Author
Eli Washington Caruthers was born on October 26, 1793, to James and Elizabeth Caruthers, on the family’s farm west of Salisbury, North Carolina, three miles west of Thyatira Church in Rowan County. He had five sisters and one brother. His father is mentioned as “a very effective and efficient elder” in the Thyatira congregation. As a young boy he studied for several years with the Rev. Joseph Kirkpatrick, pastor of Black Creek Church, before entering Hampden-Sydney College in 1813.10 He left Hampden-Sydney and served in the War of 1812 for a short time before reentering school at New Jersey College, receiving a Bachelor’s degree in 1817.11 Caruthers then pursued the traditional course of study to prepare for the Presbyterian ministry, entering the newly founded Princeton Seminary in 1817, graduating in 1820.
Caruthers was ordained by the Orange Presbytery of North Carolina on November 21, 1821, as an associate pastor to the yoked ministries of Buffalo and Alamance Presbyterian churches near Greensboro, North Carolina. He served under the guidance of Dr. David Caldwell until the senior minister’s death in 1824 at the age of ninety-nine. An indication of his early attitude towards slavery is revealed in a letter he wrote at this time. Written at the close of 1824 to a minister friend in Ohio, the letter mentions his interest in leaving North Carolina “to go to some of the western states especially to some state where there are no slaves.”12 Written at such an early date, the letter may corroborate John Spencer Bassett’s opinion that Caruthers became antislavery during his training at Princeton perhaps under the influence of George Stroud whom he met there.13 Caruthers would never leave North Carolina, but remain as the pastor of the two congregations until 1846 when the combined ministry was dissolved, and he would then continue as pastor of Alamance until 1861.
Over the course of his ministry Caruthers gained a reputation as a respected pastor, educator, and historian.14 Several published accounts remember a thorough and careful ministry to a congregation that included slaveholders. The more than two hundred of his sermons found in Special Collections at Duke University, written in a variety of booklets or ledgers, show studious preparation. Described as “a thorough scholar, an authority on theological questions, and an earnest and instructive preacher,”15 he was granted an Honorary Doctorate of Divinity in 1854 by the University of North Carolina. With two nephews as his namesakes, it is likely that Caruthers was held in high regard by his family.16
In conjunction with his ministerial work he also taught or performed administrative duties at Greensborough Academy, the Caldwell Institute, and Greensboro High School where he taught Greek and served for two years as president.17 In 1846 he ended his pastoral relationship with the congregation at Buffalo. Soon after, at the request of the Alamance congregation, he resigned from his responsibilities with the high school to devote himself solely to his pastoral responsibilities. Having lived since 1838 in Greensboro at an inn owned by his sister Catherine and her husband, G.C. Townsend, he now moved closer to the Alamance congregation. In his new location he organized classes for yet another school that would later become the Alamance Classical School.
Caruthers’s views on slavery were probably known and tolerated by his slave-holding congregation, but when his dissent from the Confederacy became a matter of public knowledge his retirement from the pastorate in 1861 was hastened.18 He explains his resignation as being “on account of bad health and for other reasons.”19 An early history of the Alamance congregation states that his prayer for the troops “was too much for the people who had risked all for a cause which they hoped to win” and that the congregation met requesting his resignation.20 No congregational meeting for such a purpose is recorded in the minutes of Alamance church but Caruthers’s letter of resignation mentions a proposed meeting for some business.” He writes to the elders of the Alamance congregation on July 5, 1861,
Partly in conformity with a purpose formed more than six months ago, as you and the congregation are well aware and partly on account of my health which is such a[t] present that I shall probably not be able to preach much for some time, I would through you, request of the Alamance church and Session to unite with me in asking a dissolution of my pastoral relation. I understand that the congregation are to have a meeting on some business tomorrow, but I am too unwell to attend. Please bring my request before the church that the application may be made to Presbytery as soon as possible and oblige
your friend and servant.21
Caruthers’s signature ends the letter. While not conclusive, the timing and content of the note implies a connection between his public prayer for the troops and the proposed meeting. He may have sensed trouble when he learned of the meeting and ended the conflict with a resignation. If a meeting had been planned it could have then been cancelled. Described as one who had “no sympathy with the Southern Confederacy or anything connected with it,” the life-long bachelor now became reclusive, according to his contemporaries “a sort of wanderer” and “little understood.” During the last years of his life even longtime “friends were estranged from him in consequence of his unwavering devotion to the American Union.”22
Caruthers has been described as a dissenter but one whose lack of action contributed to a culture of conformity within the south.23 Like many of his colleagues, until the war he had probably hoped for a peaceful resolution of the slavery issue and considered the abolitionist movement incendiary and extreme. The views of the Reverend Erasmus D. MacMaster, a well-known antislavery minister, published in an appendix to his speech made before the General Assembly of Presbyterian Church in 1859, might be applicable to many of his colleagues including Caruthers.
It is with extreme reluctance and profound regret, that I bring out, in the form I here do, opinions, and sentiments, and practices, on this subject of slavery, which I think are not honorable to the Church. I have known these things, as from time to time, through ten years past, they have come to light, with other things of like bearing of earlier date. I have known these things and I have kept silence. I have kept silence, because I have always deprecated violent agitation over particular forms of evil, which is so apt to run into exaggerations and extremes, damaging alike to personal character and to the best interests of truth and righteousness. I have kept silence, because I have no aptitudes and no taste for such conflicts. I have kept silence, because I have known something of the manifold complications and difficulties of this whole problem of slavery and the slave population, and because it has long been my settled conviction, that men living in the midst of slavery, and to whom immediately and chiefly it belongs, alone are competent to deal wisely with it, and to devise and execute measures for abating its evils, and effecting ultimately its abolition.24
Some of those “manifold complications and difficulties” in Caruthers’s region would have been the sudden and severe reaction to antislavery sentiment in North Carolina. The stories of two other natives of the Salisbury region of small farmers where he grew up and who were also antislavery are well-known. Benjamin Hedrick, dismissed from his faculty post at the University of North Carolina for his political views and born near Salisbury like Caruthers, believed “the majority of the people among whom I was born and educated” opposed slavery.
