omnipotent energy of God by which all created things . . . are upheld in existence, with all the properties and powers with which He has endowed them.”52 William Sherlock reasons similarly, citing Acts 17:28 and Heb 1:3 to support the division of providence into “preservation and government,” the former emphasizing “that God upholds all things in being from falling back into their first notion, and preserves their natural virtues, powers, and faculties, and enables them to act, and to attain the ends of their several natures.”53
Slavery violates God’s ongoing relationship with creation because it interprets perceived differences between ethnic groups for the purpose of exploitation, undermining the unity and equality of humanity established at creation. Any physical, mental, or external inequalities that might exist between people or races “subserve his own wise and beneficent purposes” but the “inequalities which man has made . . . immensely increased the degradation and wretchedness of our race.”54 The use of “inequalities in physical strength, in mental capacities and external advantages” to justify slavery, in Caruthers’s view, is only “subserviency to personal and local interests.”55 To the contrary, inequalities in the “variety of phenomena and uniformity of design” in the natural world constitute an instructive analogy for similar variations in humanity. He writes:
The hills are as important in their place as the lofty mountains, the rivulets as the majestic rivers and the lake as the mighty oceans, but must not be removed nor arrested in their course. The smallest asteroids have an important purpose to answer in the solar system as well as the mightiest orbs but must be left free to revolve in their appropriate spheres.56
Caruthers’s intends all this as an analogous illustration: It is the Africans who have been “removed” from their home, “arrested in their course” and so the universe has been plunged into chaos. The supremacy of human freedom cannot be empirically proven but is instinctively perceived and supported by heuristic arguments drawn from the creator’s ongoing relationship with the world. Just as God “has made every planet and asteroid in solar system the right size,” he writes, “so he has made the earth and every thing on it—every continent, sea, and river, every man and everything else of the right proportions; but has given man no authority to meddle with his arrangements.”57 Just as the “mightiest orbs” move along their course undisturbed, so all humanity “must be left free.”58 Caruthers deduces from both the creation and preservation of humanity that the “inequalities which the Creator has made to subserve his own wise and beneficent purposes” must never be used as the basis of the wrongful inequalities in the realm of “civil and religious rights.”59
Caruthers believes that “if left to the unrestricted operation of those laws which the Creator has established the inequalities would not be of long duration in any one line of descent but soon change . . . ” due to a process of “unceasing alternations of depression and elevation . . . indispensable to the progress of society.”60 Specifically, “an unvarying law” of human society is that “those who have acquired or inherited wealth and favor and high position gradually lose their intellectual enterprise and are left behind in the race of improvement and of social advantage.”61 Such a law accounts for the experience of the African people. “ In the early ages of Christianity,” he writes, “the gospel had quite an extensive and thorough influence along the Nile and over all the northern part of Africa,” a region populated by “flourishing churches”, and the “most learned pious and useful ministers” but now they are treated “with contempt and rigor.”62
According to Caruthers not only were the early ages of Christianity times of flourishing for the Africans, but the larger history of the African race reveals the working of this “unvarying law” mentioned above and contradicts the presuppositions of racism. The creation and preservation of the African race is not without change or “vicissitude” that is found in “all the works and operations of the divine Being.”63 Caruthers’s thinking on this point is best understood in the larger context of the battle against nineteenth-century racism waged by nineteenth-century Afrocentrism. Determining the degree to which he was in agreement with or influenced by the tenets of nineteenth-century Afrocentricism—a universal history of humanity in which blacks are the founders and leaders of all cultures—is beyond the scope of this book. Regarding the debate over the world-wide significance of the ancient African culture, he might have concurred with Wilson Jeremiah Moses’ conclusion that “certain aspects of the so-called Afrocentricism have been sensibly argued” but are “unrelated to the fanciful exaggeration that African Americans are, in some exceptional or exclusive way, heirs to the civilization of the ancient Nile.”64 There is not enough information to know what Caruthers actually thought on the matter. Nevertheless, his emphasis on the change or “vicissitude” that is found in “all the works and operations of the divine Being”65 and the elaborate ethnography found in his manuscript are both elements typically associated with Afrocentrism.
Caruthers’s use of “vicissitude” or change is a version of the Afrocentric emphasis on the “mutability of human affairs.” The phrase initially appears in an article published in the African Repository and Colonial Journal in 1825 and later becomes the title of a three part series in Freedom Journal in 1827. The first issue of the monthly journal, published by the American Colonization Society in March, 1825 includes “Observations on the Early History of the African Race.” The author, identified only as “T.R.,” describes the once great Ethiopian civilization as the people “who brought the arts and sciences of civilization to the world” and who were once the pinnacle of world culture but who are now diminished because of the “mutability of human affairs.”66 In the appeal to “mutability,” antislavery literature employs history in the racial debate.67 The state of the African, according to this line of reasoning, is due not to presumed innate inferiority, but to changing historical circumstances.
Bruce Dain has noted the dependence of this article and much of this kind of literature on Travels through Syria and Egypt, the reflections of Constantine Volney published in 1784. Samuel Stanhope Smith, successor to John Witherspoon as head of Princeton College, demonstrates Volney’s influence in early America recalling in one of his lectures “a remark made by Mr. Volney when contemplating the head of Sphinx in Egypt.” Smith recounts Volney’s belief that the Sphinx “exhibits a type of the countenance of the ancient inhabitants of the country who resemble more the natives of tropical Africa than the present population.”68
The travels of Volney, a recognized skeptic and critic of religion, convinced him that it was “to the race of negroes, at present our slaves, and the objects of our extreme contempt, we owe our arts, sciences, and even the very use of speech.”69 T.R.’s “Observations on the Early History of the African Race,” bundles Volney’s research together with studies on the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone, the history of Herodotus, and the Bible. All are combined to prove the divine role of the once great Ethiopia in the universal salvation of Africa,
