and political question, the history of the ten tribes was evidently very much on
people’s minds throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The ten tribes also surfaced in the context of the American debate over
slavery. TheQuarterly Anti-Slavery Magazinefrom New York told its readers in
1836 that “with all the wickedness of these apostate ten tribes they were
stricken with remorse” when the abolitionists were “convinced by a prophet
of the lord” that owning slaves “was a flagrant violation of the law.”^17 Suppor-
ters of slavery, on the other hand, enslaved the tribes themselves as proof of
divine approval. The 1852 Pro-Slavery Argumentexplained that “slavery existed
in Assyria and in Babylon” and that “the ten tribes were carried off in bondage
to the former by Shalmanezar.”^18
Finally, the Civil War, the second major political schism to devastate the
English-speaking world in less than a century, reintroduced the ten tribes yet
again. George Junkin ( 1790 – 1868 ), an educator and Presbyterian minister,
discussed the ten tribes’ rebellion in a treatise on the Civil War and urged the
“southern people,” whom he likened to the ten tribes, to prove that “the
sovereign powers vested in the United States have been forfeited by cruel and
tyrannical abuse.”^19 The Reverend John H. Aughey ( 1828 – 1911 ), a “refugee
from Mississippi,” warned the “supporters of secession who [were] advocating
the way of the ten tribes” that “if we, as the ten tribes, resist the ordinance of
God, we will perish.”^20 Less than a hundred years since it had been invoked in
support of the secession of the colonies from the British Empire, the secession
of the ten tribes was now used to condemn the Confederates who wished to do
the same to the Union. Such was the power of the ten tribes story to attach itself
to different political events in a culture in which the Bible played a central role.
From at least Milton’s time, the combination of a specific biblical culture
and a unique political trajectory introduced the ten tribes into the realm of
political thinking and kept them there as long as scripture enjoyed a dominant
cultural status. Their messianic promise, however, was much more powerful.
Millenarianism and Irenic Scholarship
In 1701 , Daniel Defoe invoked the ten tribes in yet another context: the gloomy
fate of the “Protestants of France.” Once “a powerful bunch,” he lamented, the
French Protestants were now “quite lost, sunk and gone.” Complaining about
the poor treatment of the Huguenots by France’s Catholic government, Defoe
depicted them as “either suppressed or driven to paupery at home, or like the
Ten Tribes of Israel, scatter’d abroad into so many unknown countries that they
have lost themselves.”^21