by Bruce Feiler
But American society was also “the most enlightened and most free,” Tocqueville said. By midcentury, Americans realized that the idea Jefferson called the Constitution’s “wall of separation” between church and state actually spurred religious growth rather than killing it. The First Amendment’s ban on the “establishment of religion” ensured that federal money would not be directed to religious institutions. Most European countries still funded state churches, and while some American states continued this practice into the 1830s, American churches were ultimately cut off from public funds. The change forced churches to compete more openly in the marketplace of ideas and to work more feverishly to attract new members. The pressure to become more user-friendly became one of the hallmarks of American religion and one of the primary reasons religion continued to thrive in the United States, long after state-sponsored churches elsewhere began to atrophy.
And just as political freedom enhanced religious freedom, religion began to reshape politics. The first national political convention was convened in 1831, for example, by a onetime evangelical society that called on many of its revivalist techniques. The vernacular of American political campaigns—the parades, the tents, the rousing speeches, the passing of collection plates—was lifted from this era’s barnstorming evangelical preachers. The government and the churches are “mutual friends,” wrote a minister in 1831. The church simply asks for protection, and in return the state receives “the immense moral influence of the church.”
Few men embodied this symbiotic relationship more than Lyman Beecher, a pioneer in the wave of Christian volunteer societies that swept America with a spirit of do-goodism. Beecher focused on such issues as temperance, literacy, and Sunday schools. His most successful effort was the American Bible Society, which he helped found in 1816. The society’s goal was to use up-to-date printing techniques and distribution to counteract the wave of secular publications that were distracting Americans from their Bibles. The group’s ambition was to have “a Bible in every household,” and it came remarkably close. Capitalizing on the new printing technique of stereotyping, using lead plates to make facsimiles that could be reproduced more efficiently, the society generated an outpouring of Scripture. In 1829 alone, it printed 360,000 Bibles; in 1830, the number rose to 500,000. By the 1860s, the society was printing more than 1 million copies a year, for a population of 31 million. Americans may have been a People of the Book before, but now they could actually own the Book.
But the biggest movement Beecher joined was carrying the Protestant ideal of a new American Israel across the mountains into the wilderness of the West. Beecher’s original objective in moving to Ohio was to “evangelize the world” and save the region from Catholicism. “The religious and political destiny of our nation is to be decided in the West,” he said in a fiery 1835 speech. He and others echoed many of the themes from the Pilgrims and the First Great Awakening. And once more, they relied on the language of the Exodus.
In 1784, John Filson, a Pennsylvania schoolmaster, returned from two years across the Appalachians and published The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, a recruiting booklet designed to lure people to the region. Filson called the territory “the land of promise, flowing with milk and honey,” where “you shall eat bread without scarceness and not lack any thing.” His account ended with a dramatization of a real yet undistinguished trader named Daniel Boone, which helped turn the Revolutionary War veteran into the archetypal hero of the American frontier. Since Boone was a man of few words, Filson flushed out his “autobiography” with elaborate fictionalizations drawn from sources ranging from Roman to Romantic. But many of the characteristics Filson gave to Boone were modeled on a figure known for venturing into the wilderness.
George Caleb Bingham’s Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers Through the Cumberland Gap, 1851–52. Oil on canvas, 36½ x 50¼". Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. Gift of Nathaniel Phillips, 1890. (Courtesy of The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum)
Like Moses, Daniel Boone leaves his family for the howling wilderness. Like Moses, he arrives traumatized but is cleansed and transformed by his immersion in nature. Like Moses, he experiences an encounter with Providence. Like Moses, he climbs a summit and overlooks an even greater paradise ahead of him. And like Moses, Boone returns to summon those left behind to migrate into the untamed territory and transform it into a new Eden.
There are differences in the two narratives, of course, but in the biblicized America of the nineteenth century, many recognized Daniel Boone as “the Moses of the West.” In 1851, George Caleb Bingham painted Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers Through the Cumberland Gap, depicting a Moses-like Boone leading an exodus through the parted Appalachian mountains with a shaft of light in front, a trail of clouds behind, and a white horse by his side. Even the phrase that encapsulated this period, “manifest destiny,” evoked for literate Americans the biblical calling for God’s chosen people to settle the Promised Land. Beginning with the Puritans, the world was often referred to as God’s “manifestation” and history as God’s “destiny.” Manifest destiny was another way of saying that God had chosen Anglo-Americans to convert the land for him—no matter who got misplaced. In the same way that colonizing America was viewed by many participants as a reenactment of the Exodus, many settlers heading west saw themselves as reliving the Israelites’ flight into the wilderness to create a new American Israel.
THE ENTRANCE OF the Beecher house opens into a larger foyer, flanked by two public rooms. On the right was Lyman Beecher’s study, which today contains a period secretary, a bookcase, and assorted chairs. “Dr. Beecher was not the neatest person in the world,” Barbara Furr explained, “so when he wrote his sermons there were probably speeches and papers strewn everywhere.” On the desk was an original leather book containing a student’s lecture notes from one of Beecher’s classes. I flipped through it and certain phrases jumped out: “church and state,” “the duties of ministry,” “the church in respect to civil government.” I double-checked the date: 1845. The United States was 95 percent Protestant. James Polk was in the White House. Yet the questions about religion in America have hardly changed in the intervening thirty presidencies.
On the opposite side of the foyer was the parlor. “This is the room where Harriet gathered many of her ideas,” Barbara said. “The Beechers were different because they allowed women to mingle with men. And if the men didn’t have their ideas right, I’m pretty sure the women corrected them.”
Though Harriet was initially skeptical about the move to Ohio, she took advantage of the relaxed mores of the West, which offered more opportunities for women. She wrote a geography book for children and, with her sister, opened a school for girls. She also joined the Semi-Colon Club, a coed literary society that focused on the growing genre of domestic literature—poetry, essays, letters. One of her fellow members was Calvin Stowe, a Lane professor who was widely regarded as the country’s leading Bible scholar. A widower, Calvin was nine years Harriet’s senior with a “tall, rectangular, perpendicular sort of body,” she recalled, “as stiff as a poker.” From this inauspicious start, their relationship never much warmed, although he did encourage her writing, in part because they needed more income.
Though Harriet gave birth to seven children before moving east in 1850, she still managed to participate in parlor society and join the fray over slavery. Both were crucial for Uncle Tom’s Cabin. At home, Harriet was a laureate of letters; she wrote detailed accounts of her daily life and scolded others for leaving out minutiae. “I want to know if the kitchen is built & how the church progresses and about how the grapes succeeded,” she wrote one cousin. These are “just the things we women like to hear.” Her domestic life also fed her interest in abolition. She wrote that her greatest insight into slavery came from the experience of losing her own eighteen-month-old son, her “pride and joy,” Charley, to cholera. “It was at his dying bed, and at his grave, that I learnt what a poor slave
mother may feel when her child is torn away from her.”
Once stirred, Harriet plunged into the topic. She visited slave-auction sites in Kentucky, read accounts of runaways, and on a trip to visit Henry in Indianapolis met an elderly former slave named “Uncle Tom” Magruder. Following passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, her sister-in-law wrote, “Harriet, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.” After reading the letter aloud to her children, Harriet announced, “I will write something if I live.” While taking Communion a few months later, she had a vision of a Christ-like black man being viciously flogged and praying for his torturers as he died. Uncle Tom was born.
Given the importance of the Bible to her life and time, biblical themes abound in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The novel centers on two slaves from Kentucky: Eliza, who escapes along the Underground Railroad to Canada with her son; and Uncle Tom, who is sold to a series of owners deeper and deeper into the South. The long-suffering Uncle Tom displays many parallels with Jesus. He miraculously saves the life of a child; he tries to evangelize his masters for Christ; and the persecutors who ultimately beat him to death are so impressed by his faith that they convert to Christianity. But with slavery at its heart, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is also steeped in parallels with the Exodus. Eliza’s flight to freedom is likened to the Israelites’ arrival at the Promised Land. “Her first glance was at the river, which lay, like Jordan, between her and the Canaan of liberty.” Uncle Tom muses on the similarities between his own plight and that of the Israelites in Egypt. “In fact, as time went on…, the strength of the parallel increased.” And he constantly sings spirituals with Mosaic themes. Oh, had I the wings of the morning, / I’d fly away to Canaan’s shore.
By mixing themes from the Bible with carefully observed scenes of parlor life, Uncle Tom’s Cabin became America’s first blockbuster novel. Published on March 20, 1852, the book sold 10,000 copies within the first week and 305,000 copies in its first year. It became the first book to sell 1 million copies in the United States. It sold another million in England and was translated into Italian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Flemish, German, Polish, and Magyar. As Henry Ward Beecher biographer Debby Applegate puts it, Harriet “took the most unpopular subject in the country and turned it into the most popular book in American history.”
Perhaps more important, she joined a long tradition of prophetic voices in America. From Columbus, through the Pilgrims, to the Revolution, breakthrough moments in American history were portrayed in the language of the Bible. The more radical the idea, the more leaders relied on the language of the Exodus to align their mission with the moral example set forth by Moses. Like William Bradford, Benjamin Franklin, and others, Harriet Beecher Stowe was encouraging her readers to support a cause that involved breaking the law. The only way to do that was to persuade them that God was on their side.
And Stowe succeeded. Her novel was received as American scripture, transcending the realm of fiction to become part of the nation’s conscience. Long before he became a twentieth-century symbol of accommodation, Uncle Tom was viewed as a liberator sent to bring forth his people from slavery. On the page he may have been a Christian symbol of martyrdom, but once he entered the culture as the face of American slavery, Uncle Tom became a Mosaic call to action. As journalist D. B. Corley wrote after the war, “We are told that Moses was chosen as the means by which the children of Israel should be liberated from their bondage…. Tom was made the chosen means for the liberation of his brethren, [and] through him the colored slaves of the world have, like the children of Israel through Moses, been led to their respective happy lands of Canaan.”
Harriet, of course, had anticipated this outcome. In Deuteronomy 34, Moses is described as having been buried by God in an unmarked grave, “and no one knows his burial place to this day.” In chapter 41 of Uncle Tom’s Cabin the hero is also portrayed as having been interred in secret. “There is no monument to mark the last resting-place of our friend. He needs none! His Lord knows where he lies.” In a country steeped in biblical overtones, Uncle Tom became a timeless American hero, a universal symbol for the moral rightness of freedom.
He became a Moses for his time.
AS I WAS leaving Stowe House, I asked Barbara Furr what Lyman Beecher’s legacy was. In 1850, humbled by his lack of success in converting the region to Protestantism, Beecher slunk back east. “Lyman was a fairly naïve person,” she said. “I think he thought he could win over Cincinnati pretty quickly. But there was already a church on every corner. People resented that Beecher was trying to Yankeeize them.”
One problem for Beecher is that by the 1840s, American society was becoming mired in a religious civil war that proved to be a vivid precursor to the real war that followed. As Mark Noll captured in his book The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, the clash over what God said about slavery in the Five Books of Moses—and what Jesus didn’t say about slavery in the New Testament—represented a radical challenge to a fundamental pillar of American civilization: namely, “trust in the Bible as a divine revelation.” By 1860, a substantial majority of Americans believed that the Bible, in addition to its religious uses, promoted republican politics, was best interpreted by ordinary people, and forecast the future glory of the United States. Yet for all its unifying power, the Bible could not heal the rift over slavery. Civil war threatened not just the union of states. It threatened the union of the United States and God.
A chief battleground in this war was a series of high-profile debates. As Walker Gollar, a professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, explained to me, debates were becoming popular entertainment. “They would debate questions like ‘Which is a greater force, love or hate?’ or ‘Who’s been treated worse by the whites, Native Americans or blacks?’” One milestone debate was held at Lane Seminary in 1834 on the question “Ought slavery be abolished immediately?” The topic was debated for two and a half hours a night, for nine nights. Though eleven of the speakers had been raised in the South, none defended slavery. The measure passed unanimously, but the outcome so enraged Cincinnati society that forty students, dubbed “the Lane Rebels,” were forced to flee north to Oberlin.
An even more contentious debate was held in Cincinnati in October 1845. On this occasion, like many, the more potent biblical argument belonged to the proslavery side. The essence of the Southern case was that if the Bible is God’s word, then it is the believer’s duty to heed every aspect of that revelation. And in example after example, the Bible sanctions, tolerates, regulates, and does nothing to eliminate slavery. Slaveholders collected a bevy of biblical citations they could wield like cudgels. In Genesis 12, Abraham acquires slaves in Egypt. In Genesis 17, God instructs Abraham to circumcise his slaves. In Exodus 12, God instructs Moses to invite slaves to the first Passover. In Leviticus 25, God tells Israel “it is from the nations round about you that you may acquire male and female slaves.”
The New Testament also supports slavery, Southerners insisted. In 1 Corinthians 7, Jesus ordains that both slave and master abide by their calling. In Romans 13, Jesus insists that his followers honor the authority of their regimes. In Ephesians 6, Paul instructs slaves to “obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling.” In 1 Peter, Paul orders servants to “accept the authority of your masters with all due submission, not only when they are kind and considerate, but even when they are perverse.” These passages were undeniably clear and made the Bible’s view on slavery abundantly transparent to the lay reader. “Don’t take my word for it,” the Southerner could say. “Take God’s word for it.” As the South’s leading theologian, James Thornwell, boasted in 1861, “That the relation betwixt the slave and his master is not inconsistent with the word of God, we have long since settled…. We cherish the institution not from avarice, but from principle.”
Antislavery activists also cited the Bible, but they were forced to sidestep these individual planks of Mosaic law and focus on larger themes, like
the idea in Genesis 1 that all humans are made in God’s image. Or they cited Genesis 17, in which Abraham circumcises his slaves, thereby welcoming them into the covenant, as well as Exodus 21, in which a master is ordered to free a slave if he’s harmed. Or they claimed, as Harriet Beecher Stowe did, that the slavery in the Bible was different from that practiced in the South. Altogether, the biblical antislavery argument was considerably weaker. As Mark Noll concluded: “The North lost the exegetical war.” Yet Northerners didn’t back down, and the results were seismic. In 1837, the Presbyterian Church split along regional lines, followed in 1844 by the Methodists and in 1845 by the Baptists. If North and South could not agree on the same Bible, they could not sit in the same pews, and if they couldn’t sit in the same pews, they couldn’t stay in the same union. As had occurred with the Revolution, what started in religion happened next in politics.
The book that joined Americans together was being torn asunder by slavery.
The 1845 debate in Cincinnati was a sterling example of this biblical fratricide. Hosted by the Presbyterian Church in the largest room in the city, the event lasted for four days, eight hours a day, discussing “Is slave-holding in itself sinful?” The two participants were ministers. Jonathan Blanchard, a Lane Rebel and later a candidate for president, said the answer was yes. Nathaniel Rice, a well-known Southern sympathist, argued no. Blanchard went first and immediately framed the question as religious: “Whether the religion we profess is a humane or an inhuman one?” He invoked the Declaration of Independence, saying men must not be slaves, “because ‘God hath created all men free and equal, and hath endowed them with certain INALIENABLE rights!’”
