Sequel to Part I: Sustaining Awakening
By ChatGPT as Harry Turtledove
The Wound and the Table
The hall in Philadelphia was thick with voices—angry, impassioned, righteous. The Fugitive Slave Act had already torn through the unity revivalists had built, but still, they gathered.
Not to debate, not to legislate, but to submit.
To take the bread and the cup together, and leave the judgment to Christ.
James W.C. Pennington, a former slave who had become a powerful voice in the church, stood at one end of the table. His sermons had moved abolitionists and cautious moderates alike, calling them to see the image of God in the enslaved. But tonight, he was doing something even harder.
He was standing beside men who defended the law that would return his people to bondage.
Charles Grandison Finney was there, too, but not at the center. Not tonight. Tonight, Christ alone would judge.
The debate had raged for hours.
Would they break bread together? Could the men who called slavery a sin and the men who called it a God-ordained order kneel side by side before Christ? Could encommunication survive this?
The murmurs turned to shouts.
A man—one of the Southern delegates, red-faced and shaking—shoved his chair back, hands balled into fists.
“I will not kneel beside a man who calls me a sinner for defending my own household! Who says my brother, my father—my people—are damned for upholding Scripture as it was given to us!”
Pennington stepped forward.
“Would you kneel beside Christ?” he asked, his voice measured, but heavy with the weight of a hundred years of pain.
The man’s face twisted. His hand moved.
No one saw the knife until it was too late.
A quick flash of steel, a sharp gasp—and Pennington staggered back.
For a moment, no one moved.
Then chaos erupted.
Men surged forward, some to catch Pennington as he fell, some to seize the attacker, who stood as still as stone, horror creeping into his face as the reality of what he had done settled in.
A shout rose—“Hang him! Hang him!”
But before the first fist could swing, Pennington’s voice cut through the noise.
“Stop,” he said, breath ragged. His hand, slick with blood, clenched the wound in his side.
“He—he is my brother.”
No one spoke.
Finney’s heart hammered as he knelt beside Pennington, pressing a cloth against the wound. The other ministers looked from one another to the man who had done it, then back again.
Justice demanded blood for blood. The law—the same law that so many here railed against—demanded it.
But encommunication demanded something else.
Pennington lifted his head, looking at the bread and the cup, still untouched on the table.
“Let him take it,” he rasped.
A murmur ran through the crowd.
“What?”
“He—he tried to kill you—”
“He did.” Pennington swallowed, pained. “And I—forgive him.”
The room held its breath.
Pennington’s shaking hand took the bread. He lifted it to the man who had struck him down.
“If Christ will judge him,” he whispered, “let it be at this table.”
The Table Holds, But the Nation Shakes
That night, the bread and the cup were taken. The assembly wept, argued, wrestled with their souls—but they did not break apart.
The murderer was not cast out.
Christ alone would judge.
And for a time—a brief, flickering moment in history—it seemed that the unity of the Second Great Awakening had held.
Until January 9, 1861.
Until Fort Sumter.
Until the guns spoke.
The First Shots
The news came like a storm cloud rolling in from the South.
Charleston Harbor, already a powder keg, had finally exploded.
Union supply ships, trying to reach Fort Sumter, were fired upon. Not random gunfire, not hotheaded civilians, but cannon shot from Southern batteries.
A declaration, more than a battle.
The war hadn’t started—not yet. But the moment the first shots rang out, it was only a matter of time.
Finney stood in his study, staring at the letter in his hands, the ink smudged where his fingers gripped it too hard.
He had known.
He had known this moment would come.
They had held the revival together through argument, through forgiveness, through bloodshed and unity at the table.
But could they hold it through war?
To Be Continued…
In Part II, have James Pennington struck down during a heated debate, and accidentally given a mortal wound. Have the assembly ready to hand the murderer over to the authorities, but Pennington pleads for forgiveness and encommunicates him, drawing the assembly together. But will it be enough after shots are fired on Jan 9 near Fort Sumter?
ChatGPT Prompt
Radically Happy 
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