CHAPTER XIII.
RECONSTRUCTION.
Seven years of war left the American people exhausted, impoverished, disorganized, conscious of having come into possession of a national existence, and stirred with anxious searchings of heart over the question what new institutions should succeed to those overthrown in the struggle for independence.
Like questions pervaded the commonwealth of American Christians through all its divisions.

The interconfessional divisions of the body ecclesiastic were about to prove themselves a more effectual bar to union than the political and territorial divisions of the body politic.
The religious divisions were nearly equal in number to the political.
Naming them in the order in which they had settled themselves on the soil of the new nation, they were as follows: 1.

The Protestant Episcopalians; 2.

The Reformed Dutch; 3.

The Congregationalists; 4.