I thank John Corrigan, Jenny Franchot, Joan Hedrick, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson for their comments and encouragement on earlier drafts of this essay.

1. Stowe, Harriet Beecher (henceforth HBS), Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)Google Scholar, reprinted in Three Novels: Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Minister's Wooing, and Oldtown Folks (New York: Library of America, 1982), 455Google Scholar; henceforth cited parenthetically in the text.

2. The figure of 700,000 converts is for the period 1813–91 and comes from Ahlstrom, Sidney, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 428Google Scholar. This figure may be high; Gerald Shaughnessy estimates 383,600 Protestant conversions to Catholicism between 1820 and 1900 (Has the Immigrant Kept the Faith? A Study of Immigration and Catholic Growth in the United States, 1790–1920 [1925; rept. New York: Arno, 1969], 117, 125, 134, 145, 153, 161, 166, 172Google Scholar). The tables on these pages also include the numbers of Catholic immigrants for each decade. On political themes in antebellum Protestant discourse, see Bodo, John R., The Protestant Clergy and Public Issues, 1812–1848 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954)Google Scholar; Bowden, Henry Warner, “Robert Baird: Historical Narrative and the Image of a Protestant America — 1855,” Journal of Presbyterian History 47 (06 1969): 149–72Google Scholar; and Handy, Robert J., A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971)Google Scholar.

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4. Grimké, Angelina, Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (New York, 1836), 23Google Scholar.

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6. Franchot, , Roads to Rome, xxviGoogle Scholar; henceforth cited by page number in the text.

7. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 143Google Scholar; henceforth cited by page number in the text.

8. Gates, Henry Louis Jr, quoted in Fishkin, Was Huck Black?, 142Google Scholar.

9. I am indebted for this point to Talal Asad's rich discussion in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 7–13Google Scholar.

10. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, quoted in Fishkin, , Was Huck Black?, 145Google Scholar. Fishkin argues that Huck's “brilliantly intuitive” mode of “signifying” “pays lip service to popular racist stereotypes at those moments when he is undermining them most severely” (66); see her discussion (60–67). I am grateful to Caroline Gebhard for this insight.

11. Lott, Eric, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 95Google Scholar; henceforth cited by page number in the text.

12. Kirlin, Joseph Louis J., Catholicity in Philadelphia from the Earliest Missionaries Down to the Present Time (Philadelphia: J. J. McVey, 1909), 54Google Scholar; see also Butsch, Joseph, S.S.J, , “Negro Catholics in the United States,” Catholic Historical Review (04 1917): 41–42Google Scholar.

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14. Fitch, Elijah, A Discourse … Delivered at Hopkinton … March 24th 1776 (Boston, 1776), 22Google Scholar. On George III as a “Popish king,” see note 35.

15. Works of John Wesley, quoted in SisterRay, Mary Augustina, American Opinion of Roman Catholicism in the Eighteenth Century (1936; rept. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 79Google Scholar.

16. See, for example, Ignatiev, Noel, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995)Google Scholar; Dragon, Grand Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Papers Read … At Their First Annual Meeting (1923; rept. New York: Arno, 1977)Google Scholar; and Michaels, Walter Benn, “The Souls of White Folk,” in Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, ed. Scarry, Elaine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 185–206Google Scholar.

17. In reference to nuns and nunneries, black ostensibly signified the color of the veil worn by those who have taken final vows. One version of the full title of Monk, Maria's famed Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery (1836)Google Scholar was Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, as exhibited in a narrative of her sufferings during a residence of five years as a novice, and two years as a black nun, in the Hotel Dieu Nunnery at Montreal; another appended to the title Secrets of Black Nunnery Revealed. The frequent appearance of blackness in connection with convent life suggests that (though not precisely how) the symbol of the black veil helped white Protestants to assimilate the vexations (and attractions) of racial and religious varieties of spiritual, psychological, and cultural inscrutability.

18. Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 8Google Scholar.

19. For a rewarding discussion of Stowe's “Orientalized” South, see Spillers, Hortense J., “Changing the Letter: The Yokes, the Jokes of Discourse, or, Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Reed,” in Slavery and the Literary Imagination, ed. McDowell, Deborah E. and Rampersand, Arnold (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 25–61, 25–27Google Scholar.

20. See Riss, Arthur, “Racial Essentialism and Family Values in Uncle Tom's Cabin,” American Quarterly 46 (12 1994): 513–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21. Cf. Eric Lott: “In rationalized Western societies, becoming ‘white’ … seems to depend upon the remanding of enjoyment, the body, an aptitude for pleasure. It is the other who is always putatively ‘excessive’ in this respect, whether through exotic food, strange and noisy music, outlandish bodily exhibitions, or unremitting sexual appetite. Whites in fact organize their own enjoyment through the other … and access pleasure precisely by fantasizing about the other's ‘special’ pleasure. Hatred of the other arises from the necessary hatred of one's own excess; ascribing this excess to the ‘degraded’ other and indulging it — by imagining, incorporating, or impersonating the other — one conveniently and surreptitiously takes and disavows pleasure at the same time. This is the mixed erotic economy … the ‘ambivalence,’ of American whiteness” (“White Like Me: Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Kaplan, Amy and Pease, Donald E. [Durham: Duke University Press, 1993], 474–98, 482)Google Scholar. The substitution of “Protestant” for “white” in this passage yields a remarkably illuminating reading of antebellum Protestant engagements with Catholicism, suggesting the salience of this dialectic to the cultural repackaging of religious fears and pleasures as racial ones (see particularly Franchot's introduction, xvii–xxvii, and chapter 12, “The Bodily Gaze of Protestantism” [which focuses largely on Stowe, 's Agnes of Sorrento], 234–59Google Scholar). My reading of the surplus corporeality of Romanism and its extension to the discursive construction of blackness is also indebted to Anne Norton (Alternative Americas, 65–90). In “Catholic Ideology and American Slave,” Paul Giles notes that Protestant reformers “tended often to conflate slave and Catholic cultures as twin embodiments of an outlook they deemed fundamentally un-American” (62) and suggests that “the Civil War surreptitiously displace[d] anti-Catholicism into a more politically acceptable form of anti-racism” (65). I argue here that the rewriting of religious differences as racial ones helped to secure the discourses not only of antiracism but of race (and so also of racism) more broadly.

22. Tompkins, Jane, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 125Google Scholar; henceforth cited by page number in the text.

23. See, for example, Birdoff, Harry, The World's Greatest Hit (New York: S. F. Vanni, 1947)Google Scholar. This reading of the canonical quality of Uncle Tom's Cabin is indebted to Scarry, Elaine, “Consent and the Body: Injury, Departure, and Desire,” New Literary History 21 (Fall 1990): 867–96, 869–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24. See Grimsted, David, “Uncle Tom from Page to Stage: Limitations of Nineteenth-Century Drama,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 56 (10 1970): 235–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lott, , Love and Theft, ch. 8Google Scholar, “Uncle Tomitudes: Racial Melodrama and the Modes of Production,” 211–33.

25. Maclear, J. F., “The Evangelical Alliance and Antislavery Crusade,” Huntington Library Quarterly 42 (Spring 1979): 141–64, 143CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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27. Ray, , American Opinion, 69Google Scholar. Franchot discusses the discursive linkage between Catholicism and slavery at length in Roads to Rome (see esp. ch. 5, “Nativism and Its Enslavements,” 99–111).

28. Mayhew, Jonathan, Popish Idolatry, a Discourse Delivered in the Chapel of Harvard-College in Cambridge, New-England, May 8, 1765 (Boston, 1765), 49Google Scholar.

29. Mecom, Benjamin, To the Publick of Connecticut … Another Newspaper (New Haven, 1765), n.pGoogle Scholar.

30. Address to the People of Great Britain by the Continental Congress, October 21, 1774, reprinted in Ellis, John Tracy, Documents of American Catholic History (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1956), 138Google Scholar.

31. Address of Frederick Smyth, Chief Justice of New Jersey, to the Grand Jury of Essex County, November 1774, quoted in Metzger, Charles H., The Quebec Act (New York: U.S. Catholic Historical Society, 1936), 125 n. 258Google Scholar.

32. Boston Committee of Correspondence, Worcester, July 18, 1773, quoted in Ray, , American Opinion, 271Google Scholar.

33. “‘Popery and Slavery go hand in hand’ said the Father as the American Revolution Began,” American Catholic Historical Researches 21, no. 1 (01 1904): 15–18, 15Google Scholar.

34. Ditchfield, Grayson, “Joseph Mendham, Collector and Controversialist,” in Catalogue of the Law Society's Mendham Collection, ed. Hingley, Sheila and Shaw, David (London: Law Society, 1994), xv–lxxiv, xviGoogle Scholar. The point that “the colonies thus began their separation from the mother-country by using the same arguments that helped establish British national identity in the sixteenth century” is made by Casino, Joseph J., “Anti-Popery in Colonial Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 105 (07 1981): 279–309, 308Google Scholar.

35. On return from “executing the Romish business” with Quebec, the King was greeted with cries of “No Popery! No French Laws! No Protestant Popish King!” New York Journal, 08 25, 1774Google Scholar, quoted in Metzger, , Quebec Act, 43Google Scholar.

36. “L. S.” in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 10 12, 1774Google Scholar, quoted in Metzger, , Quebec Act, 52Google Scholar.

37. As John Wolffe suggests, “It might seem paradoxical that the [anti-Catholic] impulse shared by Britons and Americans should have been instrumental in reinforcing their distinct national identities. However the effect of Protestantism was to channel ‘Americanism’ into a direction which played down the confrontations of 1775 and 1812 and stressed the common ground possessed by the two nations. American evangelicals saw Britain as a Protestant power blessed by God to an extent only exceeded by themselves, and were particularly anxious that there should be no further wars between the two countries … [Slavery] was to divide Americans from each other far more decisively than it was to separate them from the British” (The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain, 1829–1860 [Oxford: Clarendon, 1991], 315–16)Google Scholar.

38. See Harwood, Thomas F., “British Evangelical Abolitionism and American Churches in the 1830s,” Journal of Southern History 28 (08 1962): 287–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maclear, , “Evangelical Alliance”; Taylor, Clare, ed., British and American Abolitionists: An Episode in Transatlantic Understanding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974)Google Scholar; Midgley, Clare, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns (London: Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar; and Bolt, Christine, The Women's Movements in the United States and Britain from the 1790s to the 1920s (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993)Google Scholar.

39. Tappan, Arthur, quoted in Harwood, “British Evangelical Abolitionism,” 306Google Scholar.

40. American Catholics noted the tendency of abolitionists to combine their antislavery commitments with equally intense anti-Catholicism. Catholic and particularly Irish Catholic challenges to the religious prejudices of abolitionists in turn allowed what John Greenleaf Whittier tellingly called the latter's “just disapprobation of Catholicism” to “degenerate” into a “most unwarranted prejudice” (quoted in Riach, “Daniel O'Connell,” 22). On antebellum Catholic responses to slavery, see Rice, Madeleine Hooke, American Catholic Opinion in the Slavery Controversy (1944; rept. Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1964)Google Scholar; and Sharrow, Walter, “Northern Catholic Intellectuals and the Coming of the Civil War,” New York Historical Society Quarterly 58 (01 1974): 35–56Google Scholar.

41. On this context, see Maclear, “Evangelical Alliance.”

42. Senior, Nassau W., “American Slavery,” a Reprint of an Article on Uncle Tom's Cabin of Which a Portion Was Inserted into the 206th Number of the Edinburgh Review (London, 1856), 4Google Scholar. The writer characterized American slaveholders as an “ultra-Catholic party” and warned of them that “the Clerical, or Jesuitical, or Popish, or Ultra-Montane faction, — whatever name we give to it, — has almost always obtained its selfish objects, because those objects are all that it cares for” (17).

43. Murray, N[icholas], The Decline of Popery and Its Causes: An Address Delivered in the Broadway Tabernacle (New York, 1851)Google Scholar, reprinted in Anti-Catholicism in America: Three Sermons (New York: Arno, 1977), 346–47Google Scholar; henceforth cited by page number in the text.

44. Sumner, Charles, Our Foreign Relations: Showing Past Perils from England and France, Speech of the Honorable Charles Sumner, Cooper Institute, September 10, 1863 (New York, 1863), 46Google Scholar; henceforth cited by page number in the text.

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48. Southern Protestants, for their part, frequently viewed Catholic immigrants as natural abolitionists for their unwillingness to compete with unpaid labor. See Bean, William G., “An Aspect of Know-Nothingism: The Immigrant and Slavery,” South Atlantic Quarterly 23 (10 1924): 319–37Google Scholar.

49. Genovese, Eugene D., “Slavery Ordained by God”: The Southern Slaveholders' View of Biblical History and Modern Politics (Gettysburg, Pa.: Gettysburg College, 1985), 7Google Scholar. According to Wolffe, transatlantic Protestant Bible and missionary societies of the 1850s presented “Protestantism … as a defining characteristic of Americans, and a source of cohesion in a national community in constant danger of being torn apart by the pressure of the slavery issue” (Protestant Crusade, 315). See also Franchot, , Roads to Rome, 103–4Google Scholar.

50. Bourne, George, Slavery Illustrated in Its Effects on Woman and Domestic Society (1837; rept. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1972), 28Google Scholar.

51. Mann, Horace, Slavery: Letters and Speeches (Boston, 1851), 477Google Scholar; henceforth cited by page number in the text.

52. Bourne, , Slavery Illustrated, 27Google Scholar; and Speech of Wendell Phillips … January 27, 1853, quoted by Halttunen, Karen, “Humanitarian Reform and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,” American Historical Review 100 (04 1995): 325CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Liberator, January 29, 1858, quoted by Walters, “Erotic South,” 183. See also the quotations in Norton, , Alternative Americas, 69Google Scholar; and Billington, , Protestant Crusade, 345 ffGoogle Scholar.

53. Beecher, Edward, Papal Conspiracy Exposed and Protestantism Defended in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture (1855; rept. New York: Arno, 1977), 394Google Scholar.

54. McKivigan, John R., “The Antislavery ‘Comeouter’ Sects: A Neglected Dimension of the Abolitionist Movement,” Civil War History 26 (06 1980): 142–60, 143CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The metaphor of slavery as the diseased woman of scripture-based anti-Catholic rhetoric is repeated in The Bible on the Present Crisis (New York, 1863), 99, 104Google Scholar; and in Rev. Hedge, F. H., The Sick Woman: A Sermon for Our Time (Boston, 1863)Google Scholar.

55. “American Principles,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine 14. no. 81 (02 1857): 410–11Google Scholar. See also Bean, “Puritan Versus Celt.”

56. The Antislavery Papers of James Russell Lowell, ed. Parker, W. B., 2 vols. (1902; rept. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 207–8Google Scholar; henceforth cited by volume and page number in the text. On the providential view of Catholicism as “dead and buried,” see, for example, The Funeral of the Mass or the Mass Dead and Buried without Hope of Resurrection, trans. de Roden, M. (Edinburgh, 1836)Google Scholar. I am grateful here to Franchot's discussions, throughout part 1 of Roads to Rome (“History: The New and Old Worlds,” 3–84), of antebellum formulations of a providentially defeated Catholic “past” superseded by Protestant “history.”

57. Cf. Edward Beecher on the fervency of the martyred Elijah Lovejoy's abolitionism: “Look at the monstrous abuses practiced by the Romish Church; and at the exposure of them in England, Germany, and Scotland … if Luther had written against popery in such a manner as not to offend the most bigoted and interested of the popish clergy, what would have become of the Reformation?” (Narrative of Riots at Alton, in Connection with the Death of Elijah P. Lovejoy [1838; rept. Miami: Mnemosyne, 1969], 14–15Google Scholar).

58. Beecher, Charles, The God of the Bible Against Slavery (New York, 1855), 7Google Scholar.

59. Though hailed as an abolitionist martyr, Elijah Lovejoy saw himself at risk primarily for his anti-Catholicism: “For holding and avowing such [abolitionist] sentiments as these, but especially for honestly endeavoring to open the eyes of my countrymen to the danger which threatens their civil and religious rights, from the workings of a foreign despotic influence, carried forward here by its appropriate instruments, the Jesuits, — for these things, after repeated and long continued threats, I have at length been made the victim of popular violence” (St. Louis Observer, August 10, 1836, quoted in “Elijah P. Lovejoy as an Anti-Catholic,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 62 [09 1951]: 172–80, 180Google Scholar). On the importance of the Lovejoy murder for Beecher's conversion to abolitionism, see Hedrick, Joan, Harriet Beecher Stowe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 109Google Scholar.

60. Catharine Beecher to Sarah Buckingham Beecher, 1843, quoted in Boydston, Jeanne et al. , The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women's Rights and Woman's Sphere (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 239Google Scholar. On nuns as Beecher's models, see Sklar, Katherine Kish, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 171–72Google Scholar.

61. Beecher, Lyman, Autobiography, 2 vols., ed. Cross, Barbara (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 2: 251Google Scholar. A similar discussion appears in his Plea for the West (61–64). Harriet Martineau mentions Beecher's instigating sermons in connection with the convent riot (Society in America, 3: 234). On Beecher's involvement, see also Whitney, Louisa Goddard, The Burning of the Convent … As Remembered by One of the Pupils (1877; rept. New York: Arno, 1969), 5, 19Google Scholar. A Boston cartoonist caricatured Dr. Beecher as “Dr. Brimstone” (see McVay, Georgianne, “Yankee Fanatics Unmasked: Cartoons on the Burning of a Convent,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 83 [09–12 1972]: 159–68, 162 [Figure 2], 165Google Scholar). Other valuable accounts of the convent burning can be found in Billington, , Protestant Crusade, 53–117Google Scholar; Kenneally, James J., “The Burning of the Ursuline Convent: A Different View,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 90 (03/12 1979): 15–21Google Scholar; Franchot, , Roads to Rome, 135–45Google Scholar; and Hamilton, Jeanne, “The Nunnery as Menace: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834,” U.S. Catholic Historian 14 (Winter 1996): 35–65Google Scholar.

62. On Bishop Purcell's praise of Stowe, see Hedrick, , Harriet Beecher Stowe, 70Google Scholar (“Yankee girl” is quoted on page 168, and “Presbyterian nunnery,” is quoted on page 85). On Jesuit educators, see Hedrick, , Harriet Beecher Stowe, 342Google Scholar. On Catholic servants, see, for example, HBS, Little Foxes, or the Insignificant Little Habits That Mar Domestic Happiness (London, 1866)Google Scholar, and House and Home Papers (London, 1865)Google Scholar. “Committee of Supervision” is HBS, We and Our Neighbors, or, The Records of an Unfashionable Street (New York, 1875), 222Google Scholar. “Scarlet Beast of Rome” is HBS, Poganuc People (1878; rept. Boston, 1896), 55Google Scholar.

63. Norton, , Alternative Americas, 68–69Google Scholar.

64. Lovejoy, Elijah, St. Louis Observer, 08 27, 1835Google Scholar, quoted by Dillon, Meron P., Elijah P. Lovejoy, Abolitionist Editor (Urbana: University Illinois Press, 1961), 41Google Scholar.

65. United States Catholic Miscellany, March 20, 1852, quoted in Worsley, Stephen C., “Catholicism in Antebellum North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 60 (10 1983): 399–430, 424Google Scholar.

66. The characterization of the nuns as “defenceless” appears in the Portland [Maine] Daily Advertiser, quoted in Kenneally, , “Burning of the Ursuline Convent,” 6Google Scholar. On the plan to parade Mother Mary St. George in effigy, see Billington, , Protestant Crusade, 90Google Scholar. I am here indebted to valuable interpretations of the gender dynamics of both Monk's narrative and the convent riot in Kenneally, “Burning of the Ursuline Convent”; Franchot, , Roads to Rome, 135–61Google Scholar; Hamilton, “Nunnery as Menace”; and Griffin, Susan M., “Awful Disclosures: Women's Evidence in the Escaped Nun's Tale,” PMLA 111 (01 1996): 93–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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68. HBS, Mrs. Stowe's First Geography for Children (Boston, 1855)Google Scholar, reprint of Beecher, Harriet, Primary Geography for Children, on an Improved Plan with Eleven Maps and Numerous Engravings (Cincinnati, 1833)Google Scholar. Pages are cited parenthetically in the text. The close association between Catholic and heathen in the antebellum Protestant imagination is made strikingly apparent in “The Game of Pope and Pagan: or, the Siege of the Stronghold of Satan by the Christian Army,” a children's board game manufactured by W. and S. B. Ives in Salem, Massachusetts, around 1844. The playing board pits an image of “A Hindoo woman on the funeral pyre of her husband,” representing “pope and pagan,” against a picture of “Missionaries landing on a foreign shore,” representing “the siege of the stronghold of Satan by the Christian army.” The instructions to the game read in part, “The white figures represent the missionaries, as white is the symbol of innocence, temperance, and hope … As heraldic sable denotes grief after a loss, Pope and Pagan are in black, both denote gloom of error, and their grief at the daily loss of empire” (“The Game of Pope and Pagan,” Peabody and Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, acc. no. 4216.2; reproduced in Fleming, Robin, “Picturesque History and the Medieval in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Historical Review 100 [10 1995]: 1061–94, 1076CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

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70. The biblical discourse of nations seemed particularly activated by debates over the annexation of Texas: “The Sovereign of the Universe has his own purposes to accomplish upon the wicked treacherous and idolatrous population of Mexico; and He is making the United States as he made Assyria of Old, the rod of his anger … But who knows that our turn will not come next?” (Evangelical Repository 5 [May 1847], quoted in Hinckley, Ted C., “American Anti-Catholicism during the Mexican War,” Pacific Historical Review 31 [05 1962]: 121–38, 124)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71. HBS, The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1854; rept. New York, 1968), 45Google Scholar; henceforth cited by page number in the text.

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76. See Franchot, , Roads to Rome, 103, 248Google Scholar. Charles H. Foster suggests that Augustine St. Clare may have been inspired by the Catholic convert Brownson, Orestes (The Rungless Ladder: Harriet Beecher Stowe and New England Puritanism [Durham: Duke University Press, 1954], 49–57Google Scholar). Richard Slotkin, placing Uncle Tom's Cabin (as does Franchot) within a literary genealogy that includes Catholic and Indian captivity narratives, calls the enervated Clare, Augustine St “a moral successor to the Canadian priests whose long sojourn with Indians had sapped their fiber and made them passive before the evils their flocks engaged in” (Regeneration Through Violence [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973], 444)Google Scholar.

77. On French Huguenots in America, their ties to New England Protestantism, and their antipathy to Catholicism, see Ray, , American Opinion, 96–98Google Scholar.

78. The New Orleans Protestant Rev. Joel Parker reported to an audience in his native Hartford, Connecticut, that New Orleans Catholic men were “practically atheists; they regard religion as intended for only women and servants” (Emancipator, January 6, 1835, quoted by Harwood, “Abolitionist Image,” 295).

79. Cf. Lyman Beecher: “[The Catholic Church] is majestic and imposing in its ceremonies, dazzling by its lights and ornaments, vestments and gorgeous drapery, and fascinating by the power of music and the breathing marble and living canvas, and … unlimited in its powers of accommodation to the various characters, tastes, and conditions of men. For the profound, it has metaphysics and philosophy — the fine arts for men of taste, and wealth, and fashion — signs and wonders for the superstitious — forbearance for the sceptic — toleration for the liberal, who eulogize and aid her cause — enthusiasm for the ardent — lenity for the voluptuous, and severity for the austere — fanaticism for the excited, and mysticism for moody musing. For the formalist, rites and ceremonies — for the moral, the merit of good works, and for those who are destitute, the merits of the saints at accommodating prices” (Plea for the West, 132–34).

80. “Longfellow's poetry has the true seal of the bard in this, that while it is dyed rich as an old cathedral window in tints borrowed in foreign language and literature — tints caught in the fields of Spain, Italy, and Germany — yet, after all, the strong dominant colours are from fields and scenes of home” (HBS, Uncle Sam's Emancipation [1853; rept. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1970], 155–56Google Scholar).

81. On mild insanity as a Catholic trait, cf. the author of “The Catholic Question”: “No man, in his senses, ever believed fully and fairly the [Roman Catholic] doctrine of transubstantiation … Let us not be misunderstood; there have, doubtless, been many men who thought they believed it, but owing to the prejudice of education, their minds, on this point, were dark, and saw things that were not as though they were. So often do we see individuals inflicted with mental imbecility on some particular subject” (Western Monthly Magazine 3 [May 1835], quoted by Knobel, Dale T., Paddy and the Republic [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986], 56Google Scholar). On the darkness of mind implied by the Catholic love of “silly gewgaws,” see Murray, “Decline of Popery,” 358.

82. Stowe's invocation of the “foul, obscure den[s]” of the Inquisition as the model for popular images of the slave warehouse (379) presupposes an even greater familiarity on the part of her Protestant readers with this office and its mysteries than with the actual institutions of slavery. Antebellum works on the subject were numerous and widely available; Billington notes that “nearly every book, pamphlet, or newspaper directed against Catholicism devoted some attention to the Inquisition … The references are too numerous to be cited” (Protestant Crusade, 375 n. 66). For antebellum evangelicals, the Inquisition became a favorite site for the historical materializing and resituating of an increasingly remote Calvinist hell, for one result of the softening or “feminization” of American religion in the late 18th and 19th centuries was that the Calvinist rhetorical genius for describing evil and temptation increasingly focused on Catholic, not Protestant, states of sinfulness. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, fiery tortures define the hell of the Catholic, and no longer of the Protestant, imagination; Legree's Catholic slave Cassy (whose religious education seems a mirror of Prue's [255]) credits the “sisters in the convent” for her feeling of being tormented by devils, her visions of being burned alive (428).

83. On Catholicism's racial (and religious) promiscuities, cf. Lorenzo de Zavola: “As in all Catholic countries, Sunday is a day of diversions in New Orleans. The shops of the Catholics are open; there are dances, music, and feasts … In the Catholic church the negro and the white, the slave and the master, the noble and the poor are gathered before the same alter. Here is a temporary forgetting of all human distinctions … In the Protestant church it is not so. The colored people are excluded or separated into one place by a lattice work or balustrade. The most miserable slave receives from the hand of the Catholic priest all the consolations of religion” (de Zavola, Lorenzo, Viage a Los Estados-Unidos del Norte de America [1829]Google Scholar, quoted in Ryan, Joseph Paul, “Travel Literature as Source Material for American Catholic History,” Illinois Catholic Historical Review [04 1928]: 301–17Google Scholar). Franchot valuably remarks on Catholicism as a trope for dangerous mixtures in the antebellum Protestant imagination: “Like the fearsome image of miscegenation that haunted both pro- and anti-slavery white Americans, the threat of spiritual miscegenation as figured in anti-Catholic writing argued that mingling inevitably led to mixture — and in such mixtures all claims to purity were dangerously forsaken” (Roads to Rome, 172).

84. Hungarian rebel Louis Kossuth fled from Austria to Turkey, where he was imprisoned by a Turkish sultan. Kossuth was a rallying point for anti-Catholics when he came to the United States in December 1851; his warm reception, according to Billington, was “due in part to the fact that he was a symbol of Protestantism as well as liberty” (Protestant Crusade, 331). Stowe called Kossuth a “great apostle and martyr of Liberty and Christianity” and defended him from the Observer's slandering of him as a drunkard (quoted in Hedrick, , Harriet Beecher Stowe, 227, 228Google Scholar). Kossuth drew the wrath of abolitionists for refusing to speak out on behalf of the slave, and left under a cloud a few months after his arrival (see also Ellis, , Documents of American Catholic History, 341–42Google Scholar). On Austria's Catholic “slaves,” see Beecher, Lyman, Plea for the West, 144Google Scholar.

85. See McKivigan, John R., “The Gospel Will Burst the Bonds of the Slave: The Abolitionists' Bibles for Slaves Campaign,” Negro History Bulletin 45 (07/09 1982): 62–64, 77Google Scholar; the quote is on page 62. On the Bible riots that erupted over these disagreements, see Feldberg, Michael, The Philadelphia Riots of 1844:A Study in Ethnic Conflict (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1975)Google Scholar; and Lannie, Vincent P., “Alienation in America,” Review of Politics 32 (10 1970): 503–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the Bible and common schools as the “mill” for churning Catholics out as Protestants, see “Kirwan” [Nicholas Murray], Romanism at Home: Letters to the Chief Justice Roger B. Taney (New York, 1852), 249–50Google Scholar.

86. Miner's Journal, October 1, 1853, quoted in Gudelunas, , “Nativism and the Demise,” 230Google Scholar.

87. Under the heading Nunneries and Popish Seminaries Dangerous to the Morals and Degrading to the Character of a Republican Community, Theodore Dwight described “Roman Priests and Nuns” as “dissevered from society, unlinked from the world … even to a change of names, [and] accustomed to a kind of life the opposite of the family state” (Open Convents, or Nunneries and Popish Seminaries Dangerous … [New York, 1836], 165)Google Scholar. According to Lyman Beecher, the sexual danger marked by Catholicism could be read even within the same text as a plot to out-populate Protestants through seduction and reproduction (“Protestant children, with unceasing assiduity, are gathered into Catholic schools … so that every family in process of time becomes six” [Plea for the West, 117]) and as the impossibility of assimilating a nonreproductive clergy within the American family (“Were they allied to us by family and ties of blood, like the ministry of all other denominations, there would be less to be feared” [135]). Others suggested that the Catholic Church's powers were most dangerous precisely because they were sexually protean: The problem of the Catholic immigrant, wrote Morse, Samuel F. B., is the danger of an “anomalous, nondescript, hermaphrodite, Jesuit thing, neither foreigner nor native, yet a moiety of each, now one, now the other, both or neither, as circumstances suit” (Imminent Dangers to the Free Institution of the United States Through Foreign Immigration [1835; rept. New York: Arno, 1969], 24)Google Scholar. Franchot discusses charges of Catholic antidomesticity throughout Roads to Rome (see esp. 112–34).

88. In Stowe's Little Foxes, for example, the fire and brimstone of the Calvinist's hell is relocated to the middle-class household under the mismanagement of a “raw, untrained” Irish Bridget: “There are the gas pipes, the water pipes, the whole paraphernalia of elegant and delicate conveniences … the neglect of any of which may flood the house, or poison it with foul air … in unskilled, blundering hands … their gas, and their water, and their fire … seem only so many guns in the hands of Satan” (26).

89. Voodoo (or vodun) arrived in New Orleans with the slaves and free blacks who came from Haiti and Cuba beginning in the late 18th century. In vodun, Catholic holy days, icons, modes of healing, and other spiritual practices were assimilated to those of West African religion (see Raboteau, Albert, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South [New York: Oxford University Press, 1978], 75–80Google Scholar). According to the Louisiana historian Tallant, Robert, “Voodoo was at its height by 1850 and Marie Laveau was its essence” (Voodoo in New Orleans [1946; rept. Gretna, La.: Pelican, 1990], 64)Google Scholar. Laveau, by various accounts a witch, madam, murderer, doctor, and saint, by her own account a devout Roman Catholic, presided with her daughter (also named Marie Laveau) over the city's voodoo community for the remainder of the century. The profusion of legends surrounding Laveau, however apocryphal, suggest something of the vitality of voodoo's conception of black (and female) spiritual power unfettered by Protestant pieties. At least eight accounts of voodoo in New Orleans appeared in the popular press before the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin (see Touchstone, Blake, “Voodoo in New Orleans,” Louisiana History 13 [Fall 1972]: 371–86Google Scholar). On voodoo and Catholicism, see Robert, Paul S., Catholicism et Vaudou (Cuernavaca, Mexico: Centro Intercultural de Documentación, 1971)Google Scholar; and Jacobs, Claude F., The Spiritual Churches of New Orleans: Origins, Beliefs, and Rituals of an African-American Religion (Knoxville: University Tennessee Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

90. North American Protestant Magazine or Anti-Jesuit 1 (April 1846), quoted in Billington, , Protestant Crusade, 357Google Scholar.

91. See Anbinder, , Nativism and Slavery, 45Google Scholar.

92. See, for example, Frey, Sylvia R., “Shaking the Dry Bones: The Dialectic of Conversion,” in Black and White Cultural Interaction in the Antebellum South, ed. Ownby, Ted (Jackson: University Mississippi Press, 1993), 23–44Google Scholar.

93. Cf. Monk, Maria's “chambers of pollutions above” and “dungeons of torture and death below” (Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery [1836; rept. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1962], 344)Google Scholar.

94. Sister Mary John (Elizabeth Harrison) is referred to as the “Mysterious Lady” in the Boston, Mercantile Journal, 08 8, 1834Google Scholar, quoted by Kenneally, , “Burning of the Ursuline Convent,” 21 n. 11Google Scholar. “[D]etained in th[e] Convent … ” is from the Jesuit, August 16, 1834, quoted in “Destruction of the Charlestown Convent: Some of the Outrage from Contemporaneous Newspaper Files,” U.S. Catholic Historical Society Records and Studies 13 (1919): 107Google Scholar.

95. “She was the sauciest woman I ever heard talk” is from Buzzell, John R., “Destruction of the Charlestown Convent: Statement by the Leader of the Know-Nothing Mob,” U. S. Catholic Historical Society Records and Studies 12 (1918): 17Google Scholar, quoted in Kenneally, , “Burning of the Ursuline Convent,” 6Google Scholar. See also the accounts in Hamilton, , “Nunnery as Menace,” and Whitney, Burning of the Convent, 86Google Scholar.

96. Cf. Ragg, Thomas, Popery in Convents (London, 1837), 9Google Scholar.

97. See Ellis, John Tracy, “An English Visitor's Comments on the American Religious Scene,” Church History 36 (03 1967): 36–44, 42–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Laverdure, Paul, “Creating an Anti-Catholic Crusader: Charles Chiniquy,” Journal of Religious History 15 (06 1988): 94–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

98. See Hedrick, , Harriet Beecher Stowe, 157, 237, 250Google Scholar.

99. See Stowe, Lyman Beecher, Saints, Sinners, and Beechers (London, 1935), 188–89, 191–207Google Scholar; Birdoff, , World's Greatest Hit, 144 ff.Google Scholar; and Hedrick, , Harriet Beecher Stowe, 233 ffGoogle Scholar.

100. The Christian Diadem: A Monthly Series of Doctrinal and Devotional Essays 1 (1853): 3–4Google Scholar.

101. Westminster Review, January 1853, quoted by Klingberg, Frank J., “Harriet Beecher Stowe and Social Reform in England,” American Historical Review 43 (1938): 542–52, 545CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

102. Midgley, , Women Against Slavery, 146Google Scholar.

103. Garrison, William Lloyd, Liberator, 09 9, 1853Google Scholar, quoted in Grimsted, “Uncle Tom,” 241.

104. Hedrick, , Harriet Beecher Stowe, 257Google Scholar.

105. Holt, , Political Crisis, 161Google Scholar.

106. Flyleaf advertising new books published by Carlton & Phillips at the end of the text of M'Clintock, John, The Temporal Power of the Pope (New York, 1855)Google Scholar, unnumbered page.

107. On revivals of the Master Key, see Gunderson, Joan R., “Anthony Gavin's A Master-Key to Popery: A Virginia Parson's Best-Seller,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 82 (01 1974): 39–46, 40Google Scholar. On the establishment of Boston's Nunnery Committee, see Beals, Carleton, Brass-Knuckle Crusade: The Great Know-Nothing Conspiracy 1820–1860 (New York: Hastings House, 1960), 228Google Scholar.

108. Cross, Andrew Boyd, Young Women in Convents or Priests' Prisons (Baltimore, 1856), 24, 22Google Scholar. His defense of Monk's narrative is on pages 14–15.

109. Draft editorial, n.d., Gideon Welles Papers, quoted by Holt, Michael F., “The Politics of Impatience: The Origins of Know-Nothingism,” Journal of American History 60 (1973): 309–33, 322CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Holt notes that the nomination of Frémont came in direct response to Know-Nothing demands for a candidate “fresh from the loins of the people — a mechanic — able and jealous of the hierarchy of Rome” (Thomas J. Marsh to Nathaniel P. Banks, March 19, 1856, quoted in ibid.). On the ethnoreligious aspects of temperance, in particular, see Gudelunas, “Nativism and the Demise”; and Norton, , Alternative Americas, 72–77Google Scholar.

110. Holt, , Political Crisis, 159–62Google Scholar; Bean, , “Puritan Versus Celt,” 85Google Scholar; and Hedrick, , Harriet Beecher Stowe, 263Google Scholar. Frémont's defeat was helped along by disgruntled Know-Nothings who spread rumors of his sympathies to both Catholicism and slavery. See the anonymous pamphlet J. C. Frémont's Record: Proof of His Romanism; Proof of His Pro-Slavery Acts (New York, 1856)Google Scholar.

111. Whitney, Thomas, A Defense of the American Policy (New York, 1855), 95Google Scholar, quoted by Maizlish, , “Know-Nothing Movement,” 198Google Scholar.

112. Cited in Beals, , Brass-Knuckle Crusade, 291Google Scholar.

113. Cited in Birdoff, , World's Greatest Hit, 183–84Google Scholar; and Lott, , Love and Theft, 229Google Scholar.

114. See Lott, , Love and Theft, 33, 274 n. 16Google Scholar; and Foster, Thomas Henry, America's Most Famous Book (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Torch, 1947), 31Google Scholar. On blackness and Irishness, see Lott, , Love and Theft, 94–96Google Scholar. Topsy's desire to be “skinned, and come white” (330) would have been especially recognizable within a minstrel and popular idiom of Irish as “skinned niggers.” On this and like idioms, see Ignatiev, , How the Irish Became White, ch. 2Google Scholar, “White Negroes and Smoked Irish,” 34–61. Ignatiev notes that if Huck Finn's voice is, as Fishkin has argued, at least partly black, that voice is also, as Twain himself acknowledged, “Irishy” (58).

115. England and America: Speech of Henry Ward Beecher at the Free D-ade Hall, Manchester, Oct 9 1863, repr from the Manchester “Examiner and Times” (Boston, 1863), 34Google Scholar.

116. See Stowe, , Saints, Sinners, and Beechers, 207Google Scholar.

117. England and America, 7, my emphasis.

118. Diplomatic correspondence, 1864, in Europe Looks at the Civil War, ed. Sideman, Belle Becker and Friedman, Lillian (New York: Orion, 1960), 254–56Google Scholar.

119. Dilkes, Charles, Greater Britain (1868)Google Scholar, quoted by Bolt, , Anti-Slavery Movement, 148Google Scholar. Dilkes's book sold four editions in England and more in the United States.

120. Here I adopt and reframe Franchot's argument about William H. Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico and Parkman, Francis's France and England in North America in Roads to Rome, 35–82, esp. 35–38Google Scholar. On Protestant representations of the South's defeat as providentially ordained, see Parish, Peter J., “The Instruments of Providence: Slavery, Civil War, and the American Churches,” Studies in Church History 20 (1983): 291–320CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

121. HBS, preface to Frances Stenhouse, An Englishwoman in Utah (London, 1874), iiiGoogle Scholar.

122. Hedrick, , Harriet Beecher Stowe, 312Google Scholar.

123. HBS, House and Home Papers, 68–69Google Scholar.

124. Lott, , Love and Theft, 32Google Scholar.

125. Bremer, Frederika, America of the Fifties: Letters of Frederika Bremer, ed. Benson, Adolph (New York: American–Scandinavian Foundation, 1924), 280Google Scholar.

126. HBS, The Ministers Wooing (1859)Google Scholar, reprinted in Three Novels (New York, 1982), 601Google Scholar.

127. HBS, Uncle Sam's Emancipation, 153Google Scholar.

128. Caskey, Marie, Chariots of Fire: Religion and the Beecher Family (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 201, 202Google Scholar. Although she does not mention Caskey, Franchot develops this point in her elegant reading of Stowe, 's Agnes of Sorrento in Roads to Rome, 246–55Google Scholar. On Mandarin as recalling Sorrento for Stowe, see Hedrick, , Harriet Beecher Stowe, 383Google Scholar. On Stowe's reverence for Mary and her use of Catholic apocrypha, see Elrod, Eileen Razzari, “‘Exactly Like My Father’: Feminist Hermeneutics in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Non-Fiction,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 53 (Winter 1995): 695–720CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

129. HBS, “Introductory Essay” to Charles Beecher, The Incarnation; or Pictures of the Virgin and Her Son (New York, 1849), iv–ixGoogle Scholar, quoted in Hedrick, , Harriet Beecher Stowe, 188Google Scholar.

130. I owe this point to Brown, Gillian, who develops it in “Getting in the Kitchen with Dinah: Domestic Politics in Uncle Tom's Cabin,” American Quarterly 36 (Fall 1984): 503–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

131. On changes in the antebellum family structure, see the bibliography in Walters, “Erotic South,” 191 n. 28.

132. HBS and Beecher, Catharine, The American Woman's Home: or, Principles of Domestic Science (New York, 1869), 18Google Scholar. This revised text of Catharine Beecher's 1841 Treatise on Domestic Economy includes materials that originally appeared in Stowe's House and Home Papers and in Little Foxes.

133. HBS, House and Home Papers, 99Google Scholar.

134. This quotation comes from Mills, Job S., “A Manual of Family Worship” (Dayton, Ohio, 1900), 34Google Scholar, quoted in McDannell, Colleen and Lang, Bernhard, Heaven: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 272Google Scholar. See their discussion on pages 264–73.

135. Cf. Sobel, Mechal, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987)Google Scholar. Lynne Wardley points to links between Stowe's “sentimental practice” and West African understandings of the afterlife as well as the “fetishism” of African-American and Roman Catholic religious worlds: “Stowe's belief that some spirit inhabits all things is not only an exoticized import from the Roman Catholic and African American religions of New Orleans and beyond”; it “is by 1852 one familiar element of the nineteenth-century domestic ideology the tenets of which Stowe's writing reflected and helped to shape” (“Relic, Fetish, Femmage: The Aesthetics of Sentiment in the Work of Stowe,” in The Culture of Sentiment, ed. Samuels, Shirley [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992], 203–20, 204–5Google Scholar).

136. Cf. HBS in House and Home Papers: “‘I have often admired,’ said I, ‘the stateliness and regularity of family worship in the good old families of England, — the servants, guests, and children all assembled, — the reading of the scriptures and the daily prayers by the master or mistress of the family, ending with the united repetition of the lord's prayer by all.’ ‘No such assemblage is possible in our country,’ said Bob, ‘our servants are for the most part Roman Catholics, and forbidden to join us in acts of worship …’ ‘We cannot in this country,’ said I, ‘give to family prayer that solemn stateliness which it has in a country where religion is a civil institution, and masters and servants, as a matter of course, belong to one church … our prayers … must be more intimate and domestic’” (150–51).

137. Cf. Riss, , “Racial Essentialism,” 532–36Google Scholar. As the work of the (white, middle-class, Protestant ) “family,” this move toward essentializing race can usefully be viewed as a function of the cultivation of inwardness and self-government in children that was chief among the tasks of republican motherhood. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, the most needful and challenging subject of such a program is Topsy; as Richard Brodhead writes, “Topsy has never known herself as the object of someone's maternal affection; she has never known herself as someone's child (hence her theory of nonhuman origin: ‘I spect I grow'd’); and in the orthodox philosophy of domesticity that prevails in Uncle Tom's Cabin her lack of the experience of having her life from a loving other is what renders her without facilities for taking social authority up inside herself” (“Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America,” Representations 21 [Winter 1988]: 67–96, 86CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Eventually Topsy is successfully mothered, first by Eva and then Ophelia, and if Topsy's conversion to “be[ing] good” does not have the power to make her “come white” (Uncle Tom's Cabin, 330) still she can, according to Eva's promise, become a “bright angel” (336) in heaven. Topsy's internalization of Christian maternal authority thus primes her to take her place among what Stowe, , in How to Invest Money (London, 1852)Google Scholar, calls the “fair, godlike forms” (among them former black slaves) who greet the subject of this devotional sketch, a generous rich man who discovers on dying that not even “one of his good deeds seemed good enough to lean on; all bore some taint or tinge … before the all pure” (46–47, 44). In the blinding light of the All Pure, or what Stowe will elsewhere call “the great Invisible” (Great Men of Our Times, or Great Patriots of the Day [Hartford, 1868], 386)Google Scholar, all taints and tinges are burned away. In this life, meanwhile, blackness (like poverty) will always be with us, and if not race than racism can be purified of taint and tinge. In one sense, the Christian family state replaces the “unchristian prejudice of color” (Key, 41) with the prejudice of class: In England, writes Stowe in House and Home Papers, “the higher up the social scale one goes, the more courteous seems to become the intercourse of master and servant; the more perfect and real the power, the more is it veiled in outward expression, — commands are phrased as requests, and gentleness of voice and manner covers an authority which no one would think of offending without trembling” (House and Home, 102). This model valorizes the invisible power of middle-class motherhood that training in disciplinary inwardness installs; at the same time, it mirrors the utopic social structure Stowe credits with the power of eradicating prejudice through a trickle-down effect: “The time is coming rapidly when the upper classes in society must learn that their education, wealth, and refinement, are not their own … but that they should hold them rather … as ‘a ministry,’ a stewardship, which they hold in trust for the benefit of their poorer brethren. This is the true socialism, which comes from the spirit of Christ, and without breaking down existing orders of society, by love makes the property and possessions of the higher class the property of the lower” (Key, 43).

138. Cf. Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White; and Lipsitz, George, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies,” American Quarterly 47 (09 1995): 369–87, 370–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

139. A Harper's editorial observed triumphantly that “from this bigoted, austere, iron-willed, resisting, and persisting Saxon religionist — intolerant of other natures from the very solidity and lowering might of his own — has sprung the flexible, assimilating, compromising, all accomplished Yankee, who is neither Puritan nor Cavalier, Englishman, Irishman, Frenchman nor German, but seems to have a touch of them all” (“The American Mind,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine 15, no. 89 [10 1857]: 692Google Scholar). Compare this 1862 speech to the (Protestant) American Home Missionary Society: “Certainly unity of principle is worth more to a nation than homogenousness of race … The Great Valley already disproves the theory that the descendants of Puritan and Cavalier, Old World men and New, cannot mingle and make one” (“Address of Rev. George F. Magoun of Lyons, Iowa,” quoted in Stephenson, George M., “Nativism in the Forties and Fifties, with Special Reference to the Mississippi Valley,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 9 [12 1922]: 185–202, 202CrossRefGoogle Scholar). In earlier texts like Lyman Beecher's Plea for the West, Catholic plots to “mingle and make one” threatened to destroy the Protestant republic; in the latter model, by contrast, the power of cross-religious and crossethnic desire accrues to the Yankee's flexibility and assimilative range.

140. See De Jong, Mary, “Dark-Eyed Daughters: Nineteenth-Century Popular Portrayals of Biblical Women,” Women's Studies 19, nos. 3/4 (1991): 283–308CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

141. HBS, Woman in Sacred History: A Series of Sketches Drawn from Scriptural, Historical, and Legendary Sources (New York, 1874), 22Google Scholar; henceforth cited by page number in the text.

142. Stowe's Woman in Sacred History, with similar works by various authors, equated the “flowering” of the “Christian era” (159) with the establishment of Anglo-American culture (see the discussion in DeJong, “Dark-eyed Daughters,” 286–93), an equation that assumed the supersession of Judaism, the containment of Islam, the reform of an aberrant Catholicism, the Christianizing of heathens, and the withholding from non-Anglo-Saxon Christians of the mantle of the “sacerdotal race.” It also assumed that such formations — the slavish Oriental, the Jew whose arrogance is his refusal to leave the historical stage, the segregated Christianity of the black church, and the racial entitlement of Anglo-Saxon Christianity — coexist under the banner of a divinely modeled pluralism, for the “ear of the All-Father is as near to the cry of the impetuous, hot-tempered slave, and the moans of the wild, untamable boy, as to those of the patriarch” (27–28). Divine indifference to race becomes the source and stabilizer of racial difference: “For the formation of this [Christian] race, we see a constant choice of the gentler and quieter elements of blood and character, and the persistent rejection of that which is wild, fierce, and ungovernable. Yet it is with no fond partiality to the one, or antipathy to the other, that the Father of both thus decides” (26).

143. HBS, Great Men of Our Times, 385Google Scholar.

144. Cf. Lipsitz, , “Possessive Investment,” 369Google Scholar; and Dyer, Richard, “White,” Screen 29 (Autumn 1988): 44–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

145. A quick sampling of white, Protestant, post-Reconstruction reflection on race: “The races themselves are radically unlike,” wrote the Social Gospel theologian George Harris; to belong to a race “is to have certain characteristics which are part of one's constitution, and which one cannot change any easier than the leopard can change his spots, or the Chinaman or negro his coloring” (Inequality and Progress [Boston, 1897], 18Google Scholar). By this logic, according to another American theologian of race, Edgar Gardner Murphy, “the deepest thing about any man — next to his humanity itself — is his race,” and thus “no negro can escape, or ought to escape, the Africa of his past” (quoted in Luker, Ralph E., The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform 1885–1912 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987], 285–86Google Scholar). “We all know it instinctively,” said Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, speaking before the 54th U.S. Congress in 1896, “although it is so impalpable that we can scarcely define it, and yet so deeply marked that not even the physiological differences between the [races] are more persistent or more obvious. When we speak of a race, then, we … mean the moral and intellectual characteristics which in their association make the soul of the race, the product of all its past … an unconscious inheritance from all its ancestors, upon which argument has no effect” (Congressional Record, 54th Cong., 1st sess., 2817 ff., my emphasis). While some commentators on the sexual depravity of non-Anglo-Saxon races made it an object of Progressive reform — for example, “The darkness that rests upon Asia and the midnight that enshrouds Africa, where woman has no rights … have their appointed time to pass away in the illumination of which the American Republic is the destined centre” (Buchanan, Joseph, “The Cosmic Sphere of Woman,” Arena 1 [05 1890]: 661–81, 669, 679Google Scholar) — others, more typically, figured racial (and cross-racial) lust as beyond redemption: “There is something strangely alluring to [black men] in the appearance of a white woman; they are aroused and stimulated by its foreignness to their experience of sexual pleasure, and it moves them to gratify their lust at any cost and in spite of any obstacle” (Bruce, Philip Alexander, The Plantation Negro as Freeman [1889]Google Scholar, quoted in Williamson, Joel, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation [New York: Oxford University Press, 1984], 121Google Scholar). While the vaunted depravities of Catholicism were encoded in the body, those of blackness were also typically revenged on the body: “If it takes lynching to protect [white] woman's dearest possession from drunken, ravening beasts, then I say lynch a thousand a week if it becomes necessary” (Rebecca Felton, quoted in ibid., 128).

146. Cf. Fish, Stanley, “How the Right Hijacked the Magic Words,” New York Times, 08 13, 1995, sec. E, p. 15Google Scholar.

147. See Gates, Henry Louis Jr, “The Trope of the New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black,” Representations 24 (Fall 1988): 129–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

148. Hedrick, , Harriet Beecher Stowe, 398Google Scholar.

149. HBS, quoted in Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Fields, Annie, (Boston, 1897), 204Google Scholar.

150. On seeing the black soprano Elizabeth Greenfield perform in England, Stowe reported, an English lord declared that the “use of these halls for the encouragement of an outcaste race” constituted a “consecration,” prompting Stowe to affirm that “there really is no natural prejudice against colour in the human mind” (HBS, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, 2 vols. [Boston, 1854], 1: 284, 43Google Scholar, quoted in Lott, , Love and Theft, 235Google Scholar). On the similar consecrations that Catholics confer on the Protestant families and nations that accommodate them, see HBS, We and Our Neighbors, 244–45Google Scholar; and “Kirwan,” Romanism at Home, 245.