Religion between the testaments: Biblical reconciliation in antebellum-American literature and thought (Joseph Smith, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown)

This dissertation describes the literary response to the crisis that threatened to divide America in the decades preceding the Civil War. While Puritan typology and its eighteenth-century application by Jonathan Edwards established the Bible as a unifying cultural force during the colonial and Revolutionary eras, the hermeneutic of the antebellum decades, a literal interpretation of the Bible through the lens of Scottish commonsense philosophy, rendered the text itself a site of conflict.; National arguments about slavery, sectarianism, frontier settlement, and Indian removal were exacerbated by the ease with which advocates of opposing positions cited passages from the Bible to support their arguments. Responding to the rifts threatening to divide America, the four representative writers addressed in this dissertation propose a reconfigured Christianity, one that strives to achieve the synthesis of Puritan exegesis while simultaneously meeting the demands of the nineteenth-century literal hermeneutic. Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon, James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred, and John Brown's prison letters were four of the most widely discussed and distributed texts written in the antebellum era. Despite differing political, literary and religious commitments, these authors share a surprisingly cohesive and distinctly American Christianity. The literary genius of these four figures lies in their ability to reconcile the potentially conflicting moral models of the Old and New Testaments in their own works. The result is a between-the-testaments Christianity, a Christianity designed to address the specific religious and political conflicts of antebellum America.