Under the controlling provision of the First Amendment, ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. . .' sects did not become illegal if they offended Christian dogma. But Christian morals and social customs were a different matter, and Mormonism was in continuous battle with the state until polygamy was renounced in 1890. Gnosticism was thus perfectly acceptable within the American total, and voluntary, Christian society, but only provided it genuflected to Protestant morality. It was subject to this qualification that Catholicism was tolerated. It was not so much forced to change itself as to develop a highly defensive posture, which to some extent came to the same thing. Although American Christianity escaped religious warfare, the witchcraft frenzy showed that it was not immune to fanatical infection, and at times the development of Protestant horror-literature aimed at Catholics came close to bringing about a breakdown in the consensus. Of course, to many Protestants, a number of Catholic institutions infringed the moral consensus in spirit, even if they did not actually defy it legally, as the Mormon polygamists did. One example was convents, the objects of a campaign by the Protestant Vindicator, founded in 1834. The next year saw the publication in Boston of Six Months in a Convent, and, in 1836, Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal, written by a group of New York anti-Catholics. This was followed by Further Disclosures and The Escape of Sister Frances Patrick, Another Nun from the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal. Maria Monk herself was arrested for picking pockets in a brothel and died in prison in 1849: but her book had sold 300,000 copies by 1860 and was termed 'the Uncle Tom's Cabin of Know nothingness’. (It was reprinted as recently as 1960.) An Ursuline convent was burned down by a Boston mob in 1834 and those responsible were acquitted - Protestant juries believed Catholic convents had subterranean dungeons for the murder and burial of illegitimate children. There were also widespread fears of a Catholic political and military conspiracy - fears which had existed, in one form or another, since the 1630s, when they were associated with Charles |. In the 1830s, Lyman Beecher's Plea for the West revealed a plot to take over the Mississippi Valley, the Emperor of Austria being in league with the Pope. Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, made the conspiracy more plausible by suggesting that the reactionary kings and emperors of Europe were deliberately promoting Catholic emigration to America as a preliminary to a take-over. (Morse was not particularly Protestant, but, during a visit to Rome, he had been outraged by a papal soldier who had knocked off his hat when Morse failed to doff it to a religious procession.) In fact, during the 1850s, America's population rose from 23,191,000 to 31,443,000, or almost fifty per cent, more than a third of the increase being due to immigration. This brought the Catholic issue into politics with the emergence of the secretive ultra-Protestant American Party, whose '! don't know' answer to a key question led to their popular title, the 'Know Nothings’. The party became a national force before being merged into the Republican Party in 1854; and it was a matter of note that, whereas the Republican Party became identified with the anti-slavery campaign, the Roman Catholic hierarchy remained non-committal on the issue, and took virtually no part in the crusade. This brings us to the second precondition needed to make the American politico-religious system work. As we have seen, there was no difficulty about the level of religiosity. But the second precondition was a level of agreement on certain basic moral and ethical notions as interpreted in public institutions. It was here that the system broke down, for American Christianity could not agree about slavery. One sees why St Paul was chary of tackling the subject head-on: once Slavery is established, religious injunctions tend to fit its needs, not vice versa. In the United States, the dilemma had been there right from the start, since 1619 marked the beginning both of representative government and of slavery. But it had slowly become more acute, since the identification of American moral Christianity - its undefined national religion with democracy made slavery come to seem both an offence against God and an offence against the nation. Political and religious arguments reinforced each other. 117