Whenever readers approach a revered text for guidance, they make assumptions about how what is recorded there applies to their present context. This is a natural and mostly unscrutinised process. When and how did the Christian Scriptures and the US constitution become historicised such that readers in America recognised a certain temporal distance between their present and the past? Jordan Watkins proposes an answer: it was through antebellum slavery debates. While many imagined no distance between the original setting and their current one, divisions over slavery made the historical distance apparent. This book is therefore a story about the development of historical consciousness in the United States.
Watkins contributes to a growing list of titles in recent years that have explored the place of the Bible in US history: Mark Noll's America's book, James Byrd's investigations of the American Revolution and Civil War, and Paul Gutjahr's study of Bible print culture, to name a few. So too Watkins builds on studies recognising the contingency of the constitution (notably, Jonathan Gienapp and Simon Gilhooley). In doing so, he adds to scholarship on historical consciousness in the nineteenth century such as that of Eran Shalev, Eileen K. Cheng and – for a non-American context – Thomas Howard. Joining this literature, Watkins presses in new and fruitful directions. The argument, in brief, proceeds as follows: there was an interpretive assumption among many in antebellum America that the past and present were contemporaneous. The influence of German higher criticism helped to dislodge this assumption. The rise of historical consciousness with biblical interpretation set the ground for similar hermeneutical moves with the constitution, which reached a high point with Dred Scott, the Supreme Court's decision that people of African descent were excluded from American citizenship. Consequently, a crisis of historicity led to unique and creative readings of sacred texts.
The main characters in this account fall into three camps: biblical scholars such as Andrews Norton, Moses Stuart and Charles Hodge; abolitionists like Theodore Parker, William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass; and political leaders ranging from Roger Taney to Abraham Lincoln. Watkins's sources include sermons, diaries, archival papers, periodicals and public speeches and debates. As Watkins observes, interpreters on both sides of the slavery dispute became keenly aware of historical distance, ‘the sense of differences in context and culture between historical periods’ (p. 2). Favoured pasts shifted from familiar to foreign and forced reinterpretations of sacred texts for continued use (for example, identifying circumstances that allowed Southern slavery to persist or, conversely, concluding that founders had not lived up to the ideals they had set forth or even jettisoning the constitution altogether as outdated). Key to Watkins's argument is ‘original expectations’ – antebellum appeals from both pro-slavery and anti-slavery interpreters to era-specific intentions.
The first two chapters analyse the work of intellectuals such as the Unitarian Joseph Buckminster and the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Parker, who emphasised recovering historical contexts to extricate atemporal truth from a contingent past. In chapter iii, Watkins traces how words like ‘circumstances’ and ‘accommodation’ (the notion that biblical writers conformed the message to their local circumstances) became more common in anti-slavery arguments. As interpreters battled, two major themes emerged: the progress of moral understanding (in Baptist minister Francis Wayland's words, ‘the gradual development of the truths of revelation’) and the relationship of polygamy to slavery in the Old Testament. With the latter, pro-slavery and anti-slavery polemicists readily recognised multiple wives as an immoral practice. What, then, of slavery's continuing acceptability? Historical context provided answers to both sides in defending and attacking the peculiar institution.
Chapter iv moves to constitutional debates. The 1840 (posthumous) publication of James Madison's notes on the Constitutional Convention heightened attention to original context, and Americans began to split between Madison's view (fixed sacred text) and Thomas Jefferson's approach (open to revision). Many endorsed Madison's outlook, awarding the constitution a timeless quality by the mid antebellum period. In the aftermath, anti-slavery constitutionalism (which used the Declaration of Independence as a lens through which to read the constitution) and Garrisonian anti-constitutionalism both contributed to the historicisation of founding-era documents. In Chapter v, Watkins explores how the Fugitive Slave Law (1850) and the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) established historical distance as anti-slavery figures, rather than abandoning the constitution, stressed that the time had come for fulfilment of the founding epoch's best ideals. The Dred Scott case (1857), the subject of chapter vi, portrays the struggle to understand the framers’ original intent, the constitution's original meaning and the people's original understanding. Chief Justice Taney's logic in Dred Scott heightened the stakes around originalism, while Justices John McLean and Benjamin Curtis, in the dissenting opinion, recognised another factor – original expectation.
The final two substantive chapters consider responses to Dred Scott. In chapter vii Watkins shows that the reactions of Parker, Lincoln and Douglass did not merely signal historical distance but used that distance to promote new (egalitarian) readings. Lincoln's point, in Watkins's words, was that ‘through the framers’ arduous efforts to keep the historical reality of slavery out of the text, they had created an ahistorical document, a document for “the ages” in Douglass's phrase’ (p. 298). Chapter viii focuses on William C. Nell, an African American historian, to demonstrate the role that black writers played in ‘reading black revolutionaries’ from the past (p. 302). This chapter is less about the historicisation of sacred texts and more about black people as historical actors – a vital and welcome contribution, though somewhat tangential to the argument Watkins has been developing. It does, however, relate to Watkins’s broader study by showcasing a black reaction to Dred Scott that exposed the need for a second American revolution based on arguments of historical change and awareness.
This is a carefully exegeted and well written book. Its chief contribution lies in its approach: drawing together in chronological relationship the parallel ways in which people read the Bible and the constitution to illuminate historicising tendencies. While some may quibble over whether antebellum readings of the past were as creative or innovative as Watkins suggests, the disputes over slavery undoubtedly sharpened attention to historical context in biblical and constitutional interpretation. In an intellectual history such as this, one wonders about the extent to which retrieving original meanings from a contingent past affected ordinary Americans’ views. Nevertheless, Watkins's analysis shows ways in which a literalist hermeneutic among readers of Scripture was perhaps less dominant than the scholarship allows. It also gives deeper understanding to the battle lines today between originalist interpretations and a living constitution, or judicial pragmatism. Historians of religion, law and slavery will find this study of immediate interest, while it also invites fresh scholarship on how readings of sacred texts in other nineteenth-century Atlantic contexts may have shaped historical awareness.
