the pattern for the redemption yet to come in the person of the Messiah, to whom “every knee shall bow . . . and every tongue confess,” and from whom “the church, in its ministry and membership, received a commission . . . to go and carry the light of the gospel to them that are sitting in darkness” and to “proclaim an immediate and eternal deliverance to all who were in bondage to sin and Satan.”122 Thus the claim—“My people”—is now doubled in its justification.
First, as shown above, it is justified because it is based on God’s role in the creation and preservation of Israel and all other nations. The unity and equality of humanity from the dawn of creation was grounded in their common creator. God’s claim upon the Hebrew slaves of Exodus extended to the African slaves of the South. The enslavement of Africans, or any nation, is a violation of the Exodus text and in defiance of the creator’s claim. God was the creator and preserver of all humanity and, therefore, the only rightful superintendent of the black race.
Secondly, it is based on the covenant of redemption. In the covenant, deliverance in Christ’s name is proclaimed to the Africans because their nation is also his inheritance. As a Presbyterian minister Caruthers was committed to the expression of Covenant Theology developed throughout the Reformation and its expression in the Westminster Confession of Faith. Although that expression has provoked critical dissent and substantial differences among adherents that will not be resolved any time soon, there is general agreement upon the biblical covenant as structurally circumambient, encompassing the relationship between humanity and God in an atmosphere of lawfulness, regulation, and security. For Caruthers, American slavery pollutes and clouds this atmosphere with its illegitimate claims. If the Africans belong to God through creation, and to their Messiah through redemption, they belong to no one else.
Instead of acknowledging God’s claims and “bringing them to the knowledge of salvation through the mercy of our God,” American slaveholders have enslaved and kept the Africans “in ignorance, degradation and wretchedness, from generation to generation, without any crime alleged and without any authority whatsoever from the Lord whom they profess to serve.”123 American slaveholders are therefore acting criminally towards God. They are violators of creation, preservation, and the covenant of redemption, claiming ownership of people who belong only to Christ through creation and through a pact with roots in the ancient bond God made with Abraham, reiterated throughout the Mosaic and Davidic eras, celebrated in the psalms of Israel, fulfilled in the appearance of the Messiah, and carried to the ends of the earth.
34. Caruthers, “First Samuel 15:29.”
35. The section on the covenant of redemption is the analysis of pp. 61–64 in the manuscript. Because Caruthers’s understanding of the covenant’s bearing on the question of slavery is unique in the nineteenth century, the entire second part of the present chapter is given to its explanation. Excised for separate consideration because they are more typical of antislavery literature, pp. 65–136 are examined in chapter 7 below.
36. Caruthers, American Slavery, 5.
37. Ibid., 6.
38. Ibid., 4.
39. Ibid., 5.
40. Ibid., 202.
41. Ibid., 207.
42. Caruthers, Preface to American Slavery.
43. Caruthers, American Slavery, 202.
44. Ibid., 207.
45. Ibid., 4.
46. Ibid., 6.
47. Ibid., 30.
48. Ibid., 29, 30.
49. Ibid., 30.
50. Ibid., 36.
51. Ibid., 29.
52. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:581.
53. Sherlock, A Discourse concerning the Divine Providence, 22.
54. Caruthers, American Slavery, 8.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., 9–10.
57. Ibid., 250.
58. Ibid., 10.
59. Ibid., 8.
60. Ibid., 9, 11.
61. Ibid., 12.
62. Ibid., 21, 24.
63. Ibid., 9.
64. Moses, Afrotopia, 6.
65. Caruthers, American Slavery, 9.
66. Dain, Hideous Monster of the Mind, 105.
67. Rael, “A Common Nature, A United Destiny,” 193; Dain, Hideous Monster of the Mind, 112–48.
68. Smith, The Lectures Corrected, 1:43; Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion, 119.
69. Dain, Hideous Monster of the Mind, 77.
