1865, Caruthers completed a manuscript, over 400 pages in length, based on the text of Exod 10:3, Let my people go that they may serve me. It portrays slavery anywhere as a violation of God’s will because “slaves cannot make that entire surrender of themselves to the Lord which the gospel required and to which renewed nature prompts them.”3 Dated 1862 and entitled, American Slavery and the Immediate Duty of Southern Slaveholders, it was never published and is now in the custody of Special Collections at Duke University.
The following analysis of American Slavery and the Immediate Duty of Southern Slaveholders augments the current understanding of the American slavery controversy’s significant roots in a biblical debate. Caruthers’s manuscript is unusual for a nineteenth-century document of southern origin because it presents a scripturally based argument against slavery. This book attempts to explicate the manuscript’s arguments and their relationship to the greater slavery debate of nineteenth-century America. The following analysis also seeks to demonstrate the contribution of the manuscript to a larger conversation within which this research should be heard: the continuing historical and theological assessment of the controversy over the biblical sanction for slavery in nineteenth-century America.
American Slavery and the Immediate Duty of Southern Slaveholders is important because it is a theological work of southern origin against slavery, emerging from the North Carolina Piedmont. Shortly after its discovery in 1898 John Spencer Basset wrote that “it is doubtful if a stronger or clearer anti slavery argument was ever made on this continent.”4 The antebellum struggle to theologically resolve the antithetical impressions resulting from the Bible’s regulation of slavery alongside its emphasis on the dignity and equality of human beings is a quest usually attributed to northern theologians, especially those of the Presbyterian Church. Mark Noll’s account of conservative Presbyterians’ failed efforts to “rescue the Reformed hermeneutic from proslavery,” as exemplified in the arguments of Charles Hodge, focuses on the prominent theologians of the North.5 He has argued that their relationship with their southern counterparts, theological ability, and public influence, best situated northern Old School Presbyterians for developing a theological alternative to the literal, Reformed biblicism underlying proslavery arguments. Despite Hodge’s brilliance and influence, however, reviews of his thinking on slavery have called it “poor enough to invite sarcasm” or like “listening to a phonograph record with the needle stuck.”6 Hodge’s response to slavery was, in fact, like the rest of his colleagues at Princeton Seminary: “timid, conventional, and unremarkable.”7 Caruthers, a largely unknown Presbyterian minister in a proslavery state, arguably surpasses Hodge and other Old School colleagues, presenting a biblical alternative to the hermeneutics of slavery practiced in American Presbyterianism.
Caruthers’s manuscript is also significant because it does not correspond with the characterization of antislavery literature as biblically weak. The proslavery appeal to the Bible is determined by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese to be the foundation of the convictions of southern whites on the issue of slavery during the American Civil War era. In their view the defenders of slavery are the champions of Scripture citing “chapter and verse,” demonstrating “impressive scholarship, close textual analysis, and skillful argumentation.” Antislavery writers, on the other hand, “failed to demonstrate that the Bible repudiated slavery” and “primarily . . . appealed to the ideals of the Enlightenment and Declaration of Independence.”8 The extensive development and application of the Exodus text against slavery by a southern Presbyterian pastor in North Carolina during the nineteenth century does not fit this assessment. Caruthers’s manuscript is an important overlooked primary source in these and other appraisals of the Bible’s role in the question of slavery in nineteenth-century America.
As indicated by the manuscript’s table of contents, a three-part division is used by Caruthers to develop the universal application of Exod 10:3. In this text Caruthers sees a claim, a demand, and a reason that reflect the broader redemptive theme of the Bible. The three-part structure of the manuscript corresponds to each of these points. For clarity each point in the document’s table of contents is emphasized in bold print below.
I. The claim; My people: founded, On creation and preservation—natural differences among men furnish no justification of slavery. | 9
1. The deep and long continued degradation of the Africans in their own land—no reason why they should be enslaved. | 13
The alleged ambiguity of slavery furnishes no justification of this practice. | 29
Slavery in Egypt | 34
Slavery, if there was such a thing, in Babylon | 41
Slavery in Ancient Greece | 45
Slavery in the Roman Empire | 53
The orderings of Providence furnish no justification of slavery | 57
2. The Lord’s claims on the Africans and all other races and portions of mankind is founded on Redemption | 61
Differences between servants and slaves | 65
Noah’s prediction | 69
Servitude during the patriarchal age | 77
Servitude under the Mosaic dispensation | 87
Servitude under the Christian dispensation | 103
The opinions of learned and good men in the favor of slavery is no proof it is right | 125
Slavery originated in avarice, falsehood and cruelty | 129
II. The demand: Let my people go
The demand enforced by Providences | 157
Human beings cannot be held as property | 197
III. The reason of the demand or the purpose for which it is made. Their powers can never be developed while in a condition of slavery. | 257
Slave Code of the South | 261
According to the present laws and usages of the land, slaves cannot make that entire consecration of themselves to the Lord which the gospel requires and to which the renewed nature prompts them. | 313
Under the existing laws and in the present state of society slaves cannot have that equality of rights and privileges which in the New Testament accorded to all believers. | 325
Progress of emancipation | 345
The influences which the abolition of slavery in these southern states would probably have upon the African Slave trade upon slavery in other parts of the world and upon the future destiny of the whole African race.
What we should now do for them | 393
The sweeping structure of Caruthers’s argument as seen in the table of contents has prompted some historians to describe the manuscript as “one of the most thorough condemnations of slavery written by a southerner” or “as sophisticated a polemic against slavery as could be found in the United States, North or South, in the middle years of the nineteenth century.”9 It presents the clearest and most persuasive biblical alternative to the hermeneutics of slavery practiced in nineteenth-century
