Slavery and Sacred Texts
The Bible, the Constitution, and Historical Consciousness in Antebellum America

An analysis of the development of historical consciousness in antebellum America, using the debate over slavery as a case study.

Jordan T. Watkins (Author)

9781108746892, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 9 March 2023

398 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm, 0.646 kg

'Watkins persuasively demonstrates how in shoring up the Bible and the Constitution for the debates over slavery, nineteenth-century Americans evoked an awareness of temporal distance, a new historical consciousness. Antebellum-era struggles with time and history come to life in this insightful and compelling study, which substantially propels our understanding of historicism.' Eran Shalev, University of Haifa

In the decades before the Civil War, Americans appealed to the nation's sacred religious and legal texts - the Bible and the Constitution - to address the slavery crisis. The ensuing political debates over slavery deepened interpreters' emphasis on historical readings of the sacred texts, and in turn, these readings began to highlight the unbridgeable historical distances that separated nineteenth-century Americans from biblical and founding pasts. While many Americans continued to adhere to a belief in the Bible's timeless teachings and the Constitution's enduring principles, some antislavery readers, including Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln, used historical distance to reinterpret and use the sacred texts as antislavery documents. By using the debate over American slavery as a case study, Jordan T. Watkins traces the development of American historical consciousness in antebellum America, showing how a growing emphasis on historical readings of the Bible and the Constitution gave rise to a sense of historical distance.

Acknowledgements
Prologue
Introduction
1. 'Recourse must be had to the history of those times'
2. 'The ground will shake'
3. 'Texts … designed for local and temporary use'
4. 'The further we recede from the birth of the constitution'
5. 'The culture of cotton has healed its deadly wound'
6. 'Times now are not as they were'
7. 'We have to do not … with the past, but the living present'
8. A 'Modern crispus attucks'
Conclusion
Epilogue
Index.

Subject Areas: Legal history [LAZ], History of religion [HRAX], History of the Americas [HBJK]