proponents of slavery use providence to justify slavery, while Caruthers uses providence to judge it. Like their seventeenth-century counterparts, Reformed and Presbyterian theologians of nineteenth-century America understood and emphasized providence as God’s “design and control” of all history, an “indefinite number of subordinate ends” or “a vast concatenation of causes and effects, from the first to the last moment of time –a successive flow of events, which none can arrest, but He who first set it in motion”192 but there was much more. For the historical or national providentialism of Caruthers’s generation, the term “providence” encapsulated more than the belief or fact of God’s ongoing involvement in the world. It was a term of positive evaluation in the national discourse.
God’s supportive and beneficent involvement in the making of the nation descended from seventeenth-century beginnings through the American Revolution and on into the nineteenth century, but slavery created difficulties in this scheme. America was a favored nation under the providential care of God, and there was confidence in the divine plan for the country, but the plan was largely conceived to be along strict racial lines, without Native or African Americans. The presence of slavery created nationwide confusion. The increasing population of African Americans confronted the nation with the question of how its racial diversity could fit into what was believed to be divine purposes for a nation of single color. “God had placed the United States on an upward trajectory and had shaped its past and future toward the improvement of the world,” writes Nicholas Guyatt, but “the extension of slavery . . . confounded this effort.”193
The proponents of slavery were saddled with the responsibility of providentially defending slavery, in Guyatt’s words, “until the mists that surrounded the purpose . . . of this baffling institution finally cleared.”194 For James Henley Thornwell, writing in 1861, providence justifies slavery. It is part of “a vast providential scheme” in which “God assigns to every man, by a wise and holy decree, the precise place he is to occupy in the great moral school of humanity.”195 The capacity and abilities of the Africans suit them for slavery, and until they progress, slavery practiced according to the Scriptures provides them the best possible arrangement for their improvement. It is, in fact, “a gracious Providence” for the slaves whose living conditions were now so vastly better than they had been in Africa. And the prospect of Christianizing the Africans shrinks the problem of slavery to a mere “link in the wondrous chain of Providence, through which many sons and daughters have been made heirs of the heavenly inheritance.”196
For Caruthers, writing a year after Thornwell, providence did not favor slavery but condemned it. Decisions should be made with “reference to great moral principles, or, which is the same thing, to the inspired oracles of revealed truth, and not by the permissions of Providence.” In Caruthers’s thinking, the poor performance of the Southern economy and its slight accomplishments in the arts and sciences were proof. Guyatt describes this kind of critique as the “providentialism of wrath” in which judicial providentialism raises unsettling questions about a providential rationale for slavery.197 Caruthers sees the South lowered in its circumstances by the providence of God and near destruction unless the slaves are freed.
To further his point Caruthers contrasts the “habits of industry, economy, and enterprise” of young men raised in the North to the “idleness . . . hunting, fishing, gambling, and other frivolous amusements” of the ordinary Southerner. The atmosphere of the North is “like a great bee hive, where men, women, and children are all going from sunrise to sundown, as busy as bees” compared to the South where “one fourth of the population are little better than drones . . . sitting on the benches at every tavern door, some half a dozen . . . white men, generally slaveholders” or their “beardless sons . . . smoking their cigars, cracking the heels of their boots together and talking politics.” In the North where slavery is absent “intellectual powers above mediocrity” are directed into “one of the learned professions, for scientific and literary pursuits, or . . . the application of mechanical philosophy to mechanical inventions and improvements” but the presence of slavery in the South stunts similar ability resulting in “so few southerners who have made very great scientific and literary attainments.”198 For Caruthers the providence of God has made clear the “simple and undeniable facts . . . in regard to the condition of the South. ”199 “In a slave country” he writes with unequivocal certainty, “there is nothing to produce . . . a full and complete development of all the human powers.”200
Whether providence is used to justify the enslavement of two million Africans in antebellum America, the founding of Massachusetts by the pilgrims in 1629, or something as esoteric as the addition of vowel points to the Hebrew consonantal text in the Christian era,201 or even the invasion of Iraq by the American military in 2003,202 the absolute government of God over all creation has always provoked questions about human responsibility. Caruthers’s understanding of providence descends from its seventeenth-century Reformed definition as God’s “most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all his creatures and their actions” as stated in the eleventh question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism. The latter aspect of government predominates in Caruthers’s discussion of providence and the slavery controversy in light of the Exodus passage. God, in the words of the fifth chapter in the Westminster Confession of Faith, “doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least by his most wise and holy providence.”
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