the borders of his native state,” but his ordeal made a lasting impression on the author describing his flight, another Salisbury native, Hinton Rowan Helper.
Helper’s controversial polemic, The Impending Crisis, accused slavery of undermining the economic development of southern farmers, reducing them to abject misery, ignorance, and poverty. His book’s demand for emancipation played upon southern fears of slave insurrections provoking hysteria throughout the south. “Do you aspire to become the victims of white non-slaveholding vengeance by day,” he asks the slaveholder, “and of barbarous massacre of the negroes by night?” He warns them,“ You must emancipate them—speedily emancipate them or we will emancipate them for you!”26 As throughout the entire south, the book was banned in North Carolina, and Helper was described by one of his state’s senators as “ a dishonest, degraded, and disgraced man,” an “apostate son” of North Carolina who was “catering to a diseased appetite at the north, to obtain a miserable living by slanders upon the land of his birth.”27
Not far from Caruthers’s Greensboro church, Daniel Worth, a Wesleyan Methodist minister and native of Guilford County was charged with the circulation of Helper’s book in 1859. A mob surrounded the Greensboro jail holding him and it was feared he would be lynched. He eventually went to trial and was found guilty but skipped bail, fleeing to the North where he earned the money to repay his bondsmen.28
The response to Hedrick, Helper, and Worth is indicative of what awaited those who were publicly critical of slavery in North Carolina during the war. Unlike them Caruthers was not an agent of change, but he may have been an agent of the acceptance of change. He must have believed he could do more good if he remained in North Carolina, and he was probably right. He did not make change possible or certain, but the presence and stature of people like him may have made it more acceptable. When emancipation finally came many members of his congregation or others in the Greensboro community, who had conversed frequently with him over his forty years of ministry and with whom he had probably discussed the slavery question, were able to receive emancipation with an attitude otherwise unattainable were it not for the influence of people like Caruthers.
A minister with ecclesiastical and historical interests, Caruthers authored several books focusing on the American Revolution period in North Carolina. His biography of David Caldwell, A Sketch of the Life and Character of the Reverend David Caldwell, D.D., was the first of several installments on Revolutionary history. Caldwell was Caruthers’s predecessor in ministry, a self-taught doctor, and perhaps the most famous educator of his era in the South. An essential figure in any history of North Carolina, Caldwell was the courageous proponent of independence whose reputation was only heightened by the burning of his library by British troops in 1781. In this work Caruthers created the singular resource for the study of this remarkable minister, “among the most illustrious of American citizens.”29
Another two volumes, Revolutionary Incidents and Sketches of Character Chiefly in The “Old North State,” and Interesting Revolutionary Incidents and Sketches of Character Chiefly in The “Old North State,” Second Series are Caruthers’s presentation of the strife between the Tories and the Whigs in what can be described as North Carolina’s first civil war in the context of America’s bid for independence. These volumes record history that would be lost apart from Caruthers’s research involving interviews of veterans and those who remembered them, numerous accounts of cowardice and courage, and a detailed vindication of the actions of the North Carolina militia in the Battle of Guilford Courthouse.
When Caruthers died in November of 1865 at the age of 71, he left behind two manuscripts. Richard Hugg King and His Times, subsequently published in 1999, recounts the story of King, a farmer turned evangelist, and his role in the revivals of Western North Carolina. The other manuscript, American Slavery and the Immediate Duty of Southern Slaveholders, remained unpublished and is now considered.
Outline of the Book
Using my transcription of the manuscript,30 the second, third, and fourth chapters assess those aspects that distinguish it from other antislavery literature, highlighting the more salient aspects of Caruthers’s work. The three main headings under which his argument is presented indicate the content of these chapters. The remaining six chapters explore corollary issues raised by the manuscript’s arguments and their relationship to the greater slavery debate of nineteenth-century America.
Chapter 2, “The Claim,” examines creation, preservation, and redemption, which he conceptualizes under the claim of Exod 10:3: “My people . . . are mine and not yours: for you have no right to them.”31 He applies the slavery of the Hebrew people to the plight of the black race in America on the basis of creation and its preservation. God has created the Africans along with all humanity and preserved them throughout history. Slavery contradicts the order of creation, exploiting inequalities that exist within humanity. Utilizing the Bible and ethnographical theories of the nineteenth century, Caruthers argues that the supposed innate racial inferiority of the African does not fit with their larger history, and is, in fact, a mistaken conclusion drawn from their mutable circumstances. This chapter also shows that Caruthers’s association of the claim of Exod 10:3 with biblical redemption was understood within the framework of a covenant. The whole world was ruined by sin and under God’s judgment but Christ’s death has redeemed a people who include the Africans.
Chapter 3, “The Demand,” examines the typological and providential arguments made by Caruthers which he associates with the demand of Exod 10:3—“Let my people go.” For Caruthers the demand of the Exodus passage cannot be ethically understood or applied to nineteenth-century slavery apart from a typological understanding of the Old Testament. Caruthers’s understanding of Isa 61:1–2 and other corroborative texts illuminate this method. Divine providence also enforces the demand of Exod 10:3. Belief in divine guidance or providence as the supreme power controlling the nation was the expression of most nineteenth-century Americans belief in the relationship between their virtue as a people and their well-being as a nation.32 Borrowing categories of judicial and historical providentialism as articulated by Nicholas Guyatt, Caruthers’s interpretation of the North’s “greater prosperity” as God’s “providential government of the world enforcing his demand for the unreserved and speedy surrender of our whole slave population” is shown to be a judicial use of providence that opposes the historical providentialism typically used to defend slavery. This chapter demonstrates that in Caruthers’s thinking the Civil War is a manifestation of judicial providence and the ethical demand of Exodus coming in full force upon the slaveholders of the south.
Chapter 4, “The Reason,” examines the purpose behind the deliverance advocated by Exod 10:3. According to Caruthers it is the indispensable service of all people in God’s “merciful designs upon them and for the world.” The fulfillment of service to God, however, requires freedom. The laws regulating the life of slaves and freed slaves stand in the way of service and are an obstacle to the fulfillment of God’s purpose for them. Specifically, the purpose in view was a missionary enterprise to the continent of Africa. After emancipation, like most people of his time, Caruthers thought that some form of African colonization was a solution to the American slavery crisis.
Chapter 5, “Presbyterians and American Slavery,” assesses Caruthers’s theological depth among a few of the more prominent mid-nineteenth-century Presbyterians of the South, specifically, Robert Lewis Dabney, James Henley Thornwell, and George Armstrong. The public exchange between Armstrong and Northern theologian, Charles Van Renssaleur, on the slavery issue and the close correspondence between Caruthers’s interpretive approach with the ideas of Van Renssaleur in this correspondence
