of slavery. In making that change—while essaying to avoid an unchristian condemnation of the pious men and women who preceded them—some invoked Acts 17:30: "And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent," a verse that provided for a wide range of changes within the church, while excusing the Christian tradition of past sins, by placing a continually "commanding" God directly in charge of a progressive process.15 In recognizing the mutability of commandments, some critics of slavery demonstrated an awareness of the analogical relationship between their holy scripture and their political constitution. As one nineteenth-century commentator observed,
I do not believe that our glorious Constitution is "an agreement with death and a covenant with hell" because it tolerates slavery, any more than I believe God is in league with Satan because in the old dispensation he tolerated slavery, and polygamy, and concubinage, and divorce at will. This Constitution [the Bible] was not only susceptible of progress and amendment, but was amended by the Gospel. So is the Constitution of the United States susceptible of progress and amendment.16
 The most obvious examples of the U.S. Constitution's amendability lay with its primary author, James Madison, whose relatively frequent recourse to formal amendment and professed devotion to strict construction bear a striking resemblance to the constitutional logic employed here (even if not quite so striking as those of his less cautious friend Thomas Jefferson).17 As with the Constitution there was a tradition of formal change in the formation of the Christian Bible; Jesus Christ instituted a new era not by loosely interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures (indeed, he condemned those who "wrested" them) but by explicitly and authentically adding to them in ways that—in the judgment of Jaroslav Pelikan—resemble Madison's amendments to the original Constitution. In this sense, amendment need not connote a fundamental change lying outside the possible meanings of the text, but a clarification and fulfillment of the sovereign's will through a new interjection by the text's authorial source.18		 11
      These amendatory implications of the Christian scriptures were only enhanced by passages in the Gospel of John, wherein Jesus promised his disciples a spirit that "shall teach you all things." For unorthodox figures ranging from the second-century Montanists to Ralph Waldo Emerson, this was the Bible's Article V. In part because of the disintegrating potential of such figures, commitment to a closed canon prevailed in both Protestant and Catholic Christendom. But the persistent claim to new revelation throughout Christian history, a claim that hit a fever pitch in the antebellum United States, continually dredged up the amendatory precedents that lay in Christianity's past.19 Even when the canon was closed, the Christian God retained the prerogatives of expression; as Martin Luther had noted, the faithful cannot "be forced to recognize any authority beyond the sacred scripture ... unless, indeed, there comes a new and attested revelation."20 According to the theories of constitutional change employed here, if the amendatory origins of Christianity really did establish an unavoidable precedent of divine amendment, it might manifest in generally narrower modes of scriptural interpretation. Noam J. Zohar has argued that the extraordinary sense of sacred immutability with which Jewish tradition held the ancient law—a tradition in which God himself was explicitly prohibited from legal tampering—was directly related to the development of midrashic interpretation, a mode of creative scriptural reading unparalleled in Christianity.21 However apt such comparisons may or may not be, it is clear that the amendatory nature of the New Testament was an appealing recourse to those who called for change. 12
      In a poem published by the Anti-Slavery Standard in 1849, James Russell Lowell irritably exploited the notion that the difference between symbolic Jews and true Christians was that the latter had been more open to God's amendatory dispensations.
... Yea, what art thou, blind, unconverted
     Jew,
That with thy idol-volume's covers two
Wouldst make a jail to coop the living
     God? ...

God is not dumb, that He should speak no
     more;
If thou hast wanderings in the wilder-
     ness
And find'st not Sinai, 't is thy soul is poor ...

Slowly the Bible of the race is writ,
And not on paper leaves nor leaves of stone;
Each age, each kindred, adds a verse to it ...

... Still at the prophets' feet the nations sit.22
 An unmistakable affinity appeared between the anti-slavery movement and theologies that explicitly listened for God's ongoing declarations. Such theologies often necessitated efforts, like Lowell's, to reconceptualize what such a sovereign statement would look like: "not on paper leaves nor leaves of stone." Likewise the The New Englander hoped slaveholders would hear "with trembling the voice of God speaking to them through the moral sentiment of the world."23 The Hicksite Quaker Lucretia Mott explained her method for getting around the strict American exegesis that constantly sought to thwart her reform efforts, including temperance, women's rights, and antislavery: "I am not troubled with difficulties about the Bible. My education has been such, that I look to the Source whence all the inspiration of the Bible comes."24 The benefits of such an "education" seem to be one of the reasons why the Society of Friends proved so prominent in the history of American abolitionism.		 13
      The Quaker tradition, however, presents a very difficult case in which to locate the hermeneutical dynamic under consideration. Early Quakers have been characterized as extraordinarily strict constructionists on some scriptural provisions and exceptionally open to ongoing inspiration—a combination of restricted interpretations and expressive sovereignty that hints at harmony with the constitutional concepts employed here. And yet, overall, the Quakers present more interpretive complexity—and, according to William Frost, "inconsistencies"—than can be tamed and explained by any simple theoretical construct.25 In the antebellum era such complexity was not hard to find; the prominent theologian Horace Bushnell, for one, embraced both creative readings of the text and the possibility of new revelations from God.26 The logic of constitutional change is clearly ill-equipped to handle certain complicated theological notions, such as the concept of "inspired interpretation," which effectively collapsed the crucial distinction between speaking sovereign and written text on which such logic rests. In short, this period of religious history provides ample reason for historians to avoid simplistic, ahistorical theories that depend on rational consistency. And yet it must be noted that, in keeping with the constitutional logic, when people wanted to justify a stricter application of scripture—whether abolitionists checking those who would stretch God's ancient permissions across time and space, or defenders of slavery guarding against the discovery of "implied" commands in the Bible—the notion of a God who could still speak for himself proved undeniably useful. In a variety of ways the constitutional analog does help bring some clarity to important elements of this tangled religious story, including those that wound around the noted abolitionist Theodore Parker. 14
      Parker was among the most visible biblical critics and abolitionists of his day and one who loudly proclaimed the need for an open religious canon. How is it possible, according to the logic of constitutional change, that Parker could emphasize both an ever amending canon and the era's most advanced tools of textual criticism? Such a question is answered in part by noting that Parker—like his older and more poetic associate, Emerson—did not believe the true law ever changed; the biblical text merely approximated it as best it could in its time and place. In Parker's terms, the law was "permanent" and the text was "transient." Continuing revelation in this sense did not mean that God unfolded new divine decrees but that humans at times gained a clearer vision of an eternally unchanging Truth. As one might predict, the presence of an unamendable law—like the natural law that sits above and beyond an approximating constitution—encouraged the pursuit of interpretive sophistication.27 15
      But Parker also simultaneously demonstrated how his open-canon theology could help preserve a relatively straightforward reading of the extant text. "Paul had not his eye open to the evil, but sent back a fugitive," Parker wrote in a treatise designed to support a theology of ongoing revelation.28 Here Parker seemed to endorse the ways the literalist defenders of slavery read the text; the difference was that Parker called for the emergence of modern-day Pauls who could provide an amended version of the humanly articulated law. By lowering the standard of amendment to a natural, universally accessible sort of inspiration, Parker obviated the need for real hermeneutical suppleness. For all its heretical implications, in some sense an appeal to an endlessly expressive sovereign proved more palatable than an endlessly elastic text. In this appeal, Parker's biblical criticism served a vital function. Such criticism was used not so much to reinterpret the canon as to break it wide open. "Biblical Criticism," he wrote, "shows that inspiration is not limited to the Old Testament and New Testament." To say—as biblical criticism did—that the ancient Hebrew authors of scripture were not immune to environmental influence or other imperfection was to place the standard of scripture at a level moderns could hope to match while simultaneously demonstrating the need for such modern amendments.29 In saying this Parker was accused by conservatives of exemplifying a phenomenon modern constitutional theory has predicted (and of which Madison had famously warned): to wit, to make the foundation text more easily amendable is to run the risk of depriving it of its constitutional character, of making of it little more than an ordinary statute and then of abandoning it all together.30 To make amendment too easy may be to undermine the entire constitutional order. The most stable constitutional regimes, Donald Lutz has argued, maintain a more restrained amendment rate.31 16
      Few religious groups demonstrated the implications of the constitutional logic more conspicuously than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In this culture, a positive relationship between amendability and resistance to mere interpretive change is particularly apparent. Early Mormons have been characterized as both antislavery and antiabolitionist, a position that mirrored more than it resolved the complexities of the biblical teachings on the topic; but, when spoken in the voice of a living prophet, that ambiguity seemed to come with its own distinctive brand of contemporary clarity.32 The prophet Brigham Young used his office to declare both that Africans labored under an ancestral curse of God and that American whites would be punished for their ungodly treatment of them.33 In his earliest recorded articulation of this curse, Young revealed much about his theology:
Now then in the kingdom of God on the earth, a man who has has [sic] the Affrican blood in him cannot hold one jot nor tittle of priesthood; Why? because they are the true, eternal principals the Lord Almighty has ordained, and who can help it, men cannot, the angels cannot, and all the powers of earth and hell cannot take it off, but thus saith the Eternal I am, what I am, I take it off at my pleasure, and not one partical of power can that posterity of Cain have, until the time comes he says he will have [the curse] taken away. That time will come when they will have the privilege of all we have the privilege of, and more.34
 Young emphasized here a conception of ongoing expressive sovereignty that simultaneously reinforced the binding nature of the curse and declared its inherent mutability. Mormons retained notions of Africans' ancestral curse longer than many other American believers who considered the matter an issue of textual interpretation, but Mormons were also commanded to instantaneously drop such notions whenYoung's successors declared that God had abolished the curse and enshrined the equality of all God's children. Later Mormons were thus held to a wholly different law than that which bound their parents.35 In its resistance to the press of cultural change and its unapologetic openness to entirely new policies—and in the lack of any sense of contradiction between the two—the history of Mormonism demonstrates both the very conservative and the potentially radical implications of a sovereign who explicitly retained the right to speak again. Only that sovereign could change anything, but that sovereign could change everything.		 17
      The religious application of this logic may have proved especially prominent on the prophetic margins of American religious culture, but it also appeared in places closer to the mainstream. While some intransigent defenders of slavery claimed that God's biblical endorsement of slavery would last forever, others recognized that the ugly institution could hardly be a part of a perfect millennial order. They opposed radical abolition on the grounds that only the sovereign had the right to declare when that time for slavery's removal had come.36 God's inherent expressive power to directly decree slavery's abolition served as a check on those who would preemptively effect that change through loose scriptural readings. The Alabama preacher Frederick A. Ross's Slavery Ordained of God insisted that slavery would "continue for the good of the slave, the good of the master, and the good of the whole American family, until another and better destiny be unfolded" when it will "pass away in the fullness of Providence." Tellingly, this conception of a God capable of effecting change was textually intertwined with Ross's strict reading of scripture, which prevented abolitionists from finding an implied condemnation of slavery in the Bible.37 Some of the same logic appeared in The Sable Cloud, the Boston Congregationalist Nehemiah Adams's fictional apology for slavery. This rather idiosyncratic novel used a strict construction of the biblical text to reject the inference of the inherent sinfulness of slavery. But to justify the specific enslavement of a single race by the American South, it turned to the special messages that providence seemed to continually convey. This combination of a restricted historical text and an actively expressive sovereign could be put to very conservative purposes: That Africans "are now under a curse, and have been so for centuries, is apparent," some of Adams's most sympathetic characters agreed. "When the curse is to be repealed, God only knows," but no "believer in revelation and divine providence" can deny that such a curse may last "for long ages to come." When heaven's tutoring of the race had been "accomplished, the providence of God will, in some way, make it known."38 Adams's novel argues much of the same theology as that expressed by Young, with providence serving as Adams's prophet. 18
      On all sides of this controversy, then, there were participants in the debate over slavery conveying the sense that God could "in some way" continue to make his will known on matters of contemporary importance. Whether through the abolitionists' natural revelationism or proslavery providentialism, American religious culture harbored deeply entrenched assumptions about a God still active and expressive. At the same time, this culture seemed uniquely unable to produce a hermeneutical principle that would lift the debate out of the restricting textual legalisms in which it was increasingly mired. Theories of constitutional change suggest that those two phenomena are not unrelated, that they are in fact mutually reinforcing. Long before the war erupted, numerous Americans of all theological stripes sought to resolve the sectional crisis not by rereading the text but by adjusting the standard of what constituted a clarifying statement from a speaking God. They wanted scriptural moments. 19
      But those alternative modes of higher lawmaking did not achieve the widespread respect of the faithful. The eminent scholar of religion Wilfred Cantwell Smith has observed that canonicity is a function of community; a text becomes authoritative not because of its intrinsic quality but because the canonical community deems it so. In this sense, canonicity, in scripture no less than constitutionalism, is a product of perception.39 As Luther had observed, beyond the standard books of the scripture, nothing new had a claim to canonical status among Protestant Christians save an "attested revelation." The constitutional analog may be George Washington's suggestion that alterations to the constitution must come through the "explicit and authentic act of the whole people."40 The fact of the matter is that neither the abolitionist's natural revelationism nor the proslavery providences achieved the standard of attestation and authenticity that this canonical community required, and therefore the controversy raged on. Abraham Lincoln suggested that the conflict was fueled by the fact that God "gives no audible answer to the question."41 Only in this context does the full theological impact of the American Civil War become clear. During the war much of this community—including Lincoln—believed they heard the sovereign speaking again. Offering both attestation and authenticity, the war provided a scriptural moment. 20
   

The Voice of War

 
This would not be the first time war had supplemented scripture. In seventeenth-century Britain, when Cromwellian revolutionaries had to circumvent scriptural injunctions to "obey the powers that be" in order to pursue their violent campaign against the king, their leader admonished them to read the superseding messages provided by providence. A revolution waged partially in the name of strict scriptural fidelity could proceed to an ostensibly antiscriptural regicide because the Author of scripture appeared to offer a timely—and very public—countermand. The power of battlefield providences to clarify God's will at a moment of exegetical impasse was demonstrated by John Milton, who insisted that justice and wartime victories afforded "the only warrants through all ages, next under immediat Revelation, to exercise supream power." Military victory "equal to what hath been don in any age or Nation" offered the next best thing to immediate revelation in providing the justification for actions "above the form of Law or Custom." In that sense, war held the potential to become a divine sanction for itself.42 21
      It is worth considering why war, to borrow from Milton, would be most like new revelation from the sovereign God. One answer is implied in Milton's very invocation of it. War offered Milton a common point of reference, shared by his whole audience, to which he could appeal. A century later it promised the same to George Washington at a time when the cause of the American patriots was seen as not only politically innovative but religiously controversial; in the latter half of the eighteenth century, a series of providentially interpreted wars helped enshrine republicanism as a largely unquestioned article of the American Christian's faith.43 And it likewise provided immense evidentiary possibilities to nineteenth-century American authors who wanted to use the manifest events of the Civil War as a justification for a policy change on slavery. War served as the source of Lincoln's providential justification to his cabinet for the Emancipation Proclamation and the text from which his second inaugural sermon would proceed.44 It even functioned as a crucial source of theological authority as United States senators battled for the Thirteenth Amendment against opponents quoting scripture; Maryland's John A. J. Cresswell defended the amendment in terms that suggest the revelatory value "to all men" of such an event: "Out of the hard discipline of civil war, [God] has evoked and made intelligible to all men a thought divine, which will ever serve as a guiding inspiration for the nation...."45 And, of course, the religious press used it as the source of "new ideas" from God that all should "cheerfully receive and adopt."46 22
      The religious authority of the war is set in sharpest relief when compared to the intuitive prophets that had spoken to the matter of slavery in the pre-war period. In Adams's Sable Cloud, in a fictionalized depiction of a debate over slavery in the early Christian church, a sympathetic character attacks the moral-sense revelationism of the abolitionists in the following terms: "'Every man's moral sentiments, it seems, are to be his guide. Where, then, is our common appeal?' ... if God be our heavenly Father, he has given his children an authentic book, a writing, for their guide, unless he prefers to speak personally with them, or with their representatives."47 This lack of common appeal—a communal authority—appeared as the Achilles' heel of movements that would find their scriptural moments in individual hearts. It seemed to do little good to alter the terms of attested revelation if the canonical community was both devalued by, and refused to recognize, the new definition.48 23
      As a religious authority, moral sentiment had the great advantage of rapidly responding to changing circumstances, but the trade-off was an individualization of religious expression that offered little by way of "common appeal" and could therefore seem at odds with the coercive force it would take to uproot an intransigent slave power. As if in direct response to this conundrum, antislavery activists at times adopted a rhetorical posture that made them look more like commanding biblical prophets than moral-sense exemplars. Just as the mechanisms of constitutional amendment were designed to give subsequent statements an authoritative aura comparable to the original text, prophetic performance offered the same to antislavery protestors. They were as Moses and Paul. The white abolitionist Gerrit Smith seems to have given in to his prophetic inclinations, as did the black nationalist Robert Alexander Young.49 Contemporaries accused William Lloyd Garrison of similar presumption.50 In fiction, Harriet Beecher Stowe followed what was arguably the most effective use of moral sentiment against slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin, with Dred, the story of a wild prophet who spoke with the revelations of God in his mouth and who attacked the slave system with a sort of energy and effect unmatched by the conscience-focused characters around him. Stowe's title character rapidly shifted from the meekly moral Tom to the violently revelatory Dred. This symbolic motion from individual conscience to autocratic prophet-hood seems to reflect a sense of need for additional statements of God that looked, in short, more like the text they sought to amend.51 24
      But, again, such authority was much more readily claimed than recognized. "By what well authenticated mission," asked one writer, did Parker and Beecher "assume the office of inspiration" and offer "the solemn denunciations of prophecy?"52 When a committee of ministers gathered in Chicago to condemn the Kansas-Nebraska bill, apparently "in the name of Almighty God," Stephen A. Douglas charged them with falsely assuming a prophet's prerogative and thereby implying that others must "yield their judgments ... and their consciences" to the decisions of this clerical guild. The energy and insistence with which Douglas repeatedly pressed this point suggested his confidence in the theological ground on which he stood—a confidence that was apparently warranted, given the fact that the ministers' own congregations expressed similar concerns. If abolitionists would do away with the Constitution for the sake of being governed by God's higher laws, Douglas argued, they had an obligation then by revelation to replace the charter they had thus destroyed. But, he jabbed, "who is to be the prophet to reveal the will of God, and establish a theocracy for us?"53 The antebellum era offered some candidates, but none that appealed to the broad national community signified by Douglas's pronoun us, none that were in a position to add new pronouncements to the American canon. Massachusetts had no Moses. Neither, abolitionists had observed, did Mississippi. 25
      In the North, the war itself filled that prophetic void. Consider again the example of Theodore Parker. Parker's theology of continuing intuitive revelation seemed tailor-made to attack the scripture defense of slavery. One of his contemporary biographers, John Weiss, honored Parker for bringing to modern reform movements the same authority that empowered the Hebrew prophets.54 In 1874 another such biographer, O. B. Frothingham, printed a revealing letter that Parker had written to a friend three decades earlier after delivering a particularly bold condemnation of slavery at Faneuil Hall. The letter justified the brass of his language, which he excused by noting he "felt like a Hebrew prophet.... I did not think of such words: they came; and I thank God for it." Parker was channeling a sovereign statement, and therefore all things were possible. If friends in 1846 thought Parker had overstepped his bounds with such words, by 1874 Frothingham's judgment was very different. Commenting on the letter, he observed,
[T]he awful illuminations of the war have made the most fiery words look pale; and we do not wonder now at speech which twenty-five years ago seemed excessive, but which history has proved to have been prophetic. The speech which Providence has justified needs neither excuse nor concealment.
 In constitutional terms, we might say that Parker had drafted the amendment and Providence ratified it. The war here provides what Parker alone could not, a common appeal.55 For Northerners, the shared experience of the war offered exactly what the amendatory tradition required, an explicit and authentic statement from the sovereign. It was an attestation, a scriptural moment.		 26
      Frothingham was far from the only one who used the war as public proof of an antebellum prophet's foresight. Figures ranging from Harriet Beecher Stowe to the Mormons did likewise.56 So, too, did Union chaplain Stephen Alexander Hodgman in a work titled The Nation's Sin and Punishment (1864). Hodgman's prophet of choice was Thomas Jefferson. "He uttered prophetic words, when on one occasion, speaking of slavery, he said, 'I tremble for my country, when I remember that God is just!' If it was a prediction how fearfully it has been accomplished!" Even the predictions of the most celebrated men of the republic received relatively little honor until the God of history ratified the same message. The war provided an elusive sense of recognized authority for the whole community. Hodgman explicitly used that authority to demand the end of slavery.57 27
      Before the war, the conscientious Presbyterian Albert Barnes observed that no resolution to slavery could come from the messages of providence simply because people refused to give much weight to the antebellum signs of God's displeasure. Rather, the resolution had to come from the canonical scripture, "a standard which all will admit to have authority to determine great questions of morals."58 After the war, the Presbyterian Synod of the State of New York felt providence had "at length" provided a comparable standard, if not for morality then at least for duty. "[T]he time has at length come, in the providence of God," they declared "when it is His will that every vestige of human slavery among us should be effaced, and that every Christian man should address himself, with industry and earnestness, to his appropriate part in the performance of this Great duty." Some complained that this constituted an illicit reconceptualization of what might qualify as an explicit and authentic act of a sovereign God; and some were reluctant to find any divine meaning in such a brutal affair; but such arguments were easily overwhelmed in this instance.59 The sheer magnitude and difficulty of the event seemed to raise its legitimacy as a scriptural moment. In Julia Ward Howe's iconic hymn, she saw "a fiery Gospel writ in ... steel." Surely in a national community of increasing intellectual heterogeneity not everyone saw new gospels written by the war, but there was a sense that when confronted with "multitudinous remembered dead" even people who had been "most indifferent" to religion began "to hold to a realizing conviction that God does direct the affairs of nations by His special providences."60 Looking back on the war in the fall of 1865, The New Englander insisted that not since the times of the children of Israel or the days of the early Apostles had there been a "people to whom [God] has revealed Himself so palpably as to us."61 If the point of a difficult amendment process is to invest the amendments with comparable majesty to that of the original founding moments, this war seemed to have special amendatory potential. 28
      It certainly did for Stephen Hodgman, who had opposed the abolitionists on strict exegetical grounds but became a loud proponent of abolition during the war. In the pre-war days, Hodgman's understanding of the Bible prevented him from siding with those who inferred a malum in se in the text, nor could he accept the claim of those proslavery theologians who found a universal endorsement of slavery in that text. On the question of what was to be done with American slavery, Hodgman harbored a belief in a providentially active God and was unable to stretch the text in either abolitionist or proslavery directions. But then God spoke again. Writing after Bull Run and Antietam and Gettysburg, Hodgman used the war precisely the way he might have done a new bit of scripture handed down from heaven. He knew his whole audience was aware of the living chapter and verse he now cited. As amendments do in constitutionalism, this interjection by the sovereign fundamentally clarified the Christian's contemporary duty without adding to the essential elasticity of the ancient text. Hodgman used the war to declare God's condemnation of the South's peculiar institution while explicitly retaining the basic interpretive assumptions that had sustained his earlier antiabolitionist stance. Slavery, he insisted, was still not a malum in se. God's providential powers of expression, the unrestrained ability of the sovereign to speak for himself to modern circumstance, was far from incompatible with the strict interpretive principles upheld by so many American biblicists. Indeed, when viewed through the lens of contemporary constitutional theory they appear as rather predictable corollaries of one another.62 29
   

Epilogue

 
In its challenge to the abolitionist movement, The United States Democratic Review saw only two possible justifications for the claim that participation in slavery was a test of one's Christianity. Either slavery had always been a sin—in which case Jesus and Paul were "quite mistaken"—or the test of Christian character had since been "divinely altered."63 The demand to put the sovereign in charge of change, the suggestion that this was the only legitimate way both to respond to new circumstance and retain a meaningful commitment to the fundamental law, has repeatedly manifest itself in American history. It is quite apparent why the forces of conservatism would want to impose such a high standard on the processes of change, but those fighting for reform and progress have often shown no less commitment to this concept. 30
      In more recent times, in a deeply painful debate over the ordination of a homosexual bishop that bore striking similarities to earlier controversies over the sinfulness of slavery, members of the Episcopal Church USA who favored a change on the longstanding ecclesiastical exclusion of gay clergy principally rested their case not on new interpretations of scripture but on the ongoing revelations from God received in the aggregated hearts of the faithful. For now, the claim that such a revelation could supersede those in the canonical text is only widening the gap between the orthodox and liberalizing factions of the church, as the same claim did among nineteenth-century believers until the "divine actor" so conspicuously appeared on the stage of history in ways recognized alike by northern liberals and northern conservatives.64 Certainly many—especially Southerners—disagreed with such interpretations of the war (scriptural moments are no less subject to alternative construction than the scriptures themselves) but like the constitutional moments proposed by Bruce Ackerman, such massive providential phenomena had the advantage of presenting residual dissenters with a structural fait accompli. In any event, war—community wide and deeply wrenching—seems to have had a claim on canonicity that very little else had been able to muster in the notoriously atomized culture of the United States. One can alter the definition of amendment, but there appears no getting around the fact that if it does not reach the level of magnitude and majesty that gave the charter document its cultural power in the first place, such amendments will fail to push past the debate. Without a moment of recognizable attestation and authenticity, amendatory revelation seems more divisive than decisive. 31
      If modern theorists of constitutional change—who propose that belief in a sovereign that can still speak works against elastic interpretation, obliging appeals directly back to the sovereign—help us understand more fully the dynamics of American religious debate, the history of American religious debate may also help us understand more fully the strategies of modern theorists of constitutional change. Like the religious providentialism of the Civil War era, recent theoretical work has sought to legitimate substantive changes to the constitutional order not through subtle interpretive principles but by altering our very conception of what constitutes an amendatory "moment."65 A relatively new phenomenon in constitutional studies, such a strategic move actually has a long pedigree in a community struggling to deal with the logical imperatives of its professed devotion to living sovereigns and binding texts. 32


David F. Holland is an assistant professor in the History Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas <david.holland@unlv.edu>. He thanks the participants of the Law, War, and History Conference, whose insights have fundamentally improved this essay; he also extends his thanks to colleagues at UNLV, who entertained the first expression of these ideas at the History Department's faculty research seminar; to the anonymous reviewers of the LHR for their generosity and wisdom; to UNLV's College of Liberal Arts, whose research funds allowed him to work in the National Archives and the Library of Congress; to Brad Hays, whose early guidance into the literature of constitutional theory proved invaluable; and finally—and especially—to the LHR's editor and his cherished colleague, David Tanenhaus.


Notes

1.  Donald S. Lutz has offered the clearest articulation of this logic in "Toward a Theory of Constitutional Amendment," in Responding to Imperfection: The Theory and Practice of Constitutional Amendment, ed. Sanford Levinson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 237–74. A logic that Lutz presents as a hypothesis, others employ as assumption. On the informal constitutional construction by the political branches, consider Michael Besso, "Constitutional Amendment Procedures and the Informal Political Construction of Constitutions," The Journal of Politics 67 (2005): 84. On the logic of the courts, consider David A. Strauss, "The Irrelevance of Constitutional Amendments," Harvard Law Review 114 (2001): 1461. A comment such as Strauss's is particularly relevant to this essay. In the course of arguing that amendments are "irrelevant," it notes that the mere possibility of amendment creates limits on how loosely the supreme interpreters of the Constitution are willing to apply the text.

2.  Mark Noll has analyzed both the textual hermeneutic and providentialism of this story in a series of recent works: "The Bible and Slavery," in Religion and the American Civil War, ed. Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 43–73; America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 386–438; and The Civil War as Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006). For additional discussions of the biblical debates over slavery, see J. Albert Harrill, "The Use of the New Testament in the American Slave Controversy: A Case History in the Hermeneutical Tension between Biblical Criticism and Christian Moral Debate," Religion and American Culture 10 (2000): 149–86; E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 494–504. For a treatment of the prominent place of providentialism during the war, see Peter J. Parish, "The Instruments of Providence: Slavery, Civil War and the American Churches," in The Church and War, ed. W. J. Sheils, Studies in Church History, 20 (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1983), 291–320. Though he places his explanatory emphasis on anti-southern animus rather than the religious reasoning discussed here, no one has provided a better general treatment of the abrupt wartime shift of the northern churches on the matter of slavery than John R. McKivigan, The War against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). For a superb analysis of one denomination's engagement with these matters, see Donald G. Jones, The Sectional Crisis and Northern Methodism: A Study in Piety, Political Ethics and Civil Religion (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1979), esp. chap. 4, "Providence and Historical Interpretation," 58–107.

3.  Jaroslav Pelikan, Interpreting the Bible and the Constitution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Thomas C. Grey, "The Constitution as Scripture," Stanford Law Review 37 (1984):1–25; Sanford Levinson, Constitutional Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 9–53 and passim. For a more general observation, typical of historians, see Joyce Appleby, "The American Heritage: The Heirs and the Disinherited," Journal of American History 74 (December 1987): 809.

4.  Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1988).

5.  Consider the evidence from no less stable a pillar of American religious culture than the Presbyterian General Assembly, which considered the matter in a lengthy discussion containing such observations as, "any or all [commandments] may be set aside by him in whose hands are all his creatures." "The General Assembly of 1842," The Princeton Review 14 (July 1842): 517 http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moajrnl;idno=acf4325.1-14.003 (12 Nov. 2007). For a splendid encapsulation of this mentality, albeit from an earlier period, see David D. Hall, "The Mental World of Samuel Sewall," in Saints and Revolutionaries, ed. David D. Hall, John M. Murrin, and Thad W. Tate (New York: Norton, 1984), 85.

6.  On American biblicism, see Nathan O. Hatch, "Sola Scriptura and Novus Ordo Seclorum," in The Bible in America, ed. Mark A. Noll and Nathan O. Hatch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 59–78. On the matter of providence in early American life there have been a number of very valuable works, including John F. Berens, Providence and Patriotism in Early America, 1640–1815 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978) and Nicholas Guyatt, "'The Peculiar Smiles of Heaven': Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1865" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2003) http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=765020781&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=17675&RQT=309&VName=PQD (12 Nov. 2007).

7.  Noll, America's God, 386–438; Noll, The Civil War as Theological Crisis, 31–94.

8.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, An Address Delivered to the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge (Boston: Munroe, 1838), 16.

9.  Bruce Ackerman, We the People, vol. 2, Transformations (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap, 1998).

10.  Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), quoted at 2; Noll, America's God, 377.

11.  Richard Fuller and Francis Wayland, Domestic Slavery Considered as a Scriptural Institution (New York, 1845), 13–125. For a contrasting view, compare Theodore Dwight Weld, The Bible against Slavery (1837).

12.  A Tennessean, The Bible Gives No Sanction to Slavery (n.d.), 10 http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=AEU2037.0001.001 (12 Nov. 2007); Fuller and Wayland, Domestic Slavery, 51; William C. Wisner, "The Biblical Argument on Slavery," The American Biblical Repository 11 (April 1844): 328–35 http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=69993948&sid=2&Fmt=1&clientId=17675&RQT=309&VName=HNP; [Stephen A. Hodgman], The Nation's Sin and Punishment; or, The Hand of God Visible in the Overthrow of Slavery (New York, 1864), 31; Caroline L. Shanks, "The Biblical Anti-Slavery Argument of the Decade 1830–1840," The Journal of Negro History 16 (April 1931), quoted at 139–40 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-2992%28193104%2916%3A2%3C132%3ATBAAOT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-S (12 Nov. 2007).

13.  While one might expect such arguments from the South, their prevalence in the North is quite striking. See, for instance, John Henry Hopkins, A Scriptural, Ecclesiastical and Historical View of Slavery (New York: Pooley, 1864), 315 http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=ABT7253.0001.001 (12 Nov. 2007); Joseph C. Stiles, Modern Reform Examined (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1857), 20 http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=ABJ1692.0001.001 (12 Nov. 2007); Nehemiah Adams, The Sable Cloud. A Southern Tale with Northern Comments (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1861), 77–83, 107–8, 117, 136–140, 152–53, passim http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=ABA7995.0001.001 (12 Nov. 2007). Adams's apologetic work of fiction explicitly conveys the same sentiment, that modern enslavement would require its own tokens of divine approval, and then goes on to convey the impression that God "evidently appointed" the South to its own providential project in regard to the slaves. For a southern example, see The Proslavery Argument as Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the Southern States (Charleston: Walker, Richards, 1852), 16–17 http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=ABT7488.0001.001 (12 Nov. 2007); for ways in which providence generally figured into the proslavery mindset, see John Patrick Daly, When Slavery Was Called Freedom (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002), 11, 15–20, 23, 25–26, 40, 63, 92, 99–100, 108–9, 123, 138.

14.  Ronald J. VanderMolen, "Providence as Mystery, Providence as Revelation: Puritan and Anglican Modifications of John Calvin's Doctrine of Providence," Church History 47 (March 1978): 27–47; Michael P. Winship's Seers of God: Puritan Providentialism in the Restoration and Early Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 11–15, 20–27.

15.  See, for instance, Wisner, "The Biblical Argument on Slavery," 336–37 and The Debates of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Maryland (Annapolis: Richard P. Bayly, 1864), 630 http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=AEW7572.0001.001 (12 Nov. 2007). See also, Iota, "Habit vs. Right," Christian Union, June 25, 1870, 406 http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=704920012&sid=2&Fmt=2&clientId=17675&RQT=309&VName=HNP (12 Nov. 2007), in which the church's changing views on slavery and alcohol are compared. Perhaps most poignantly, Jonathan Edwards, Jr., used this verse to understand the slaveholding of his own pious progenitors. See Kenneth P. Minkema and Harry S. Stout, "The Edwardsean Tradition and the Antislavery Debate, 1740–1865, The Journal of American History 92 (June 2005): 57–58. Tellingly, where the elder Edwards had used this verse to explain the New Testament's relation to the Old, his son invoked it to explain contemporary changes within the American church.

16.  W. P Strickland, "Loyalty to Government," Christian Advocate and Journal, 15 Jan. 1863, 18 http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=852468002&sid=2&Fmt=2&clientId=17675&RQT=309&VName=HNP (12 Nov. 2007). For a similar argument, see "Discussion of Slavery in Congress," Christian Inquirer, 8 Jan. 1848, 50 http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=846942052&sid=4&Fmt=2&clientId=17675&RQT=309&VName=HNP (12 Nov. 2007). This practice of seeing constitutional parallels in the Bible had a long history in the United States. See "K" [Benjamin Franklin] to the Editor, in The Federal Gazzette, April 8, 1788, printed in Bernard Bailyn, ed., The Debate on the Constitution : Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification (New York: Library of America, 1993), 2:404.

17.  David E. Kyvig, Explicit and Authentic Acts: Amending the U.S. Constitution, 1776–1995 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1996), 128–31; Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 328–31. In terms of the self-reinforcing relationship proposed here, it is worth noting that Jefferson was both more eager to appeal to the People on constitutional matters and more committed to a strict construction of the text. That Jefferson and Madison seemed to downplay these principles when their political interests were at stake—most notably in the case of the Louisiana Purchase—confirms the notion that interpretive principles can be invoked and abandoned in purely instrumental ways, which is one of the reasons why most constitutional theory sits only imperfectly on the actually messiness of history. However, that does not mean that such theory has no historical impact. On this point one might consider the reflections of Jack N. Rakove in "The Super-Legality of the Constitution, or, a Federalist Critique of Bruce Ackerman's Neo-Federalism," The Yale Law Journal 108 (June 1999): 1931–32.

18.  Pelikan, Interpreting the Bible and the Constitution, 13–14.

19.  Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development and Significance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 100–106; Adolph von Harnack, The Origin of the New Testament and the Most Important Consequences of the New Creation (London: Williams and Norgate, 1925), 35–38; Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Columbia: The University of Missouri Press, 1980–), 4:209–13; R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 29.

20.  James Mackinnon, Luther and the Reformation (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 4:296. This same notion was repeated by no less prominent an early American theologian than Samuel Willard in A Compleat Body of Divinity in Two Hundred and Fifty Expository Lectures (Boston, 1726), 22 http://docs.newsbank.com/openurl?ctx_ver=z39.88-2004&rft_id=info:sid/iw.newsbank.com:EVAN&rft_val_format=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:ctx&rft_dat=0F301AA0545A7300&svc_dat=Evans:eaidoc&req_dat=0BB295CEAF424306BCADA379D413C8A3 (12 Nov. 2007).

21.  Noam J. Zohar, "Midrash: Amendment through the Molding of Meaning," in Responding to Imperfection, ed. Levinson, 307–18.

22.  James Russell Lowell, "Bibliolatres," in The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 99; for publication information, see Bibliography of James Russell Lowell, comp. George Willis Cooke (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), 11.

23.  "Shall We Vote to Perpetuate Slavery?" New Englander 2 (October 1844): 594 http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=454635022&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=17675&RQT=309&VName=HNP (12 Nov. 2007).

24.  Lucretia Mott, "Remarks, Delivered at the National Women's Rights Convention," Cleveland, Ohio, October 5–7, 1853, in Lucretia Mott, Her Complete Sermons and Speeches (New York: E. Mellen Press,1980), 224; for a discussion of Mott's position on these matters, see Nancy A Hardesty, Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: Revivalism and Feminism in the Age of Finney (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1991), 76–78.

25.  J. William Frost, "The Dry Bones of Quaker Theology," Church History 39 (Dec. 1970): 519–23 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0009-6407%28197012%2939%3A4%3C503%3ATDBOQT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-7 (12 Nov. 2007); for John Woolman's literalist reading of Old Testament slavery, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 536–37.

26.  Robert Bruce Mullin, The Puritan as Yankee: A Life of Horace Bushnell (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002), 143–48.

27.  See Theodore Parker, A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion (Boston: Little and Brown, 1842). This is not only Parker's magnum opus; it is also the clearest theological exposition of the era's Transcendentalist impulse. For an excellent discussion of Parker's early confrontation with new modes of interpretation, historical dispensationalism, and the eternal constancy of moral Truth, see Dean Grodzins, American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 148–65. On Emerson, see Alan D. Hodder, Emerson's Rhetoric of Revelation: Nature, the Reader, and the Apocalypse Within (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989).

28.  Parker, A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion, 375.

29.  John Weiss, The Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1864), 2:49, 464 http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/textidx?c=moa;idno=AGU9018.0002.001 (12 Nov. 2007). For another example of how the emerging terms of biblical criticism sustained appeals to new revelation, see David B. Slack, The Celestial Magnet (Providence, R.I.: Miller and Hutchens, 1820).

30.  Lutz, "Toward a Theory of Constitutional Amendment," 244–46; Stephen M. Griffin, American Constitutionalism: From Theory to Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 33–34; James Madison, "No. 49," The Federalist Papers (New York: The New American Library, 1961), 313–17. Adams, The Sable Cloud, 269.

31.  Lutz, "Toward Constitutional Amendment," 243.

32.  Newell G. Bringhurst, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks: The Changing Place of Black People within Mormonism (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981); Richard Lyman Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005), 4–5, 288–89, 516–17.

33. The Journal of Discourses (Liverpool, U.K.: D. H. Wells, 1854–1886), 10:110–11.

34.  Brigham Young, Feb. 5, 1852, Reports of Speeches ca. 1845–1972. LDS Church Historian's Office. My thanks to archivist Ron Watt for his invaluable assistance in locating the original transcript of this speech.

35.  See Jessie L. Embry, Black Saints in a White Church (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1994), 1–35. On the ebb and flow of mainstream and racist uses of the curse in American Christianity, see Stephen R. Haynes, Noah's Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), especially 165–67.

36.  On the Northern need to wait on Providence, see George M. Fredrickson, "The Coming of the Lord: The Northern Protestant Clergy and The Civil War Crisis," in Religion and the American Civil War, 114–19. Elsewhere, in what seems a particularly telling passage, a Southern writer who was willing to entertain the possibility that God had prophesied eventual freedom contrasted the abolitionists to Moses, who waited to free the Israelites until he received an express command from God to do so. Jehovah had allowed the children of Israel to be enslaved for 400 years, notwithstanding the fact that the Lord had expressly promised deliverance "to their fathers long before." Despite the inevitability of such liberation, "God would no doubt have punished [Moses] for his presumption had he dared to go in His name before he was called, as many now do, but waiting patiently till he had full authority was doubtless set down to his credit as righteous" (434). Publicola, "The Present Aspect of Abolitionism," The Southern and Western Literary Messenger and Review (7 July 1847): 429–36 http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=786679502&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=17675&RQT=309&VName=HNP (12 Nov. 2007).

37.  Fred[erick] A. Ross, Slavery Ordained of God (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1857), 5–7 http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=ABJ1203.0001.001 (12 Nov. 2007). See also, The Proslavery Argument as Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the Southern States, 96.

38.  Adams, The Sable Cloud, 77–83, 107–8, 117, 136–41, 152–53, 162, 170–71, 183–85, 224, 239–40, 243, 273.

39.  Wilfred Cantwell Smith, What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), ix.

40.  Mackinnon, Luther and the Reformation, 4:296; George Washington, "Farewell Address," in A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897, ed. James D. Richardson (New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897), 1:209.

41.  Abraham Lincoln, "Fragment on Proslavery Theology," October 1, 1858, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), 3:204.

42.  Thomas Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches: With Elucidations (London: Chapman and Hall, 1846), 1:431–38; J. C. Davis, Oliver Cromwell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 176–80; Christopher Hill, God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (New York: Dial, 1970), 217–50; John Milton, Complete Prose Works of John Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–), 3:311, 194.

43.  George Washington, To the Inhabitants of Canada (Philadelphia, 1775) http://docs.newsbank.com/openurl?ctx_ver=z39.88-2004&rft_id=info:sid/iw.newsbank.com:EVAN&rft_val_format=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:ctx&rft_dat=0F3018B9969E7B48&svc_dat=Evans:eaidoc&req_dat=0BB295CEAF424306BCADA379D413C8A3 (12 Nov. 2007); Noll, America's God, 73–92; Guyatt, "The Peculiar Smiles of Heaven," at 157 gives an striking example of how these providential events literally led at least one satirist to try his hand at composing a new and prophetic book of scripture.

44.  Abraham Lincoln, Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 474; Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and the Civil War, ed. Michael P. Johnson (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2001), 321. There has been some scholarly controversy regarding Lincoln's invoking of providence. Was he religiously sincere or rhetorically savvy when he did so? For this controversy, see Johnson's review essay of Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), in The Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 26 (Summer 2005): 75–81. Either way, he seems to have seen it as a source of authority on which he could confidently draw for political purposes.

45. Congressional Globe, 38th Congress, 1st Session, 1314, 1364–67, 1370, 1440–43; 2nd Session, 141 http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwcglink.html#anchor38 (12 Nov. 2007); "Effects of Emancipation," Liberator, 14 April 1865, 57–58 http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=11&did=566277992&SrchMode=3&sid=1&Fmt=6&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=HNP&TS=1194918558&clientId=17675&aid=1 (12 Nov. 2007).

46.  Jones, The Sectional Crisis and Northern Methodism, 77.

47.  Adams, The Sable Cloud, 213–14, 224–25.

48.  Eugene Genovese has argued that conservatives did not object to the abolitionists' Higher Law doctrine per se, only to the fact that their higher law was individual conscience rather than the canon of the Lord's revealed will. Eugene D. Genovese, "Religion in the Collapse of the American Union," in Religion and the American Civil War, 82–83.

49.  John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 11–12, 17–18, 32–33, 243–44; Robert Alexander Young, Ethiopian Manifesto (New York, 1829), reprinted in Sterling Stuckey, ed., The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 32–37.

50.  "The Conspiracy of Fanaticism," The United States Magazine, and Democratic Review 26 (May 1850): 391. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=331721691&sid=2&Fmt=2&clientId=17675&RQT=309&VName=HNP (Nov. 27, 2007).

51.  Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin (New York: Norton, 1997); Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, 2 vols. (Boston: Phillips, Samson, and Company, 1856).

52.  George Lunt, The Origins of the Late War (New York: D. Appleton, 1866), 289 http://name.umdl.umich.edu/ABJ5787.0001.001 (27 Nov. 2007).

53.  For these quotations and a thoughtful discussion surrounding them, see Ronald Deane Rietveld, "The Moral Issue of Slavery in American Politics, 1854–1860" (Ph.D. Diss., University of Illinois, 1967), 47–54.

54.  Weiss, Life and Correspondence, 1:81.

55.  Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Theodore Parker: A Biography (Boston: Osgood, 1874), 385–87 http://name.umdl.umich.edu/AGV9260.0001.001 (27 Nov. 2007).

56.  Gail K. Smith, "Reading with the Other: Hermeneutics and the Politics of Difference in Stowe's Dred," American Literature 69 (June 1997): 313n.35. See also, Phillip Shaw Paludan, "Religion and the American Civil War," in Religion and the American Civil War, 26. Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, 191–92.

57.  Hodgman, The Nation's Sin and Punishment, 38.

58.  Barnes, An Inquiry into the Scriptural Views of Slavery, 25.

59.  "A Voice of Wisdom in the Presbyterian Synod," The Old Guard (June 1865): 277–82 http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=728390572&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=17675&RQT=309&VName=HNP (27 Nov. 2007).

60.  Benjamin Brown, U.S. senator from Missouri, quoted in Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the American Civil War (New York: Viking, 2006), 355.

61.  "A Divine Actor on the Stage," The New Englander (Oct. 1865): 690–704 http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=454654542&sid=3&Fmt=2&clientId=17675&RQT=309&VName=HNP (27 Nov. 2007).

62.  Hodgman, Nation's Sin and Punishment, 7–9, 94–113. Though the evidence is again more circumstantial, others shared Hodgman's combination of a providentially active God and a strict construction on the question of malum in se, even as they changed their mind regarding what God wanted done with American slavery. See [Charles Hodge], "President Lincoln," The Princeton Review 37 (July 1865): 435–58 http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=343344531&sid=4&Fmt=2&clientId=17675&RQT=309&VName=HNP (27 Nov. 2007). Hodge's commonly held view that slavery was only temporarily justified implies the existence of a revelatory mechanism by which humans can determine when the time of justification has passed.

63.  "Anti-Slavery May Meetings in New York and London," The United States Democratic Review 33 (July 1853): 73 http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/moa/moa-cgi?notisid=AGD1642-0033&byte=230052583 (27 Nov. 2007).

64.  Douglas LeBlanc, "Resolved: Conventions Are Hell," Christianity Today 47 (October 2003): 95–96.

65.  See Ackerman, We the People.

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