shall soon stretch forth her hands.”70
Caruthers utilizes such history against the formidable pretense of African inferiority in his era. By the 1850s the craniology studies of Samuel George Morton had become foundational for scientific racism. Utilizing skull size and capacity it was argued that the African was incapable of having the intelligence of a Caucasian thus rendering African inferiority an unalterable and indisputable fact. Morton’s research methods were seriously flawed but his conclusions were embraced by many and used by some proslavery advocates to justify belief in the Africans’ inferiority.71 Against this background Caruthers’s counters: “For long generations they appear to have been the superior race and . . . long buried monuments of their greatness have been brought to light on the Nile, the Tigress, and the Euphrates.”72 He presents an account of an ancient Africa far more capable and accomplished than their nineteenth-century circumstances indicated. The achievements of their past were proof of the Africans’ capacity for greatness. The race of Ham is the “intrepid, earnest, and successful” forerunners in human improvement and development, “building cities and establishing governments” or engaged in commerce, ship building, and fine arts, while the other races displayed only “idleness and indifference about the future.”73
Drawing historical and ethnographical facts from the Bible in order to demonstrate the greatness of ancient African culture was also a preoccupation of Caruthers’s era, and his manuscript reveals strong similarities to this aspect of Afrocentrism.74 He utilizes place names of the Old Testament to construct an account of these descendants, piling up famous personages of the black race, heaping up their accomplishments, while dismissing the rest of humanity as simple, pastoral, and unmotivated. He assumed, along with T.R. and the rest of the antebellum world, that the Africans were, in fact, the descendants of Ham.
T.R. presents the ancient Ethiopians as “invincible in war and yet preeminent in all the arts of peace, distinguished above other men for learning, enterprise, and valour—at once tyrants and instructors of mankind!”75 Likewise, Caruthers tells his reader of “ a galaxy of men who were celebrated for their enterprise and generalship” or of “six African generals” who “were more than a match for the ablest of the Roman commanders” or of another African “who was certainly one of the ablest generals of this age to which he belonged” as well as many “ other names of note in history to which we cannot now refer.”76 The ancient Africans “became famous in arms and carried on a world wide and most profitable commerce, while all the rest of mankind were engaged in hunting, or tending their flocks, or whiling away the hours in idle amusements.”77 Once the Africans “were the superior race; but, owing to a variety of secondary causes . . . they gradually deteriorated and became dispersed.”78
Not only are the enslaved Africans the descendants of a once-great race but the Americans who now oppress the Africans are themselves the descendants of the “Anglos and Britons and the Germans” who were “exceedingly ignorant, superstitious” and believed inferior by their Roman conquerors.79 The enslavers of the Africans descend from those who “believed in signs and portents, in fairies, witches, ghosts, and hobgoblins” and “were frightened out of their wits by an eclipse of the sun, the appearance of a comet, or a play of meteors in the heavens.”80 Only through the “humanizing influences of Christianity” over the past fifteen hundred years have they been elevated to their current position.81 “That the Africans or any other race,” he writes, “are of an inferior grade, as to natural capacities and powers is mere slang, the flimsy pretext of slaveholders, to conceal their pride and avarice.”82
Caruthers’s tendentious account powerfully contradicts the claim of southern slaveholders to their slave property. Such a claim “rests not on any origin or express grant from the Creator but entirely on . . . the pretended inferiority of the race.”83 His ethnography sweeps away the basis for American slavery founded in racial superiority. Carl Degler has called it “an ethnological defense of black equality that is unusual anywhere in antislavery thought in the United States, North or South.”84
Summary
American slaveholders are like Pharaoh, asserting a claim to people who belong only to God. American slavery denies God’s order and the sufficiency of his creation. It wrongfully exploits differences and inequalities intended to serve his own purposes in the history of humanity. American slavery is attempting to subvert the course of his creation, presuming the innate inferiority of the African. Borrowing elements of Afrocentrism and general history, Caruthers argues that the capabilities and intelligence of races, including his own, are not static but dynamic. Assumptions of slaves’ inferiority and their own superiority by slaveholders are thus shown to be self-serving. The exploitation of the African’s current circumstances is an injustice not only against them but against God, himself: “He who will rob another who has not strength to resist him . . . is unjust, not only to him,” Caruthers emphasizes, “but to God.”85
Redemption through the Covenant
God’s “claim on the Africans and all other races” is not only based on the creation and preservation of humanity but also on their redemption in Christ who “gave himself a ransom for all to be justified in due time.”86 In pages 61–64 Caruthers explains Ps 2:7–8: “I will tell of the decree of the Lord: He said to me, You are my son today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession.” The nations, according to Caruthers, have been given to Christ, they are his “inheritance.” He explains that because “all nations were included in the cov’t [covenant] of redemption.”87 “It was promised to Abraham,” Caruthers tells his reader citing Gen 22:18, that “in his seed all the nations of the earth should be blessed.”88 Thus, Africa and all other “heathen nations . . . stand pretty much,” the southerner writes, “in the same relation to Him in which the descendants of Abraham, so far as they were included in the promise, stood to Him before their deliverance from Egypt.”89 American slavery is therefore a violation of the “covenant of redemption.” Caruthers’s distinctive covenantal understanding and its relationship to the Exodus text consists of just four pages but its fuller explanation is warranted because it is the only antislavery argument from a covenantal perspective.90 Before looking more closely at Caruthers’s “covenant of redemption,” some general background on the covenant concept and its development in the Westminster Confession of Faith is needed.
The term, “covenant,” a fundamental concept in the world of the Old Testament, signifies an agreement between two equal parties by which they obligate themselves to certain responsibilities, such as a marriage or political agreements. See, for example, the description
