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It is strange that a Christian and protestant people, who profess to value liberty above every other consideration on earth and to regard it as indispensable to the welfare of mankind should exhibit to the world such a legalized and systematized course of downright despotism.

Although the subject may have been discussed by a thousand writers and speakers, men of learning and eloquence, it is not exhausted and the discussion ought to be continued without let or hindrance until the question is finally settled.1

Manuscript

Eli Washington Caruthers (1793–1865), author of the quotes above, was the pastor of Alamance Presbyterian Church in Greensboro, North Carolina from 1821 until 1861. A disparaging public prayer for the Confederacy is the remembered cause of his retirement after forty years of service. The 1964 bicentennial poster for the Alamance congregation recalls the event that occurred shortly after the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April of the same year and the beginning of the war:

One Sunday in July 1861, he prayed that the soldiers of the congregation might “be blessed of the Lord and returned in safety, though engaged in a lost cause.” A congregational meeting was held, his resignation was requested, and soon the ties were dissolved that had united loving pastor and people for 40 years. Dr. Caruthers was now infirm, and died four years after. He was buried at Alamance where a monument over his grave and a memorial tablet . . . attest the esteem of his people for a pastor faithful, honored and beloved.2

During the four years that preceded his death in 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 America, North or South.

The 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.25 Hedrick was chased out of the state, “savagely driven beyond the borders of his native state,” but his ordeal made a lasting impression on the author describing his flight, another Salisbury native, Hinton Rowan Helper.

Helper’s controversial polemic, The Impending Crisis, accused slavery of undermining the economic development of southern farmers, reducing them to abject misery, ignorance, and poverty. His book’s demand for emancipation played upon southern fears of slave insurrections provoking hysteria throughout the south. “Do you aspire to become the victims of white non-slaveholding vengeance by day,” he asks the slaveholder, “and of barbarous massacre of the negroes by night?” He warns them,“ You must emancipate them—speedily emancipate them or we will emancipate them for you!”26 As throughout the entire south, the book was banned in North Carolina, and Helper was described by one of his state’s senators as “ a dishonest, degraded, and disgraced man,” an “apostate son” of North Carolina who was “catering to a diseased appetite at the north, to obtain a miserable living by slanders upon the land of his birth.”27

Not far from Caruthers’s Greensboro church, Daniel Worth, a Wesleyan Methodist minister and native of Guilford County was charged with the circulation of Helper’s book in 1859. A mob surrounded the Greensboro jail holding him and it was feared he would be lynched. He eventually went to trial and was found guilty but skipped bail, fleeing to the North where he earned the money to repay his bondsmen.28

The response to Hedrick, Helper, and Worth is indicative of what awaited those who were publicly critical of slavery in North Carolina during the war. Unlike them Caruthers was not an agent of change, but he may have been an agent of the acceptance of change. He must have believed he could do more good if he remained in North Carolina, and he was probably right. He did not make change possible or certain, but the presence and stature of people like him may have made it more acceptable. When emancipation finally came many members of his congregation or others in the Greensboro community, who had conversed frequently with him over his forty years of ministry and with whom he had probably discussed the slavery question, were able to receive emancipation with an attitude otherwise unattainable were it not for the influence of people like Caruthers.

A minister with ecclesiastical and historical interests, Caruthers authored several books focusing on the American Revolution period in North Carolina. His biography of David Caldwell, A Sketch of the Life and Character of the Reverend David Caldwell, D.D., was the first of several installments on Revolutionary history. Caldwell was Caruthers’s predecessor in ministry, a self-taught doctor, and perhaps the most famous educator of his era in the South. An essential figure in any history of North Carolina, Caldwell was the courageous proponent of independence whose reputation was only heightened by the burning of his library by British troops in 1781. In this work Caruthers created the singular resource for the study of this remarkable minister, “among the most illustrious of American citizens.”29

Another two volumes, Revolutionary Incidents and Sketches of Character Chiefly in The “Old North State,” and Interesting Revolutionary Incidents and Sketches of Character Chiefly in The “Old North State,” Second Series are Caruthers’s presentation of the strife between the Tories and the Whigs in what can be described as North Carolina’s first civil war in the context of America’s bid for independence. These volumes record history that would be lost apart from Caruthers’s research involving interviews of veterans and those who remembered them, numerous accounts of cowardice and courage, and a detailed vindication of the actions of the North Carolina militia in the Battle of Guilford Courthouse.

When Caruthers died in November of 1865 at the age of 71, he left behind two manuscripts. Richard Hugg King and His Times, subsequently published in 1999, recounts the story of King, a farmer turned evangelist, and his role in the revivals of Western North Carolina. The other manuscript, American Slavery and the Immediate Duty of Southern Slaveholders, remained unpublished and is now considered.

Outline of the Book

Using my transcription of the manuscript,30 the second, third, and fourth chapters assess those aspects that distinguish it from other antislavery literature, highlighting the more salient aspects of Caruthers’s work. The three main headings under which his argument is presented indicate the content of these chapters. The remaining six chapters explore corollary issues raised by the manuscript’s arguments and their relationship to the greater slavery debate of nineteenth-century America.

Chapter 2, “The Claim,” examines creation, preservation, and redemption, which he conceptualizes under the claim of Exod 10:3: “My people . . . are mine and not yours: for you have no right to them.”31 He applies the slavery of the Hebrew people to the plight of the black race in America on the basis of creation and its preservation. God has created the Africans along with all humanity and preserved them throughout history. Slavery contradicts the order of creation, exploiting inequalities that exist within humanity. Utilizing the Bible and ethnographical theories of the nineteenth century, Caruthers argues that the supposed innate racial inferiority of the African does not fit with their larger history, and is, in fact, a mistaken conclusion drawn from their mutable circumstances. This chapter also shows that Caruthers’s association of the claim of Exod 10:3 with biblical redemption was understood within the framework of a covenant. The whole world was ruined by sin and under God’s judgment but Christ’s death has redeemed a people who include the Africans.

Chapter 3, “The Demand,” examines the typological and providential arguments made by Caruthers which he associates with the demand of Exod 10:3—“Let my people go.” For Caruthers the demand of the Exodus passage cannot be ethically understood or applied to nineteenth-century slavery apart from a typological understanding of the Old Testament. Caruthers’s understanding of Isa 61:1–2 and other corroborative texts illuminate this method. Divine providence also enforces the demand of Exod 10:3. Belief in divine guidance or providence as the supreme power controlling the nation was the expression of most nineteenth-century Americans belief in the relationship between their virtue as a people and their well-being as a nation.32 Borrowing categories of judicial and historical providentialism as articulated by Nicholas Guyatt, Caruthers’s interpretation of the North’s “greater prosperity” as God’s “providential government of the world enforcing his demand for the unreserved and speedy surrender of our whole slave population” is shown to be a judicial use of providence that opposes the historical providentialism typically used to defend slavery. This chapter demonstrates that in Caruthers’s thinking the Civil War is a manifestation of judicial providence and the ethical demand of Exodus coming in full force upon the slaveholders of the south.

Chapter 4, “The Reason,” examines the purpose behind the deliverance advocated by Exod 10:3. According to Caruthers it is the indispensable service of all people in God’s “merciful designs upon them and for the world.” The fulfillment of service to God, however, requires freedom. The laws regulating the life of slaves and freed slaves stand in the way of service and are an obstacle to the fulfillment of God’s purpose for them. Specifically, the purpose in view was a missionary enterprise to the continent of Africa. After emancipation, like most people of his time, Caruthers thought that some form of African colonization was a solution to the American slavery crisis.

Chapter 5, “Presbyterians and American Slavery,” assesses Caruthers’s theological depth among a few of the more prominent mid-nineteenth-century Presbyterians of the South, specifically, Robert Lewis Dabney, James Henley Thornwell, and George Armstrong. The public exchange between Armstrong and Northern theologian, Charles Van Renssaleur, on the slavery issue and the close correspondence between Caruthers’s interpretive approach with the ideas of Van Renssaleur in this correspondence is also examined in this chapter. Van Renssaleur stressed that the issue of slavery 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. Johnson, Antebellum North Carolina, 580.

29. Caruthers, A Sketch of the Life and Character of the Reverend David Caldwell, iii.

30. American Slavery and the Immediate Duty of Southern Slaveholders, Pickwick Publications.

31. Caruthers, American Slavery, 4.

32. Hood, Reformed America, 1783–1837, 9.

33. Genovese and Fox-Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class, 7, 490.