Higher laws: The making of religion in antebellum American literature

Higher Laws argues that religion in the antebellum lexicon is an inherently unstable concept constituted through comparisons of diverse beliefs and practices across lines of inscribed colonial and racial difference. Given the comparisons that constitute religion, it is a concept not so much defined as emplotted. Jurists, orators, and novelists alike turn to narratives, metaphors, and other modes of writing more literary than technical in their effort to consolidate or challenge, stabilize or unsettle, the meaning of religion. Higher Laws focuses on antebellum American writers who leveraged the conceptual instability of religion to forge moral discourses that overstep the boundary between religion and politics constructed by U.S. law. These writers challenged political thinkers and jurists who sought to stabilize the meaning of religion and delimit its authority according to the dictates of law in the decades following the American Revolution. Such political and judicial efforts were part of a broader cultural trend, powerful but by no means hegemonic, that made religion and American law proximate to each other. Maintaining that the imperatives of religion were consonant with the imperatives of law in effect drew the conceptual boundaries of religion in a way that aligned religion with republican government, civilization, and the rule of law and foreclosed extralegal action premised on appeals to a higher law. Higher Laws examines literary and rhetorical strategies by which antebellum American writers contested this lawful religion by comparing religion to, and distinguishing it from, superstition. At a time when the United States was heralded as a redeemer nation fulfilling a providential history by spreading Christianity, civilization, and science across the continent, and when proslavery thinkers were lending slavery the moral sanctity of Christianity, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, William Apess, Orestes Brownson, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Beecher Stowe composed narratives that uphold the superiority of religion to U.S. law even as they unsettle the claims of Protestant institutions, traditions, and theology to the divine authority of religion