To the contrary, Caruthers hears in Exodus a continuing echo of “the whole tenor of the Bible” which is “a demand on all who are holding others in bondage and oppression.”173
If the Exodus text “has been overlooked, in its true import, for more than two hundred years, it is not the only important one that has shared the same fate.” Important texts on the doctrine of justification were overlooked or misunderstood “for a thousand years.” Romans 3:28 and Galatians 2:16 along with “scores of others teaching the same doctrine, were “misapplied by the whole Christian world” except by “ a little handful” who are “now known as witnesses for the truth.”174 The larger meaning of the Exodus text has suffered a similar fate but now it should be recognize that, as all of the above passages confirm, the “demand which was first made on Pharaoh, king of Egypt by Moses and Aaron and is now made by the lively oracles of God on all, here in America and every where else, who are holding their fellow men in bondage.”175
Providence
God’s demand regarding the American slaves is to “Let My people go” and it is also “enforced by his Providence.”176 Caruthers asserts God’s demand for the “unreserved and speedy surrender of our whole slave population.”177 The deteriorating economic and intellectual conditions of the slave states are cited as providential evidence of God’s demand. Caruthers understands “providence” as the “constant and absolute good which God exercises over this world and all that it contains,” including “humans and all other agencies and his employment of these agencies to accomplish his own purposes.” In the distinctive national providentialism of nineteenth-century America, providence demonstrated God’s favor on the nation as it carried out its divine purpose. While Caruthers probably embraced such a form of providentialism, he also challenged providence as a justification for slavery. “There are few words in our language,” he writes of providence, “that are in more frequent use and few that are more oftener perverted or misapplied.”178 In a longer passage on providence he writes,
It is strange how inconsiderately and unmeaningly the term is generally used; for Providence is made to favor every successful undertaking whether right or wrong. If a man has prospered in his efforts to accumulate property, tho’ it has been been by taking advantage of those who are ignorant of business or less crafty than himself, Providence has certainly favored him; . . . Slave holders talk very fluently about the wise and kind Providence which brought the negroes into this country to be civilized; but as an army when unsuccessful in battle has nothing to say about Providence, they have no notion of giving them up or of thanking Providence for taking them away.179
Caruthers challenges the assertion of God’s benevolence toward the institution of slavery often made by slavery’s proponents in the name of providence by focusing on a judicial interpretation. As explained by Nicholas Guyatt, historical providentialism interprets providence in terms of a nation’s imagined and future significance on the world stage. The rewards or punishments of providence unfolding in history are thus supportive of and tending toward that nation’s special role in the overall improvement of the world. A judicial interpretation views providence as a negative assessment of national virtue. The rewards or punishments of God’s providence are thus related to a nation’s ethical conduct rather than some larger scheme or plan.180
Both these forms of providentialism and their variations intermingle in American religious discourse and in Caruthers’s manuscript. In some parts of his argument Caruthers’s asserts his belief in the larger divine purposes for America, but in this section of his manuscript the Exodus text summons a judicial interpretation of providence in which the South is punished for slavery. The declining and poor industrial record of the South, along with its lack of contributions to literature, art, and technology, are contrasted with the North resulting in clear evidence that Providence is blessing the North and pressuring the South. From such punishments the demand of God for the freedom of the Africans can be heard.
The Five Cotton States and New York: Remarks upon the Social and Economic Aspects of the Southern Political Crisis, a lengthy pamphlet published in 1861, is cited by Caruthers at the beginning of this section, and in a few pages he offers a providential interpretation of the pamphlet’s theme. Its author, Stephen Cowell, contrasts the growing population and commercial prosperity of the Northern states with the stagnate conditions of the South. Cowell is not against slavery—it “has more friends in the Northern States than it has in all the world beside” and constitutional protection –but he details the decline of South Carolina.181 In “her colonial days . . . South Carolina stood in the front rank in point of wealth, education, and aristocratic style of living,” he writes, and the state enjoyed “high distinction in many other respects, in comparison with her sister colonies and States.” “Charleston” he says, “enjoyed a like distinction among the cities of North America, its inhabitants being in high repute for their intelligence, refinement, and liberal style of giving” but now the “State and city have fallen far behind many others in the race of population, wealth, and power.”182
Caruthers characterizes these and similar findings along with other aspects of Southern society as evidence of God’s providential demand for the release of the slaves. The divine operations of providence are enforcing the demand of Exod 10:3: “The greater prosperity of the free than of the slave states first occurs to us an important fact in God’s providential government of the world enforcing his demand for the unreserved and speedy surrender of our whole slave population.”183 The industrial, literary, and intellectual accomplishments and contributions of the north are providential signs indicating God’s blessing on the absence of slavery in the northern states. The stagnation and decline of the South is providential evidence of God’s disapproval of a slave society. Even though “southern men have as good minds as northern men,”184 the South is “indebted to the North for everything we have worth having.”
for all our valuable works on mathematics, science, and on natural, mental, and moral philosophy; on law and medicine, theology, government and jurisprudence; for all our histories, poetry, and works of taste and general literature, for our books of surveying, navigation, and improvements in farming and farming implements; for our improved breeds of horses, cattle and sheep; for our household furniture . . . In the South we may have invented a pretty good straw cutter and a bedstead that affords little or no harbor for bugs, but nothing, I believe, of more importance.185
Mark Noll has described the “flourishing of providential reasoning” during the American slavery controversy and the war that accompanied it in which Caruthers and many others of his era understood their world, its influences, events, circumstances, and “how the moral balance sheet should be read” with greater certainty. Such reasoning made “it easy to reduce the complexities of the war to simple, if sharply contrasting, providential calculations.”186 By Caruthers’s calculations the providence of God made it clear that the south should free the slaves, but like Pharaoh the south was incorrigible and would not comply. Threats of slave insurrections and the massacre of whites prompted the adoption of measures towards emancipation and education by the government however “as the price was high, when the danger seemed to have passed away, all their good feelings and resolutions vanished and, like Pharaoh of old, they resolved again that they would not let them go.”187
Caruthers reasons that the war is the outworking of the demand of Exod 10:3 now finally coming in full force upon the south: “Now what is all this for? . . . it is a war for the defense and perpetuity of slavery on the part of the South and for its abolition on the part of the North.”188 The South is like ancient Egypt under Pharaoh. Its plagues are the paucity of accomplishment in the various fields of human endeavor. The free North has prospered but within the slave society of the South “the boundaries of science have never been extended and nothing of importance has been added to human knowledge. No great inventions have been made in the useful arts and very rarely has much excellence been attained in music, poetry, painting, or sculpture.”189 The South’s deficiencies were God’s judgment against slavery according to Caruthers. Judicial providence, the “ providentialism of wrath,” explained the current economic status
