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 quasi-sacred 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.
Perpetual Scriptures in Nineteenth-Century America 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, Joseph Smith, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller,
Theodore Parker, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Frederick
Douglass, Martin Delany, Abraham Lincoln, and other religious and
political leaders and men and women of letters helped define American
literary culture as an ongoing quest for new "bibles," or what Emerson
called a "perpetual scripture."
