Five
Nativism and Its Enslavements

As the Indian was forcibly removed from America, Catholicism occupied an enlarged cultural arena for the identity-confirming drama of piety and violence, of ritual resistance to the torments and seductions of the profane initially fashioned in Indian captivity and conversion narratives. Having made its American literary debut in Jesuit and Puritan narratives of captivity, Catholicism thereafter figured crucially in the construction of antebellum Protestant subjectivity.

The powerful link between piety and sadism seen in a narrative like Jogues's resurfaced in the nineteenth century in the immensely popular tales of captivity to a punitive Catholicism. In imagining Americans trapped in convents, confessionals, and the dungeons of the Inquisition, militant Protestant nativists battled against Roman intrigue and persecution. Anti-Catholic narratives, while developing the conventional but still compelling association of the violent, the exotic, and the hidden that had structured the Indian captivity genre, moved the site for these psychic challenges from the forest to the parochial school, the nunnery, and the confessional. In the words of one "escaped" nun: "Where do you place the abode of cruelty and of curiosity? Where, but in the mysterious seclusion of the convent?"^[1]

Many antebellum Protestants imagined that a resurgent, disturbingly immigrant Catholicism aimed for their land, their children, their very souls. Embattled by this Protestant nativism that peaked in the 1830s and then again in the 1850s, Catholic leaders sometimes took the reckless offensive. In 1850, Archbishop Hughes, for example, brashly declared: "Everybody should know that we have for our mission to convert the world—including the inhabitants of the United States—the people of the cities, and the people of the country, the officers of the navy and the

marines, commanders of the army, the legislatures, the Senate, the Cabinet, the President, and all!"^[2]

Such statements threw conservative Protestants into angry panic. Lyman Beecher, whose evangelical rhetoric drew much power from artfully terrifying depictions of an imperial power that dared compete with the Anglo-Saxon, imaged the papacy as the archcaptor, holding "in darkness and bondage nearly half the civilized world" and threatening to swallow America whole. As Beecher went on to explain in his Plea for the West (1835), papal machinations were already at work to overtake the American West since Catholic policies had always sought to "compensate for losses at home by new efforts to extend their influence abroad."^[3] Only if New England funneled funds westward to establish Protestant schools could Americans hope to compete ideologically against popery, whose successful and rising number of parochial schools and dangerously populous settlement of the Mississippi River Valley promised a Roman Catholic frontier.

Fears of educational takeover paralleled visions of political usurpation, for the mind of the child and that of the voter were figured as similarly impressible. The confessional—as a mysterious architectural interior closed off from public surveillance, a place where secret dialogue transpired beyond the alleged democratizing influences of print—attracted enormous political and sexual anxiety. In the confessional, according to the nativist Protestant imagination, women were seduced and men suborned by priests who as confessors could discover the workings of home, marketplace, and polling booth and manipulate all invisibly. To nativist sections of the Whig and, later, Republican parties, the Irish immigrant was particularly susceptible to both the priest and the Democratic party machine, leagued to overthrow republican America.

Fears of political conspiracy were greatly enhanced by Anglo-American prejudice against the Irish that flared up when the Great Famine (1845-52) sent 1.25 million impoverished Irish to America in the space of a decade. Could America's still nascent democracy, one that in the 1830s actively battled the tyrannies of "King Jackson" on the one hand and the "Money Power" on the other, withstand the massive foreign influence of these spiritually "docile" Irish? Or would American politics regress to the despotism and cabalistic intrigues that typified Old World political culture?^[4] Nativists typically described the pope's impending political dominion in terms that indirectly implied their own powerlessness in an electoral system increasingly afflicted by fraud and graft. If the will of the people was divided by sectional quarrels and economic conflict, the Vatican's will was reassuringly united by its malevolent inten-

tion. Thus the author of Pope or President? Startling Disclosures of Romanism as Revealed by Its Own Writers (1859), for example, sought to convince American voters that the "hand of popery, secretly moving, misdirecting or holding in check the rights of the people," was about to grip America by the throat.^[5] This "hand of popery" operated as demonic counterpart not only to Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market but to evangelical Protestantism's hand of the Lord, a hand whose providential management of New Zion was increasingly impeded by denominational schism and the spiritual paucity of American civil religion.^[6] The Vatican hand invisibly guiding schoolchild and confessional visitant meant that any Roman Catholic with public power would be psychologically incapable of observing the constitutional separation of church and state. One popular anti-Catholic novel incited readers with "the extraordinary spectacle of the entire Postal Department—which controls the transmission of the public and private intelligence of the country—confided to the hands of a Roman Catholic, with upwards of fifty thousand offices in his gift."^[7]

Political phobias in particular were shaped by the centuries-long tradition of suspicion toward the Jesuits, confessors to generations of European royalty and hence the supposed masterminds behind domestic and international politics. As missionaries in New France, as an educated elite, and as highly placed confessors, Jesuits, as one nativist explained, "have cords drawn all around the world."^[8] Even more than Napoleon, Loyola (as we have seen for the theologically liberal Parkman) epitomized an absolute power based on the fusion of political, intellectual, and spiritual energies. According to one antebellum Protestant biographer, a single idea inspired Loyola: "that of an absolute domination over the spirits of men, and of a centralization of all powers on earth, in the bosom of one master of souls."^[9] With the revival of the Jesuit order in 1814, the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829, and the sharp rise in immigration from Catholic Europe between 1845 and 1855, a renewal of papal despotism, engineered by the Jesuits, seemed near, and "Jesuitical" intrigue became the target of Protestant missionary reprimand.

Writing for the Home Missionary Society, the liberal Congregational minister Horace Bushnell spoke in tones of Gothic alarmism, condemning Pope Gregory XVI for his politics, in which, "with few exceptions, every centre of power is the seat of some cabal; and creatures, male and female, glide about the precincts, who are able, by the base and criminal secrets in their keeping, or perhaps, by terms of partnership well understood, to open or shut at will, the gates of favour."^[10] Behind this

Gothic image of spectral figures gliding through conspiracy-ridden interiors stood American party politics (and for Bushnell in particular, Hartford church politics), whose invisible workings and all too visible corruptions propelled many citizens to abandon traditional party affiliations and subscribe to the anticonspiratorial platform of the American, or Know-Nothing, party.^[11]

It was finally difficult, however, for Americans to act decisively against the papal threat of electoral captivity. For all its ominousness, the precise nature of the popery overwhelming America remained vague: "Few have any exact knowledge of the doctrines of that Church which, through her servants, whispers seductively into the ear of a monarch, or mingles in a popular election, in order to compass her end of universal mental despotism."^[12] One writer even confessed his bewilderment in the face of his own conspiratorial suspicions; if the Jesuits achieved global dominion, "the question still comes up, what did they intend to do with the world and in it?"^[13] This elusiveness at the heart of Catholic agency was crucial to its continued vitality as a conspiratorial menace, always beckoning nativist fears toward social spaces where the figure of Romanism invisibly mingled. If to those unconvinced by the charges of Protestant alarmists such elusiveness simply signaled the absence of malign papal intentions, lack of evidence only worked to heighten nativists' certainty of intrigue. They turned for evidence of their unsubstantiated fantasies of global domination to the local mysteries of language deceitfully shared between unsupervised individuals. Captivity was to occur not through military invasion or overt political gesture but through the seemingly casual minglings of an increasingly heterogeneous and urbanized social space.

While alarmed Protestants had trouble arriving at very precise notions about their Catholic enemy, they also had correspondingly few ideas about how to ward off impending captivity; notwithstanding their meteoric rise to political power in 1854, Know-Nothing legislators failed to issue any new laws. Know-Nothing demands for a twenty-one-year naturalization period, restriction of officeholding to native-born citizens, and legislation requiring periodic inspection of convents succumbed to the greater appeal of the new Republican party platform calling for "free labor"—an appeal in which the South and slavery were cast as the nation's principal menace. Nativists' efforts to stigmatize the Catholic immigrant were thwarted both by economic realities and by the manifestly vague conception of the foreign threat, which enabled its appropriation by abolitionists in their campaign against the southern "Lords of the Lash." But if abolitionists borrowed the terms of anti-Catholic in-

vective to bolster their righteous attack on the tyranny and sensual excess of plantation life, their rhetoric hardly accorded black slaves the purity of the Protestant martyr. Rather, that status was reserved for the New Englander, intent on asserting his or her section's vision of America against the Romanish iniquities of the South.^[14]

New England hostility to immigrant Catholicism in the three decades prior to the Civil War facilitated the mounting regional attack on slavery by popularizing a usefully improbable and clearly regional rhetoric of purity and contamination, a discourse legitimized by appeal to a religious supremacism that left racial loyalties intact. One could attack the South for the Romanism of its slaveholding practices rather than the white supremacism of such customs. Thus Harriet Beecher Stowe's evangelical critique of the Catholic household of the St. Clare family in Uncle Tom's Cabin indicts slavery for its spiritual tyranny over the soul more than for its racial tyranny over the body. That little Catholic Eva attends Methodist meetings with her spiritual colleague Uncle Tom discreetly registers her escape from Romanism's toils—toils that entwine her neurasthenic punitive mother and her indolent father.

It is difficult, finally, to position anti-Catholic discourse in the sectional crisis of the 1850s; if Stowe and more radical abolitionists "Romanized" southern slaveholders, the Louisville Bloody Monday riots of 1855 found Know-Nothing agitators on the side of the South, preventing immigrant (often radical and antislavery) German Catholics from voting, thus "converting the election into a perfect farce."^[15] The increasing tensions that followed the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act splintered nativism into competing sectional alliances; for example, New England nativists allied themselves with antislavery forces against Irish Catholic immigrants while siding with southern planters who attacked German Catholic immigrants in Kentucky. Such contradictory uses of anti-Catholicism illustrate its strategic flexibility to antebellum politics and render problematic any one formulation of its position in the slavery crisis. Indeed, alarmist southerners themselves borrowed the terms of anti-Catholic discourse to depict the threat of a slave conspiracy that was seemingly confirmed by Bishop England's opening of a school for slaves in Charleston, finally closed by protests.^[16] The elusiveness of anti-Catholicism in antebellum politics enabled sectionally divided Americans to express their regional animosities while imagining their united opposition to the pope. If popular and elite fictions of Protestant captivity to Rome functioned in the 1830s and 1840s to contain the threat of the Catholic immigrant, by the 1850s they permitted North and South alike to imaginatively resist white America's impending fratricidal vio-

lence. To fight the machinations of Rome was to displace the specter of civil war; more generally, to imagine Rome as protean conspiratorial agent, confusingly allied with both pro- and antislavery forces, was to imagine an America still joined by common religious concerns.

Alarmed anticipations of an impending national captivity to popery form a revealingly distorted commentary on troubling issues of immigration, urbanization, and democracy. If the nativist efforts of the American party to purge the nation of heterogeneous "Catholic" elements represent one aspect of a recurrent American xenophobia, the literary-historical importance of antebellum nativist discourse resides in its use of an increasingly anachronistic vocabulary of theological conflict to describe and obfuscate the crises of America's transition from a "union" to a "nation."^[17] Nativist "religious" purity powerfully supplemented appeals to ethnic supremacism and racial purity, projecting contaminations of the Republic, like the capitalist regimentation of the Lowell textile mills or the miscegenation of the races, onto the foreign and tyrannous papal father. The widening controversy over the validity or permissible extent of slavery clarified this focus on Catholicism, the "foreign" religion a powerful surrogate for the "foreign race" enclosed in white America. The image of captivity to Rome, then, not only expressed the slave's captivity for the Protestant abolitionist and the slave conspirator's for the planter class but also revised the estrangements of a modernizing economy and social space into the righteous simplicities of filial revolt against Rome.

Thus in its obsessive fantasies of an impending Protestant surrender to papal mastery, much anti-Catholic writing resituated the divisive and pluralistic public sphere—whose tensions infiltrated the strenuously asserted privacies of the "domestic sphere"—in the manageable confines of an enclosed and melodramatized privacy of religious sentiment. Perplexed by the strain of conveying the "indelicacies" of slavery "delicately," even the fugitive slave Harriet Jacobs appealed to the ritual theatrics of anti-Catholicism in her pseudonymous Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Referring to her master's hidden fathering of eleven slaves, Jacobs's persona, Linda Brent, reminds readers that "the secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition."^[18] Jacobs's invocation of the Inquisition signals her owner Timothy Flint's licentious exploitation of women slaves and her own righteous expose: she will reveal the illicit excesses of his private and at times frustratingly invisible dominion. Her Inquisitional metaphor also dramatizes the intensity of her victimization and the justice of her revolt in terms profoundly familiar to her white northern readership. Such metaphorizing of herself

as Protestant victim to the subtle and largely hidden tortures of the Inquisition perilously borders on the salacious associations of anti-Catholic rhetoric widely popularized by the dime novelist Ned Buntline, who wrote, for example, of the titillating tortures of the Inquisition: "For, oh! upon that rack lay stretched the fair and half-naked form of Genita, its symmetry convulsing in matchless tortures, the bosom palpitating awfully with the pangs of that earthly hall and the exquisitely modelled limbs enduring all the pains of dislocation."^[19]

Intent finally on disclosing the intricacies of Linda Brent's psychological as well as bodily enslavement, Jacobs's narrative renders the sexual theatrics of Inquisition literature ironically: rather than eroticized torture in basement cells, she images for her northern evangelical readership a far more subversive interiority, as she tells of hiding herself first beneath kitchen floorboards and then for seven years in her grandmother's garret, from where she looks down on the master who still pursues his fugitive slave. In artfully removing herself from captivity within the sexually contaminated domesticity of Flint's household and his threatening interrogations, Linda Brent simultaneously sidesteps the nativist melodrama of anti-Catholic discourse—not only its prurient focus on female violation but also its consoling promise that ideological complexities are nothing more than Romish mysteries to be indignantly deciphered. Linda Brent's garret interior—in its solitude, its aerial superiority to masculine persecution, its surveillance of the white world—resolutely forbids the reader's "religious" arousal.

In contrast to Jacobs's suspended, calculating, and painfully protracted escape from slavery, nativist literature of the convent, the confessional, and the Inquisition recurrently imagined the pleasures of a serendipitous, instantaneous flight. The intensity of fantasied emancipation was fueled by a sentimental logic of vicarious identification with the imagined prisoners of antebellum culture. George Lippard's best-selling Monks of Monk Hall (1844) lavishly multiplied the forces of imprisonment and their (usually) female captives; Lippard's Philadelphians, though sometimes villainous, are at bottom helpless captives of capitalism, libertinism, and religious (Protestant, Catholic, and visionary) opportunism—forces not so much woven into a coherent plot by Lippard as melodramatically dismembered into the various spaces of the long-ago Catholic interior of Monk Hall.^[20]

Many contemporary observers, reluctant to acknowledge the relationship of righteous anti-Catholicism to racial and ethnic conflict, claimed that the religious paranoia and violence were incited by the flood of anti-Catholic sermons, pamphlets, and novels that saturated the an-

tebellum literary marketplace. Some of this literature, such as the reformist priest Scipio de Ricci's Female Convents, Secrets of Nunneries Disclosed (1829), was directly imported from England, where agitation over the promulgation of the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) produced a spate of anti-Catholic works. Other works made their way to America from more distant times, such as Anthony Gavin's Great Red Dragon; or, The Master-Key to Popery (London, 1725). Gavin's work was reissued three times in America (Philadelphia, 1816; Boston, 1854; Philadelphia, 1855), its popularity indicating the contemporary efficacy of such an anachronistic text. From 1800 to 1860, a partial count of anti-Catholic publications shows some 25 newspapers, 13 magazines, 210 books, 40 fictional pieces, 41 histories, and scores of giftbooks, almanacs, and pamphlets dedicated to the anti-Catholic cause.^[21]

As a strategic displacement for actual and ongoing captivities in antebellum America, anti-Catholic narratives exhibited a characteristically farcical tone. A sense of theatricality and insincerity pervades not only the frankly commercial dime-novel literature but more elite literary productions as well. Many Americans detected the imposture, sham, and simple profiteering that accompanied the often violent ideological tensions of this period. By 1835 anti-Catholicism had become a moneymaking venture that many entered into with entrepreneurial gusto. "The abuse of the Catholics," noted one magazine, "is a regular trade, and the compilation of anti-Catholic books . . . has become a part of the regular industry of the country, as much as the making of nutmegs, or the construction of clocks."^[22] The observation points to a paradoxical dynamic in American anti-Catholicism—namely, the indigenous production and consumption of an ostensibly foreign, Catholic commodity. Indeed this Old World religion, as conceived by nativist propaganda, became one of the basic ingredients in the developing American identity. Catholic perceptions corroborated the pervasive anti-Catholic slant of contemporary writing. Declared the leading Catholic journal: "There is not a single work of fiction, emanating from Protestants, which does not directly or indirectly assail the faith or morals of the Catholic Church."^[23]

The inauthentic strain at the base of the hysteria troubled some observers because it revealed a disturbing resemblance to hated popery. If the domestic manufacture of popery was aimed at bolstering the Protestant Way, it quickly assumed an ironic function as well. Much anti-Catholic writing unwittingly revealed that Protestant Americans could be as scheming and exploitative as the papists they despised. The vocabulary of Protestant disdain was fast turning in on itself as self-

critical Americans applied it to their society. Thus one review of an anti-Catholic text defined Jesuitism as

referring to all those of every religious denomination who are more zealous for their church than for Christianity, more particular about ends than means, who resist the teachings of their instincts as solicitations from the devil, who estimate their virtue by what they suffer rather than by what they enjoy; who take pride in concealing an appetite which they intend to mortify; and who, in time, form a habit of deception which spreads over the whole surface of their character, perhaps without their ever suspecting its existence.^[24]

Thus while Jesuits, as the menacing other, continued in symbolic counterpart to the developing entrepreneurial masculine identity, they were also beginning to appear as an indigenous feature of that identity. Nativist discourse was escaping from its confines and attaching itself to the interior of Protestant subjectivity. To the minister Calvin Colton, anti-Catholic writers were themselves "Jesuitical," for they used religious zeal to disguise their own greed and pornographic inclinations. The phenomenon so disturbed him that he wrote a book, significantly entitled Protestant Jesuitism (1836), which detailed how Protestantism and Catholicism ironically converged in a salacious nativist literature: "The taste for these publications and the excitement produced by them, are the natural product of that false alarm which the Jesuitism of our own country has attempted to raise against the Jesuitism of Rome. Here is rogue chasing rogue—Jesuit in pursuit of Jesuit—but the older rogue is the wiser, because he has been longer in practice: he will not be over-taken, for the sufficient reason that his pursuer is on the wrong scent."^[25]

As Colton's statement suggests, the antebellum struggle to fend off the Catholic enemy manifested a curious doubling effect that disrupted the traditional captivity model in which Protestants righteously fled from Catholic persecution. Protestants, increasingly corrupt in the same ways as their enemy, were now pursuing Rome. It was not only that Americans, by indulging in their taste for the pornographic, the inquisitional, and the violent, were practicing the very vices they ascribed to their enemy but that their conspiratorial fears also came to function as a surrogate religion, which inevitably resembled its Catholic nemesis because its shape and meaning developed through enumerating the myriad evil tenets of popery. The high ritualism and secrecy of the nativist Order of the Star-Spangled Banner is one prominent example of this surrogate effect. As a doubled representation of Protestant selfhood, the image of

Romanism attracted obsessive scrutiny precisely because it covertly promised access to the self modeled upon it. This strangely solipsistic pursuit produced a voluminous literature denying its self-bound origins. As David Reese declared in his Humbugs of New-York: Being a Remonstrance against Popular Delusion; Whether in Science, Philosophy, or Religion (1838): "Indeed the class of Anti-Popery literature, including volumes, pamphlets, tracts, and newspapers, have become so numerous, that it is impossible to read them all, unless indeed all other reading be postponed to the all-absorbing inquiry into the abominations of Romanism."^[26]

Such an "all-absorbing" fascination with Catholic iniquity indirectly confirmed the purity and unity of Protestantism.^[27] Because the Roman church had been traditionally associated with the complexity and corruption of culture, it served as an ideal antagonist in the fervent, if not entirely sincere, struggle against materialism. The threat of captivity to Catholicism's dread interiors, to its alluring and perilous worldliness, gave shape and limit to American democracy; the menace also functioned, however subliminally, as a desirable alternative to the pressures disguised beneath the optimistic rhetoric of democracy. Here as elsewhere, the Jesuits figured importantly as symbols of an alternatively constructed masculine power. Isaac Taylor's eccentric but revealing biography Loyola and Jesuitism in Its Rudiments (1857) diagnosed Protestantism's antagonistic fascination with Catholicism as symptomatic of the loss of human agency in the antebellum age, an insight unusual for the period. For all his hatred of the Jesuits, Taylor, like Francis Parkman, betrayed a self-critical curiosity about them. But unlike the famous historian, Taylor carried his analysis one step further in claiming that the fascination was not in fact with the Jesuits but with the early modern culture that produced them. At its zenith, the Jesuit order represented an era when individual agency clearly counted. By contrast, in the modern era individual power had been eroded by a vast, impersonal, and uncontrollable system:

The cessation—or the apparent cessation—of human agency, as related to the movements and progress of the moral system, seems to invite attention to the times when its power was at the height; and when the individual peculiarities and the personal history of illustrious men gave a well-defined direction to the mind of nations, and left a strongly marked image upon their forms of belief, and upon their permanent institutions.^[28]

Like many others, Taylor sought refuge from his newly "systematic" age in studying (and creating) a historical past that validated individualism

and nourished convictions strong enough to resemble the "marked image." Paradoxically, the Jesuits, representing an absolute obedience to absolute authority, enjoyed freedom from cultural enervation. They epitomized at once the captive mind and the power of individual will.

The nostalgia for a zealous but disciplined agency evinced by Taylor and others figured at the center of evangelical opposition to Catholicism and explains some of the conflicted and self-reflexive nature of Protestant fears of captivity to Rome. To many contemporary observers, their democratic age, in suppressing the rule of charismatic authority, enfeebled convictions of all sorts, religious ones included. Antebellum criticism of Rome, especially in the recurrent portraits of the malign but attentive Jesuit, aim at the recovery of agency and, for ministers in particular, the recovery of audience as well. Many of the most vocal anti-Catholic agitators, such as George Bourne and the Reverends Brownlee and Beecher, were ministers on the defensive, struggling to maintain prestige in a heterogeneous religious marketplace. From their alarmist perspective (which registered in heightened tones a queasy unrest at their decline in status) America could more easily brave a Catholic plot than the rapid proliferation of Protestant sects that apparently mocked any notion of theological design to the Christian universe. Lyman Beecher, who owed much of his fame to his crusade against Catholicism, suggested as much in outlining the Austrian-papal plot to gain dominion of the American West: "If such complicated indications of design may exist without design, as well may the broader mechanism of the world be regarded as the offspring of chance."^[29] For many antebellum Protestants, the supposed Catholic conspiracy to capture them proved not only that their faith was still vital but that their ministers were too.

Captivity structured nativist perceptions not only of papal machinations but also of Catholic dogma itself. Bondage characterized popery in all its aspects, thus presenting a satisfyingly coherent text for observers to decipher. To Nicholas Murray, the development of Catholic dogma and practice since the early Middle Ages revealed, as they did for Pastor Williams in his Canadian captivity, Catholicism's innate relationship to captivity. "These tenets," Murray explained, "artfully linked together into a great chain, forged for the purpose of binding the soul at the feet of the priest, were quietly received in those days of darkness; and the darkness was cherished by the locking up of the Scriptures from the people, and by the inculcation of an implicit faith."^[30] Murray's identification of Catholic piety with confinement, with the locking in of Scripture and of the soul, characterized liberal as well as nativist attitudes.

Illustrating this distribution of nativist discourse across theological "class lines," liberal New England Protestants even borrowed images of Catholic captivity to depict their own fear of entrapment by any orthodoxy, the specter of confinement figuring prominently in Unitarian and agnostic thinking about the spiritual life in general. Orthodoxy, whether Catholic or Calvinist, threatened to imprison the soul. From the perspective of one Unitarian writer, acceptable spirituality was closely associated with images of space and escape. In his article entitled "Sacrifice" he describes the spiritual life as poised between the alternatives of interiority and exteriority, confinement and release.^[31] Significantly, no explicit reference is made to Protestantism's quarrel with Rome, for by avoiding any hint of polemics he effectively dismisses the possible validity of their separate claims. Nonetheless, a clear ideological division remains. Liberal Protestantism implicitly figures as the way of release, Calvinism and Catholicism as the way of confinement. Presenting an amiable version of the labyrinthine interiors of Gothic fiction, the author depicts the self as a maze through which the divine spirit seeks to pass, God's chief desire being to flow through us and on into the world. The divine spirit "waits with sublime imperturbable serenity at every closed avenue, and enters at every open one" (320); our religious duty is to remain open to this spirit by emptying ourselves through a constant self-expenditure, or "sacrifice." Having let the divine enter us, we must let it exit into the world. We must not "make our bosom a terminus, rather than conduit, for the river of life" (332). Ideally, the individual should behave like a fountain, then, circulating the divine spirit through society; any attempt to confine the Deity, to horde it or hold it captive, will deform the person, for to constrain or repress this divine spirit generates the vices of "bigotry, self-mutilation, and every species of conscientious suicide" (316)—vices commonly ascribed to a monastic and penitential Rome.

Captivity to Romanism, be it on the national or individual level, was complicated by the threat of complicity. Many accused the Catholic church of luring people into its grasp, of charming their senses with the magnificence of its art or befuddling their reason with Jesuit casuistry. The widespread conviction of Catholicism's spellbinding properties suggests the discomfort yet usefulness of the felt attraction; the passivity of enchantment was psychologically safer than the activity of desire. Nativists were expert politicians of this theology of mesmerism; in effect, they created and controlled this enchanting menace in their self-appointed efforts to alert the American public to its presence. To Samuel F.B. Morse, artist, inventor, and Protestant propagandist, Catholics

lurked hypnotically and evilly like serpents in the "cradle of the embryo giant [America]." Moving quickly from pagan fantasies of America's Herculean infancy to Genesis imagery of sexual temptation, Morse hopes that the infant America, having grasped these serpents, will "neither be tempted from his hold by admiration of their painted and gilded covering, nor by fear of the fatal embrace of their treacherous folds."^[32]

Morse's use of Edenic imagery to describe Catholicism's serpentine sexual and moral temptations was typical of his time; earlier Americans had also understood the foreign religion as an extension through time of the devil's seduction of Eve. John Adams, for example, wrote to his wife, Abigail, of Catholicism's deceptive allure: "Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear, and imagination. Everything which can charm, and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell."^[33] By Morse's time, many Americans were convinced that Luther had not successfully broken the spell. Catholics hardly needed to conspire against America, for the nation's citizens were already spellbound, dangerously ready to sample Rome's delusions further. Morse's role in this prelapsarian drama was to alert Americans "who, with a facility most marvellous, fall into every snare and pleasant baited trap that Popery spreads for them."^[34] Anti-Catholic activity like Morse's could reenact the Fall in order to repair it, resurrecting Satan in order to triumph over him.

The continued reimagining of the horrors of captivity to Catholicism's labyrinthine, despotic interiors, past and present, provided an acceptable access to racial and economic worlds of subordination and dispossession disturbingly enclosed in, and forced beneath, middle-class existence. Unlike Lippard's eccentrically lurid fiction, anti-Catholic fiction more typically confined its treatment of such dispossession to the racially and economically "pure" precincts of the domestic where powerlessness could be safely figured as maidenhood trapped in the architectural complexities of the convent rather than the mazes of politics or economics. Narratives of imprisoned Protestant virgins offered a tantalizing confluence of theological and sexual preoccupations—a discursive convergence that was itself as provocative as the contents of convent life that it disclosed.