In the tumultuous decades of rapid expansion and change before the Civil War, Americans confronted a cluster of overlapping crises whose common theme was the difficulty of finding authority in written texts. Putting religious and literary studies in conversation, Jeff Smith presents key features of the writings, careers, and cultural politics of several prominent figures as responses to these 19th-century textual challenges. "Perpetual Scriptures" in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture explores several disruptive developments arrayed around the issue of textual authority: rising challenges to the traditional authority of the Bible; persistent worries over America's lack of a "national literature" and an independent national cultural identity; clashing interpretations of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as they gradually became a kind of quasi-sacred secular canon; and, from the opposite direction, the rapid emergence of a new print culture that put a premium on mass-produced text that was immediate and urgent, but often unreliable. In so doing, Smith analyzes varied attempts to vindicate the sacred and merge the timeless with the immediate by religious and political leaders such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joseph Smith, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln. These men and women of letters helped define American literary culture as an ongoing quest for what Emerson called "a perpetual scripture," or new modes of written expression with high authority like the Bible's, but rooted in the real, ongoing experience of the nation and its people. This study ties together various movements and projects to show what was distinctively American about them and what they reveal about the inherent problems and limits of textual authority.