required a hermeneutic or interpretive guideline not limited to the mere word or letter of the Bible. Caruthers’s development of Exodus fills such an opening, and his manuscript is the singular example of this approach in biblical hermeneutics among Old School Presbyterians.
Chapter 6, “Caruthers and the Enlightenment,” examines Caruthers’s intertwining of biblical argument with the political principles of his era. Appeals to the Declaration of Independence such as occur in antislaveryliterature and in Caruthers’s manuscript have been described as primarily derived from the Enlightenment.33 This chapter argues that Caruthers, like others from his Reformed and Presbyterian tradition, utilizes aspects of the Enlightenment or the Declaration of Independence because he believes such political ideas enshrining equality and liberty are, in fact, biblically derived from the doctrines of creation and redemption.
Chapter 7, “Similarity of Caruthers to Other Antislavery Literature,” assesses the similarity of Caruthers to other biblically based arguments against slavery in antislavery literature. The curse of Noah, the servants of Abraham, the slavery of the Mosaic and Christian eras were the familiar ground of the slavery debate. The well-worn arguments examined in the chapter and Caruthers’s own views provide a glimpse into various and fragmented interpretive tendencies that marked antislavery literature, the sum of which signaled frustration with, and a departure from, the standard Reformed hermeneutics of the era.
Chapter 8, “The Exodus Text in Nineteenth-Century Discourse,” is a review of Exod 10:3 in antislavery literature. Caruthers was not the only writer to depend upon the text although his treatment is the most expansive. The examination of Exod 10:3’s use in antislavery literature shows how the text lent divine impetus to the cause of slavery’s abolition. Borrowing from the categories assigned to antislavery writers by Robert Forbes, the examples reviewed in this chapter suggest that Forbes’ Providentialists found the text highly adaptable because it moved the debate over slavery away from the rights of slaveholders to the perspective of the oppressed and that the nameless character of pharaoh provided an unambiguous identity to their oppressors.
Chapter 9, “Caruthers’s Method,” compares Caruthers’s method of interpretation to that of James Henley Thornwell, giving attention to the differing roles of reason in their arguments. Thornwell’s thinking exemplifies a restrained use of reason, prompted by the Evangelical Enlightenment, allowing for a more narrowed focus on a defense of a traditional practice of slavery through deductive, flat, and literal readings of slavery texts in the Bible. In contrast, Caruthers’s argument against slavery allows reason a greater role, showing a more deliberate tendency to an inductive and theological reading of texts that draws inferences from certain passages, personal experience, and sees larger themes that eclipse the isolated proof texts for slavery offered by the institution’s defenders.
Chapter 10, “Caruthers and Recent Studies,” examines the similarity of current opinion regarding New Testament slavery texts to nineteenth-century antislavery arguments. The theological approach of modern commentaries to the slavery issue is foreshadowed in these same arguments. Caruthers is set apart from both his contemporaries and their modern day counterparts by his dependence upon the Exodus text, a dependence this chapter demonstrates was prescient in the light of general trends in current scholarship that assert the importance of Exodus and its role in the life and literature of Israel as well as in the teaching of Paul.
1. Caruthers, American Slavery, 68, 369.
2. Murray, A History of Alamance Church 1762–1918, 16.
3. Caruthers, American Slavery, 313.
4. Basset, Antislavery Leaders of North Carolina, 60.
5. Noll, America’s God, 413–17.
6. Guelzo, “Charles Hodge’s Antislavery Movement,” 299–326, 324; Barker, “The Social Views of Charles Hodge,” 5.
7. Calhoun, Princeton Seminary, 328.
8. Fox-Genovese and Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class, 7, 490.
9. Chesebrough, Clergy Dissent in the Old South 1830–1865, 65; Troxler, “Eli Caruthers,” 95.
10. Brockman, Adams-Caruthers-Clancy-Neely, 66–67.
11. Troxler, “Eli Caruthers,” 95.
12. Eli Caruthers to Reverend Joseph Merriam, 30 December 1824 (photocopy from private collection).
13. Basset, Antislavery Leaders, 60.
14. Ibid., 56; Troxler, “Eli Caruthers,” 101.
15. Murray, A History of Alamance Church, 16.
16. Brockman, Adams-Caruthers, 69.
17. Troxler, “Eli Caruthers,” 98, 100.
18. Ibid., 95.
19. Caruthers, Richard Hugg King and the Great Revival in North Carolina, x.
20. Scott, “A History of Alamance Church,” 92–93.
21. Minutes, Session of Alamance Presbyterian Church, 30 July 1861, Greensboro, North Carolina.
22. Wilson, The Presbyterian Historical Almanac, 6, 350.
23. Chesebrough, Clergy Dissent in the Old South 1830–1865, 64.
24. McMaster, Appendix to General Assembly Speech, May 30, 1859 (n.p., n.d.), 33.
25. Cited in Brown, Southern Outcast, 78; cf. Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina, 566; Basset, Antislavery Leaders, 29–44.
26. Cited in Johnson, Antebellum North Carolina, 568.
27. Ibid.
28.
