Little of the literature on fundamentalism is devoted to its 19th-century precursors. I am examining the origins of one, the dispensationalist movement of the late 1800s. Dispensationalism is an exegetical scheme developed in the 1830s by John Darby, an Irish separatist. For reasons that have not been adequately explained, dispensationalism became popular in the United States after the Civil War. My thesis is that dispensationalism succeeded because it provided a response to the theological problems that faced American Protestants after the Civil War, and because its social implications were appealing to northern conservatives. Dispensationalists read the Bible as a cyclical narrative of the interaction between God’s grace and man’s sin. This interaction was a fundamental principle that explained human history, past and future. Furthermore, they claimed that the interpretive key to the Bible was contained in the Bible itself, allowing them to retain the traditional American belief that Scripture could be fully understood by any literate reader. Finally, dispensationalists drew a strict line between the church and the kingdom, a move that had profound political consequences for early British dispensationalists. This appealed to Christians who feared that Northern and Southern churches identified too closely with their sections' political aims.