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| 27 2 Building the New Jerusalem The High Tide of the Seven Sisters “Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February . . .” With these words Harriet Beecher Stowe began one of the most popular, controversial, and important works in American literature: Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Written in response to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and published in book form in 1852, Stowe’s work is generally credited with helping to shift Northern public opinion from apathy to generally antislavery in nature, and thus adding to the other forces that brought on the Civil War.1 But the book is much more than just a piece of abolitionist propaganda, for it marks the ascent of evangelical Protestantism in the United States and the corresponding arrival of the Seven Sisters as a virtual establishment in the young nation.2 The European roots and colonial founding gave American Christians all the necessary ingredients to create the Mainline of the Seven Sisters. The established denominations, the Episcopal and Congregational churches, with their cultural impact, were in place. The ending of state-sponsored churches (even if the states themselves retained a largely religious-based interest in the legal promotion of morality) over the first half of the nineteenth century not only unleashed the competitive nature of American denominationalism but corresponded to the rise of the democratic impulse, which saw the creation of new denominations and the reorganization of old ones. The Seven Sisters emerged out of this milieu, overcoming war and dramatic societal changes, and creating a virtual establishment that lasted well into the twentieth century. Awakening and War Even as the nation was recovering from the Revolution, it was pushing forward , or more precisely, westward. Between 1790 and 1860 the United States moved from thirteen states clinging to the Atlantic coastline to controlling 28 | Building the New Jerusalem what modern Americans would view as the “lower 48.” This westward expansion was met with a good deal of excitement as well as fear over the future, not only on behalf of the prosperity of the country but also for the nation’s soul. As pioneers moved from the East, would God go with them—as westward expansion was couched in the religious notion of manifest destiny—or would they become cut off from organized religion and civilization, descending into some sort of lawless (and pagan) state of nature? The Episcopalians and Congregationalists were unready to deal with this potential problem, or at least they were unsure of how to act. The pillars of colonial Christendom were struggling to find their place in the new America as disestablishment hit them the hardest. The Episcopal Church was tainted by its English roots despite its new, official name as the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, and the Congregational Church was mired in a divisive doctrinal debate related to a proposed merger with the Presbyterian Church. For these reasons, many people believed the religious faith of the nation was at low ebb in the years after the Revolution.3 The nation now faced some real problems. The diversification of the American economy, which comprised commercial agriculture in the Midwest , cash crops in the South, and industrialization in the Northeast—corresponding to regionalism—and the South’s reliance on slave labor, were all soon causing a political crisis that ended in civil war. While slavery was hardly the only issue discussed, it soon became the most important. Religious debate over it and calls for other reforms only exacerbated tensions in the nation.4 Likewise, the nation’s Protestant Christians faced another challenge as well, which also affected the future Mainline. During the mid-1800s, the nation welcomed the first wave of large-scale immigration from Europe since the Revolution. Prompted by war, famine, and political disruption, and tied to both cheap land in the West and a growing industrial capability in the Northeast, these immigrants, primarily from Ireland and Germany, were largely Roman Catholic. To many native-born Americans, such an influx brought with it societal strain and challenge, and also religious tension. The Reformation divide between Protestants and Catholics was still very much alive, and the early nineteenth century witnessed a wave of anti-Catholicism, which included riots and bloodshed.5 These events helped bolster both Catholic and Protestant identity, each largely independent of the other. Not surprisingly, America’s churches unleashed another wave of revivals along with reforms in response to these tensions. While not quite as transatlantic as the first, the...

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