The introduction outlines the book’s argument that biblical and constitutional debates over slavery introduced a sense of historical distance from the founding era and the biblical past. It also defines key terms, including historical distance, sacred texts, and favored pasts, and outlines developments by which the Bible maintained its status as a sacred text, while the Constitution achieved a similar kind of status in antebellum America. These developments set the stage for the process by which debates over slavery began to historicize the biblical and constitutional pasts. This process corresponded with the broader emergence of a modern historical consciousness. And yet, the nature of American religious and legal culture, and the presence of slavery, gave unique shape to American historical awareness. The book makes its most innovative move in showing how slavery encouraged interpretive shifts to read both the Bible and the Constitution as historical texts. I focus on a range of thinkers and interpreters and read their writings with an eye toward measuring historical consciouness. This approach demonstrates that the crisis over slavery in America became a crisis of historicity.

The prologue spotlights twenty-first-century uses of both the founding era and the biblical past to introduce the book’s central contention that biblical and constitutional debates over slavery cultivated a sense of historical distance in antebellum America. The prologue points to examples of how contemporary Americans both ignore and highlight historical distance in making political use of the founding era and the biblical past. It suggests that in both the antebellum era and in the twenty-first century, politics has shaped American approaches to these pasts and their corrsponding texts – the Bible and the Constitution. At the same time, the prologue maintains that the idea of the past as distant, which has become a common assumption in our period, only began to emerge in the antebellum era. To highlight the continuities and differences between antebellum and twenty-first century thought, the prologue references phrases such as “black lives matter” and “make America great again,” even as it points towards its central focus on the antebellum developments that shed light on the meanings of such phrases.

The epilogue indicates continuities and changes in American historical thought, highlighting the persistence of the ways in which politics inform historical awareness, and also showing that Americans continue to read the Constitution and the Bible in spite of – or in light of – historical awareness. While drawing attention to these continuities, the epilogue emphasizes differences in thought as well, particularly the fact that Americans today are more likely than their antebellum predecessors to engage in or to be confronted by conversations revolving around ahistorical and historical thinking. Twenty-first-century historical consciousness can be seen in aspirationalist readings of the Constitution and approaches to the Bible that deliberately account for historical distance. In attending to both continuities and changes, the epilogue underscores Americans’ continued efforts to bridge the meaning of founding documents to our new times, while also emphasizing the limitations of these approaches. A focus on the founders has allowed white Americans to avoid fully confronting the facts of slavery and racial prejudice in our past and, as a result, in our present.

The conclusion summarizes the book’s central contention that antebellum interpretive debates over slavery encouraged contextual readings of sacred texts and deepened a sense of historical distance from America’s favored biblical and founding pasts. It restates the argument that while some aimed to set aside the historical distance and change their readings revealed, others used distance and change in advancing new readings of the Bible and, especially, the Constitution. The conclusion narrates how Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln continued to use historical distance and the insight of historical contingency in working towards slavery’s abolition. Douglass found hope in Lincoln’s election, the Civil War, and the Emancipation Proclamation, and despite crucial differences between them, Douglass and Lincoln continued to advance antislavery readings of the Constitution based in the framers’ expectation of abolition. This reading gave shape to Lincoln’s Proclamation and his Gettysburg Address. The conclusion also indicates the limitations of approaches like Lincoln’s and emphasizes the need today for new kinds of historical narratives and new kinds of actions.

This chapter shows that thinkers across the antebellum religious spectrum, from Charles Hodge’s orthodox Calvinism to Andrews Norton’s liberal Unitarianism, accepted history as the favored battleground in debates about canon and religious truth. These developments had colonial roots, but flowered in the nineteenth century. Although America’s antebellum biblical scholars responded differently to developments in German biblical criticism, those developments led them to defend their canonical choices with historical arguments, base their hermeneutics in historical analysis, and center their epistemologies in historical knowledge. Even those who rejected aspects of historical interpretation nonetheless recognized the need to address historical readings. Whether in using historical readings or in dismissing them as dangerous or problematic, American biblical interpreters’ efforts highlighted crucial contextual differences between their world and the biblical pasts they looked to for guidance. In short, the stress on historical difference in biblical interpretation introduced a sense of historical distance, which carried with it the threat of questioning the Bible’s relevance.