Jeffrey A. Smith
Perpetual Scriptures:
Quests for Textual Authority
In Nineteenth-Century American
Literature and Culture
Habilitation Thesis
Brno, 2023
Faculty of Arts
History of Concrete Literatures
(Germanic Literatures)
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ABSTRACT
In the tumultuous decades of rapid expansion and change between the American
Founding and the Civil War, Americans confronted a cluster of overlapping crises whose
common theme was the difficulty of finding authority in written texts. The issue arose from
several disruptive developments: rising challenges to the traditional authority of the Bible in
a society that was intensely Protestant; persistent worries over America’s lack of a “national
literature” and an independent cultural identity; and the slavery crisis, which provoked
tremendous struggles over clashing interpretations of the Declaration of Independence and
the Constitution, even as these “parascriptures” were rising to the status of a kind of quasisacred
secular canon.
At the same time but from the opposite direction, new mass media were creating a
new, industrial-scale print culture that put a premium on very non-sacred, disposable text:
mass-produced “news,” dispensed immediately and in huge quantities but meant only for
the day or hour. This thesis identifies key features of the writings, careers and cultural
politics of several prominent Americans as responses to this cluster of challenges. In their
varied attempts to vindicate the sacred and to merge the timeless with the urgent present, a
number of religious and political leaders and men and women of letters helped define
American literary culture as an ongoing quest for new “bibles,” or what Ralph Waldo
Emerson called a “perpetual scripture.”
As a work of cultural studies, the thesis follows the methodological assumptions
outlined in journals like New Literary History, one of many scholarly enterprises founded to
expand literary history, traditionally focused on works of imaginative literature and their
authors, to consider “texts” more broadly understood – written and even in some cases
nonwritten cultural products of many kinds and purposes. These in turn could be situated
within cultural contexts which, inverting the former relationship between text and context,
would come to the fore as principal objects of study in themselves. Thus, “the line between
literary and nonliterary texts has become blurred,” and new questions have arisen with
regard to the nature and authority of texts of various kinds.1
These questions bear on our
understanding of novels, stories, poems and plays and of how and why they are produced.
Specifically, in the cases at hand, the early literature of the United States lends itself
to analysis as one manifestation of a broader concern in a text-centered Protestant culture
with the uses and impact of various kinds of writing. The thesis argues that many culturemakers
– key religious leaders and founders, poets and storytellers, and political leaders,
journalists, activists and polemicists – were all engaged in movements that overlapped and
converged on a shared set of hopes and anxieties. It further argues that their efforts in turn
arose from and attempted to influence the cultural circumstances of pre-Civil War America,
and that given their interdependence, these projects can best be understood through an
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interdisciplinary approach, a coordinated examination of developments in religion,
literature, politics and “media” that have traditionally been treated separately.
The study is divided into three parts. After an Introduction outlining the persistent
concern over the new American republic’s “literary delinquency,” Part 1, “The Quest for
New Prophets,” focuses on religious religious texts and ideas about the “sacred.” The crisis
over biblical authority, described in chapter 1, gave rise to two contrasting responses. In one
stream were various attempts to recover, restore or re-found the old textual authority, if need
be through the making of new scriptures or new biblical translations and interpretations.
Chapter 2 describes and differentiates the most important of these revivalist and “ultraProtestant”
projects, evaluating their uncertain success at addressing the anxieties that
prompted them. Chapters 3 and 4 turn to the parallel but quite different efforts of “liberal”
Protestants, notably Unitarians and their descendants in the Transcendentalist movement. As
American ideological cousins to the European Romantics, the Transcendentalists and their
allies and protégés saw the need for religious renewal and “new Bibles” as inseparable from
the frustrated need for an original, powerful and distinctively American national literature.
Part 2, “The Quest for New Scriptures,” considers the simultaneous emergence of
new forms of “high” and “low” text and the efforts of some literary artists to find ways of
synthesizing them. As textual products of the American Founding, the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution already carried authority but, over the course of the early
nineteenth century, gradually rose in prestige to become the basis of a national political
canon of “parascriptures” bearing the quasi-sacred status that many still see them as holding
today. That evolution is described in chapter 5. Chapters 6 and 7 examine the rise of massproduced,
“disposable” text, notably via the “news revolution” that began with the penny
press, and the literary projects it helped inspire. In the case of Herman Melville and,
especially, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Walt Whitman, these included stories and poems that
self-consciously sought to merge journalistic with biblical themes and writing styles.
Part 3, “The Quest for National Salvation,” analyzes the great antebellum political
crisis over race and slavery in terms of complex and sharply contested questions of textual
interpretation. Chapter 8 considers the role in these debates of William Lloyd Garrison,
Frederick Douglass, John Brown and Martin Delany, including Delany’s literary response to
the problem in his only novel, Blake. Chapter 9 focuses on Abraham Lincoln and especially
the Gettysburg Address, reading both the address and the storytelling around the “Lincoln
legend” as further efforts to synthesize the sacred with the ephemeral, thus inscribing
America’s experience and destiny into a national secular scripture. The Conclusion reviews
all the efforts previously described in terms of their distinctively American qualities and the
foundations they laid for a national literary quest that remains ongoing today.
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1
C. Jan Swearingen, “What Is the Text? Who Is the Reader? A Meditation on Meanderings of
Meaning,” New Literary History 38, no. 1 (Winter 2007), 148.
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CONTENTS
Introduction: A Nation Founded on Writing......................................................................... 1
“Where Genius Dies”: American Authors and the Problem of Author-ity................. 2
The Plan of this Thesis..................................................................................................... 4
Part One: The Quest for New Prophets
Chapter 1
The “World’s Oldest Book” and the Crisis of Scriptural Authority ................................... 7
Relativizing the Bible in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries......................................... 8
Textualizing the Bible in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries................................. 12
Democratizing the Bible in the Nineteenth Century......................................................... 15
Chapter 2
Revivals, Reaction, and the Ultra-Protestants..................................................................... 26
From Revivalism to “Ultraism” ........................................................................................ 27
Against Doubt: William Miller’s Adventism.................................................................... 29
Against Disagreement: Alexander Campbell’s Primitivism............................................. 33
Against Dullness: Joseph Smith’s Restorationism............................................................ 40
Institutional Successes, Conceptual Failures .................................................................... 46
Chapter 3
Scriptures as Sepulchres:
Unitarians and Transcendentalists ....................................................................................... 57
Unitarianism: The Break with Creeds and the Assertion of Reason................................. 59
Transcendentalists: The Break with Scripture and Assertion of the Higher Reason ....... 63
Emerson on Books, America, and the New Teacher ........................................................ 69
“We Too Must Write Bibles”............................................................................................ 73
Chapter 4
Spirit and Kingdom:
Language, Social Action, and the “True Reviving”............................................................. 84
Radicals, Mystics, and the Question of Social Responsibility.......................................... 87
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Theodore Parker’s “Republic of Righteousness”.............................................................. 92
Horace Bushnell: The Gospel as a “Magnificent Work of Art” ....................................... 99
Noble Schemes and Poetic Manifestations ..................................................................... 105
Part Two: The Quest for New Scriptures
Chapter 5
American Parascriptures:
The Making of a National Political Canon......................................................................... 114
Toward Parascripture: The “Awkward and Uncouth” Declaration ................................ 118
The National Compact and America’s “Political Bible” ................................................ 121
A “Political Religion of the Nation”............................................................................... 126
Chapter 6
Sacred Ephemera:
News, Literature, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin .......................................................................... 135
“A Great Deal More News Nowadays” .......................................................................... 135
"We Do Not Care for the Bible, But We Do Care for the Newspaper".......................... 140
“Story”-telling and Literary Scripturism......................................................................... 143
The Parascripture(s) of Harriet Beecher Stowe .............................................................. 145
Chapter 7
Walt Whitman’s “New Bible” and the Spiritual Vitalizing of Facts................................ 160
“I Must Get What the Writing Means” ........................................................................... 161
“Our Current Copious Fields of Print” ........................................................................... 164
“Whatever Interests the Rest Interests Me” .................................................................... 166
Lithographing the Ancient Gods..................................................................................... 170
“The Continuousness of It All”....................................................................................... 173
Part Three: The Quest for National Salvation
Chapter 8
Slavery, Liberty, and the Three Great Charters................................................................ 181
"The Bible is an Unintelligible Book" ............................................................................ 182
William Lloyd Garrison’s “Lutheran Incendiarism” ...................................................... 186
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The Constitution and “Plain, Common-sense Rules” ..................................................... 189
“An Excrescence on the Tree of Our Liberty”................................................................ 193
John Brown's Compact For a New Republic .................................................................. 196
Martin Delany: Secret Agency and the “Nation Within a Nation”................................. 198
Chapter 9
Lincoln’s Miniature Bible:
Salvation History in the Gettysburg Address .................................................................... 210
“An Interesting Memorial of the Dead Past?” ................................................................ 210
The Legendary “Back of the Envelope” ......................................................................... 212
Type and Antitype: The Biblical "U-shape" ................................................................... 217
Sacred History and the Ephemeral Moment ................................................................... 221
The “Fourth Soil” and the Great Reversal ...................................................................... 225
“The Greatest Actor in All the Drama” .......................................................................... 227
Conclusion: The New American Testaments..................................................................... 233
Bibliography..........................................................................................................................238
Illustrations
Figure 9.1: The Gettysburg Address as illuminated manuscript, 1919……………………..213
Figure 9.2: The U-shaped structure of the Gettysburg Address…………………………….216