The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion

Chapter 3. The Christian Plot: Stowe, Millennialism, and Narrative Form

CHAPTER 3 The Christian Plot Stowe, Millennialism, and Narrative Form Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand. —Revelation 1:3 Throughout the nineteenth century, it was a widely held belief that the millennium was imminent. Established denominations and new religious movements alike shared the belief that the divine kingdom would soon be established on Earth, and religious leaders as diverse as Lyman Abbott , Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Bushnell, Alexander Campbell, Lorenzo Dow, Dwight L. Moody, John Humphrey Noyes, and Joseph Smith all maintained that the religious fulfillment of human history was impending.1 The evangelism of the American Home Missionary Society, one of the era’s leading Protestant organizations, was openly motivated by the desire to prepare humankind for the impending millennium, and revivalist Charles Finney assured an audience in 1835 that “if the church will do all her duty, the millennium may come in this country in three years.”2 William Miller, a Baptist minister from Upstate New York, created a veritable frenzy of millennialist fervor with his conviction that Christ would return by March 1844, but the failure of his projection in no way dimmed widespread millennialist expectation . Americans interpreted both the economic collapse of 1837 and the revolutions of Europe in the 1840s as signs of the coming apocalypse.3 Even Lincoln’s second inaugural address registered the widespread belief that the 104 Chapter 3 United States would play a pivotal role in the coming millennium, as with his assertion that the nation remains “the last, best hope of earth.”4 Millennial anticipation was everywhere visible in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, and, unsurprisingly, it surfaces in contemporary religious literature by women writers. As Herbert Ross Brown observed in 1940, “The ebullient prophets of the sentimental generation were confident that the millennium was just around the corner.”5 In Catharine Sedgwick’s 1835 novel, Home, Mr. Barclay interprets the spread of democracy and the erosion of class hierarchies as “some heralds of this millennium.”6 In Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide, World, John Humphreys testifies to his millennialist conviction: “I know that a day is to come when those heavens shall be wrapped together as a scroll—they shall vanish away like smoke, and the earth shall wax old like a garment;—and it and all the works that are therein shall be burned up.”7 Sarah Josepha Hale’s Northwood (1852) anticipates that the millennium will enable “great elements of human progress,” such as the “change [of] man’s heart” and the imprisonment of Satan.8 The closing chapter of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin offered the most famous literary avowal of millennialist belief in the entire century, let alone among nineteenth-century women’s writing. Insisting that the impending millennium necessitates the abolition of slavery, Stowe enlists the thundering oratory of the pulpit to urge readers to “read the signs of the times!”9 The imminence of the millennium, she proclaims, is evident in the revolutionary upheaval sweeping Europe and encroaching on the United States. “This is an age of the world when nations are trembling and convulsed. A mighty influence is abroad,” she insists, “surging and heaving the world, as with an earthquake. . . . Every nation that carries in its bosom great and unredressed injustice has in it the elements of this last convulsion.”10 The source of this international turmoil, she contends, is the “the spirit of HIM whose kingdom is yet to come,” an event that will soon transpire in a “day of vengeance” [emphasis in original] in which Americans will have to face the “wrath of Almighty God” for the collective national sin of slavery. Similar rhetoric pervades Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), in which the novel’s titular character, the fugitive slave Dred, prophesies the vengeance that will be enacted with Christ’s return. Where Uncle Tom’s Cabin only foretells the imminent destruction of American civilization, Dred dramatizes such an event, as slavery unleashes chaos and lawlessness that ravage the basic structures of civilized society, among them family, law, and religion. In fulfillment of biblical prophecy, the high in Dred are laid low, forced to live as fugitives in a grisly swamp, while the most loathsome, base 105 The Christian Plot elements of society become the new...