The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America

Chapter 2. Amalek and the Rhetoric of Extermination

C h a p t e r  Amalek and the Rhetoric of Extermination John Corrigan The Bible is true. —Andrew Jackson The definitive nineteenth-century biography of the nation’s seventh president concluded with its author observing: ‘‘It does not appear that he ever repented of anything, ever thought that he had been in the wrong in anything, or ever forgave an enemy as a specific individual.’’1 But as William Graham Sumner and a throng of other biographers since have noted, the General gave signs of embracing the good book, especially late in life, when he doled out morsels of its wisdom, wrapped in words of tender affection, to his family and friends during his final June, in 1845. In assessing his life and representing it to others, and in communicating his aspirations for his adopted son and grandchildren, he deployed the language of biblical faith that they all shared and recognized as the linguistic vehicle best suited to deathbed farewells. For Jackson and his circle, and for many other Americans as well, the Bible was true in all kinds of ways, from the literal veracity of its words to its beautiful consolations and intuitively appealing provocations and its status as iconic artifact, a book that could be held, smelled, and felt. From the colonial era through the antebellum decades, the Bible profoundly informed the lives of many Americans. The Old Testament, in particular , furnished a living archive of images of leaders, brigands, prophets, warmakers, and slaves, their trials and triumphs, devotions and doubts. The literature of the early Republic itself was saturated with references to the Old 54 Ideologies of Tolerance and Intolerance Testament. Americans habitually imagined themselves into the stories about the Israelites, seeing their own causes joined with those of Moses, Abraham, Saul, and Ruth. Christians and Jews, and the unchurched as well, fashioned complex self-understandings, individual and collective, from those inspiring stories. It did not matter that the patterns of interpretation and application that they wove were often byzantine in their architecture, or paradoxical, or entirely contradictory. Americans banked on the appropriateness of biblical themes, characters, and plots in sorting out the meanings of things in the Republic. The American experience in the colonial setting and the early Republic unfolded within the narrative of the Old Testament just as much as it was ruled by the various legacies of the Enlightenment, the ethos of democracy , the market, and the blight of slavery. As the Harvard historian Perry Miller observed a century later, ‘‘The Old Testament is truly so omnipresent in the American culture of 1800 or 1820 that historians have as much difficulty taking cognizance of it as of the air people breathed.’’2 The influence of the Old Testament, at least in as much as it furnished controlling imagery for thought, constituted an important part of what another twentieth-century writer, Pierre Bourdieu, might have called a doxa, ‘‘the ensemble of fundamental beliefs which do not even need to affirm themselves in the guise of an explicit dogma, conscious of itself.’’3 Included in that doxa was an understanding of the nature of religious conflict. The fact of biblical literacy among readers meant that writers could shorthand their arguments without losing texture by invoking a proper name or geographic feature or string of words in place of an otherwise longer prose elucidation. Such shorthand was especially expedient in cases where authors were intent on drawing sharp distinctions between social groups. In figuring difference, they might juxtapose the Mosaic community of believers to the cruel Egyptians who enslaved them, or congratulate Esther on outing the evil Haman, or simply reference the story of Cain and Abel. Polemicists whose claims required the master stereotype of an acutely blameworthy group conjured the story of the Amalekites . The Amalekites, descended from Esau, appear in several places in the Old Testament. Or more properly, they disappear, for their fate at the hands of God is to serve as fodder for a massacre that, when recalled by the Israelites over time, will instruct the faithful in the importance of obeying God’s commands . The Amalekites were a wandering tribe that trailed the Hebrews during their flight from Egypt, falling upon the sick and weak in the rear, killing them and claiming their possessions.4 Moses presided over a miracle Amalek and the Rhetoric of Extermination 55 in the desert in which...