religiously determined law, there was no reason why Jews should operate a separate legal
system, except on matters which could be seen as merely internal religious discipline. Since in
America all religious groups had equal rights, there was no point in constituting itself into a
separate community. All could participate fully in a communal society. Hence from the start the
Jews in America were organized not on communal but on congregational lines, like the other
churches. In Europe, the synagogue was merely one organ of the all-embracing Jewish
community. In America it was the only governing body in Jewish life. American Jews did not
belong to the Jewish community,' as in Europe. They belonged to a particular synagogue. It might be Sephardi or Ashkenazi and, if the latter, it might be German, English, Polish, or Holland,' all of them differing on small ritual points. Protestant groups were divided on similar
lines. Hence a Jew went to his' synagogue just as a Protestant went tohis' church. In other
respects, Jews and Protestants were simply part of the general citizenry, in which they merged as
secular units. Thus the Jews in America, without in any way renouncing their religion, began to
experience integration for the first time. And this inevitably meant accepting the generalized
morality of the consensus, in which religious education was ‘character-training' and part of the
preparation for living an adult republican life.
But if even Roman Catholics and Jews could join in the American republican moral
consensus, there was one point on which it broke down completely-slavery. One sees why St
Paul was not anxious to tackle the subject directly: once slavery takes hold, religious injunctions
tend to fit its needs, not vice versa. On the other hand, the general thrust of the Judeo-Christian
tradition tended to be anti-slavery, and that was why it had slowly disappeared in Europe in the
early Middle Ages. In America the moral and political dilemma over slavery had been there right
from the start, since by a sinister coincidence 1619 marked the beginning of both slavery and
representative government. But it had inevitably become more acute, since the identification of
American moral Christianity, its undefined national religion, with democracy made slavery come
to seem both an offense against God and an offense against the nation. Ultimately the American
religious impulse and slavery were incompatible. Hence the Second Great Awakening, with its
huge intensification of religious passion, sounded the death-knell of American slavery just as the
First Awakening had sounded the death-knell of British colonialism.
Religion would have swept away slavery in America without difficulty early in the 19th century
but for one thing: cotton. It was this little, two-syllable word which turned American slave-
holding into a mighty political force and so made the Civil War inevitable. And cotton, in terms
of humanity and its needs, was an unmitigated good. Thus do the workings of mysterious
providence balance good with evil. Until the end of the 18th century, the human race had always
been unsuitably clothed in garments which were difficult to wash and therefore filthy. Cotton
offered an escape from this misery, worn next to the skin in cold countries, as a complete
garment in hot ones. The trouble with cotton was its expense. Until the industrialization of the
cotton industry, to produce a pound of cotton thread took twelve to fourteen mandays, as against
six for silk, two to five for linen, and one to two for wool. With fine cotton muslin, the most
sought after, the value-added multiple from raw material to finished product was as high as 900.
This acted as a spur to mechanical invention. The arrival of the Arkwright spinning-machine and
the Hargreaves jenny in the England of the 1770s meant that, whereas in 1765 half a million
pounds of cotton had been spun in England, all of it by hand, by 1784 the total was 12 million,
all by machine. Next year the big Boulton & Watt steam engines were introduced to power the
cotton-spinning machines. This was the Big Bang of the first Industrial Revolution. By 1812 the