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God’s demand regarding the American slaves is to “Let My people go” and it is “made by express communication and enforced by his Providence.”124 The call for Israel’s freedom and the miraculous deeds that providentially accompany the demand are applied by Caruthers to American slavery. The manuscript’s heading of this section, The Demand: Let my people go, is explained scripturally (pp. 137–156), and providentially (pp. 157–256). In his approach to scripture Caruthers employs typology. Apart from a typological understanding of the Old Testament the demand of the Exodus passage cannot be ethically understood or applied to nineteenth-century slavery. Caruthers’s understanding of Isa 61:1–2 and other corroborative texts illuminate this method.

Divine providence also enforces God’s demand for the freedom of Israel. 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.125 Borrowing categories of judicial and historical providentialism as articulated by Nicholas Guyatt, I will show that 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 a judicial use of providence that opposes the historical providentialism used to defend slavery. In Caruthers’s thinking the entire Civil War is judicial providence, the ethical demand of Exodus coming in full force upon the south: “Now what is all this for? . . . it is a war for the defense and perpetuity of slavery on the part of the South and for its abolition on the part of the North.”126

Scripture

The application of the Exodus passage to American slavery might be doubted by those who “don’t see how a demand made upon Pharaoh . . . more than four thousand years ago can have any bearing upon slaveholders at the present day.”127 He counters that if the passage was “recorded by the pen of inspiration” then it cannot be treated “merely as a historical fact.” In supporting this part of his argument, in addition to other passages, he cites Rom 15:4 and 1 Cor 10:11, passages that intimate an important connection between ancient Hebrews and Gentile Christians. The use of these particular texts indicate that Caruthers sees a typological origin for God’s demand upon American slaveholders. Because a continuing correspondence exists between the church and ancient Israel, God’s demand for the release of the Hebrews by Pharaoh must guide the evaluation of slavery for all time. Underneath Caruthers’s comprehension of the demand of the Exodus text for American slavery, there is a conviction about the coherence of Jewish and Gentile experience. God “never does anything in vain and the whole transaction in Egypt is fraught with the most important instruction.”128

Typology is concerned with “ the fundamental analogy between different parts of the Bible” and “the consistent working of God” in the lives of people. It seeks to identify the correspondences and parallels in which the Old Testament illuminates the New Testament or vice-versa.129 Typology describes the correspondence between a type and its antitype as well as intensification or escalation in the latter.130 The type involves or exhibits certain aspects which can be found with heightened significance in the antitype. The exact nature of correspondence may be difficult to determine. It might be said that typology focuses on the metaphoric role or possibilities of an event, institution, or person, beyond the immediate historical setting to realms of correspondence or prefiguration.131

Typology is distinguished from allegory by its reliance on factual or historical elements. Whereas it is permissible for allegory to derive spiritual truths from the slightest details or even the mere words of a text, typology must transmit, in some way, a similar meaning or structure of meaning. According to Leonard Goppelt allegory “goes its own way regardless of the literal interpretation” but typology “begins with the literal meaning.”132 Typology has a particular concern for understanding the Old Testament’s relationship to Christianity. Specifically, it is concerned with “an institution, historical event or person, ordained by God” which “effectively prefigures some truth connected with Christianity.”133 Most importantly perhaps, as Richard Hays has pointed out, typology “is before all else a trope, an act of imaginative correlation” and that “if one pole of the typological correlation annihilates the other, the metaphorical tension disappears, and the trope collapses.”134 Hays’s observation cautions against the minimizing or diminishing of the Old Testament that sometimes results from typology, the importance of which is especially seen below in the treatment of the Jubilee.

As a central text for the typological relationship between ancient Israel and the Christian church, the passage cited by Caruthers from First Corinthians is especially significant. Paul calls the Gentile Corinthians “brothers” and refers to ancient Hebrews of Exodus as “our forefathers.” What is “a crucial rhetorical maneuver” for Paul, as he identifies his Corinthian readers as Israel’s descendants, is also further proof that he thinks of them not simply as Gentiles, but as now identified with Israel.135 The use of the terms “typoi” and “typikos” in 1 Cor 10:6 and 11, could be translated “examples” or “patterns” or “types.”136 The terms assert a correspondence between the nation of Israel along with their particular circumstances in the Old Testament, presumed the “literal” or “type,” and the Corinthians of the New Testament and their circumstances, the “spiritual” or “antitype.”137 The escape of the Hebrews through the Red Sea or Noah’s flood are also types that are fulfilled in the antitype of Christian baptism (1 Cor 10:1–2, 1 Pet 3:20–21). The relationship between the type and antitype may be by way of contrast, as in the case of Adam and Christ (Rom 5:12–21, 1 Cor 15:22), or a more exact comparison as in Christ on the cross and the “lifting up” of the bronze serpent in the wilderness (John 3:14).

As mentioned above, it is difficult to determine the exact correspondence intended when passages indicate a typological relationship. The reader may only know that a typological connection exists because of the text’s claim. For example, John 3:14 does not tell the reader in what exact way Jesus is like the bronze serpent of Israel’s wilderness experience. Patrick Fairbairn speculates in The Typology of Scripture that the precise point of correspondence between the lifting up of the bronze serpent and Jesus on the cross is the deceptive appearance they share. A man suffering the death of a convicted criminal on the cross seems as unlikely a help to humanity in need of moral salvation as the image of a despised and poisonous snake to those bitten and in need of a cure.138

Caruthers’s particular view of typology is not systematically set out as it was not his intention to write a theological treatise, but his comments on the use of Isa 61:1–2 in Luke’s Gospel provide an outline from which a reliable construction of his understanding is made possible. Because Caruthers’s application of the Exodus passage is guided by his typological understanding of the Old Testament, his explanation of Isa 61:1–2 (pp. 154–56) warrants special attention.

In Luke 4:20 Jesus declares in the synagogue of Nazareth that Isa 61:1–2 is fulfilled by his appearance. The Isaiah text makes reference to Israel’s year of Jubilee, the fiftieth year of sabbatical cycles when land is returned to its original owner (Leviticus 25). The forgiveness of debt and the release of all enslaved is a necessary part of Jubilee’s program to equalize ownership of the land. In Luke’s gospel Jesus applies the words of the prophet to himself, proclaiming “liberty to the captives” thus magnifying the Jubilee beyond the limits of its historical meaning so that it encompasses his own life and work. Caruthers believes that like other “prophecies which related to the Christian age” the passage has “a progressive import and fulfillment.” The Jubilee’s “general release of all debts and obligations, of all bondmen and bondwomen and of all lands and possessions which had been alienated from the tribes and families to which they belonged,” had “ a much more important meaning.” Jesus’s application of the Jubilee year to his own coming “declared plainly enough that the Jubilee had a typical [typological] import.”139

In contrast to his contemporaries and many modern commentators, Caruthers believes the Jubilee has meaning that continues to be both literal and spiritual. He calls these same categories “lower” and “higher.” Interestingly, he focuses attention on the continuing importance of the lower or literal level of the Jubilee’s meaning. Jesus’s application of the Isaiah text to himself indicates spiritual liberation from sin but also and equally important, a widening declaration of freedom for those in captivity. When Jesus “applied the prediction to himself he declared plainly enough that Jubilee had a typical import but that only gave it a much more important meaning without changing in any respect its literal significance.”140 For Caruthers, the Jubilee typologically foreshadows “spiritual” freedom for those who are captive to the power of sin, but not to the exclusion of its continuing literal meaning. Ongoing fulfillment requires an ongoing experience of liberty.

To support his argument, Caruthers recalls the predictions that “the blind should see, that the deaf should speak and that the lame should walk” in the Messianic era, and that “during the personal ministry of Christ on earth, all the predictions . . . received both a literal and spiritual accomplishment.” The higher or spiritual sense continues to be fulfilled “every day and everywhere throughout Christendom, in the case of all who are brought out of the darkness of nature into the marvelous light of the gospel” but also “in the lower sense they are receiving a partial accomplishment by the skill of physicians and other friends of humanity.” For now, “by various contrivances the lame, the halt, the maimed are enabled to walk, the deaf, the dumb, and the blind are taught to read the Bible and to transact the usual business of life but,” Caruthers insists, “they are yet to receive a more literal and full accomplishment by higher attainments in medical skill and by the discovery of means which are yet unknown.”141 In the same manner, the literal implications of the Isaiah passage have already been fulfilled to a “very gratifying extent” but it “will yet have a universal fulfillment in its fullest extent of meaning.”142 A measure of contemporary corroboration of Caruthers’s view is found in Michael Green’s comment “that Jesus’s mission is directed to the poor—defined not merely in subjective, spiritual, or personal, economic terms, but in the holistic sense of those who are for any of a number of socio-religious reasons relegated to positions outside the boundaries of God’s people.”143 Caruthers is certain that the Jubilee declaration implies not only spiritual liberty but also real freedom:

Jesus Christ came to preach liberty to the captive and the opening of the prison to them that are bound and he will deliver his people who are so unjustly and so cruelly held in bondage here, either by the power of his grace on the hearts of their owners or by such judgments as will make them learn righteousness.144

In Caruthers’s thinking the distinct but related concerns for spiritual and physical well-being are viewed under the image of the Jubilee. Isaiah 61:1–2 is traditionally understood as a typological use of the Jubilee. The ancient institution of Jubilee is prophetically pulled from the Torah to describe the greater realities of God’s forgiveness of Israel and their imminent release from exile and restoration to Zion. The Year of Jubilee image is used to hold together the importance of Israel’s forgiveness by God alongside the nation’s political freedom to return and restore their land, two distinct but related concerns. Sharon Ringe has noted that “human needs often experienced as competing for attention are brought together onto the single agenda of the Jubilee.”145 Luke’s use of Isaiah’s text characterizes yet another, even greater era of forgiveness and release to be accomplished by the Messiah. Caruthers’s approach understands and upholds these distinctions without diminishing the importance of either.

Conversely, for the nineteenth-century contemporaries of Caruthers and many current commentators, the distinctive social reforms of the original Jubilee are diminished and transcended by the greater spiritual realities they prefigure. J. C. Ryle’s commentary on Luke states that Messiah’s “victories were not to be over worldly enemies, but over sin” and that he is “the Friend of the poor in spirit, the Physician of the diseased heart, the Deliverer of the soul in bondage.”146 More recent commentators express the meaning in terms of spirituality, such as “deliverance to those who were captives in the power of sin and spiritual wretchedness” or giving back “to the spiritually blind the power of sight” or “freedom from guilt and the effects of sin.”147 Darrel Bock emphasizes “release from sin and spiritual captivity” and the “spiritual overtones” of exilic identity. The Old Testament “viewed the exile as the result of sin.”148 For I. Howard Marshall Jesus’s announcement in Luke is an allusion is to the Old Testament Jubilee “appointed by Yaweh . . . and now made symbolic of his own saving acts in order to show his salvation.”149 Joseph Fitzmyer’s conclusion is similar: “The Isaian description of a period of favor and deliverance for Zion is now used to proclaim the period of Jesus, and the new mode of salvation that is to come in him.”150 An emphasis on the spiritual fulfillment of Jubilee and a muting of its social reforms in Protestant literature goes back to the earliest views of Martin Luther and John Calvin.151

Caruthers’s appreciation of the Jubilee’s distinctions and their literal fulfillment mirrors another and more influential nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister. The highly regarded Patrick Fairbairn, a theologian in the Free Church of Scotland, exemplifies the Reformed perspective in The Typology of Scripture. At nearly a thousand pages in two volumes, Fairbairn’s magnum opus remains a standard text on the topic of typology for evangelicals since its publication in 1845. He is considered by some to be “the spokesman for the Reformation tradition” on typology.152 In line with traditional typology Fairbairn speaks of the “littleness” of historical types, “exhibiting on a comparatively small scale what was afterwards to realize itself on a large on” or of “historical personages and events being related to some higher ideal, in which truths and relations exhibited in them were again to meet, and obtain a more perfect development.”153

For Fairbairn, as for Caruthers, the concrete social realities of the Jubilee continue to have application as its antitype escalates, and his understanding of the Jubilee’s application is very similar to his unknown colleague. The Jubilee addresses sin and effects, not simply as an individual issue that “still causes innumerable troubles and sorrows” but also as political and societal. “Even in the best governed states,” he writes, “the true order of absolute righteousness and peace is to be found only in scattered fragments or occasional examples.” The purpose of the Jubilee should be seen “as one of deliverance—deliverance from trouble, grievance, and oppression” so that the “the aspect of society might reflect” the “well-ordered condition of the heavenly world.” Fairbairn envisions specific social imperatives arising from the event of redemption. As he describes it: “When all in a manner, being set right between them and God, it became them to see that every thing was also set right between one person and another.”154

The sequence of reconciliation noted above by Fairbairn, from God to others, requires continuation of the Jubilee’s fuller meaning. He observes that the year of Jubilee’s emphasis on the restoration of property and freedom from captivity is united to the restoration of the people’s relationship to God. It commences not at the beginning of the year, but follows immediately after the Day of Atonement (Lev 25:9) in which reconciliation with God is dramatically symbolized in the prescribed rituals, the same rituals that foreshadow the Messiah’s death for the sins of the people.155 Isaiah’s incorporation of the Jubilee follows the same pattern. Its declaration in Isaiah 61 follows after the “Redeemer” comes and ends the separation of the people from their God (59:16—60:1). Forgiveness and reconciliation precede their release from Babylonian captivity, the end of their oppression, and the restoration of Zion. The typological understanding of the Jubilee involves certain social imperatives or events that result from its redemptive antecedent and without which severely diminished its meaning.

A few current studies corroborate the perspective of Caruthers and Fairbairn. Speaking of what Jesus actually did in his ministry, Paul Hertig observes that “Luke will not allow us to interpret this jubilee language as flowery metaphors or spiritual allegories . . . Jesus literally fulfilled the Jubilee that he proclaimed.”156 Samuel Aborgunrin complains that within traditional theology “the problem of the poor and justice, receive very little attention’ because it “does not regard poverty, justice, and other similar social issues as central to the mission of Jesus.” Jesus came not only to proclaim a solution to inner dimensions of sin “but also to bring about total deliverance from all forms of power that have held people in bondage” and “this means that the ministry of the Church, like that of its Lord, must always focus on the whole person.”157 The Jubilee’s emphasis on concrete social change cannot be diminished by its spiritual overtones and application. Although the implementation of the specific reforms of the Jubilee is not intended by Luke’s Gospel, David Pao stresses that “the Jubilee connection does highlight the social, economic, and political impact of the arrival of the eschatological era” and observes that, as in Isaiah 61, “this Jubilee theme is one among many that contribute to the wider prophetic paradigm of the second exodus.”158

Like Fairbairn, his contemporary, and these more recent studies, Caruthers insists that the antitype of Jubilee remains characterized by its literal type. The fullest extent of meaning is achieved only when spiritual redemption is coupled to the Jubilee’s literal and universal application for the poor and oppressed of the earth. In his era there was no more obvious example of Jubilee’s application than American slavery. The Messiah had brought redemption, now it was the responsibility of a Christianized humanity to bring freedom to the slaves.

In Caruthers’s view not only does Luke’s use of the Isaiah passage confirm his own use of the Exodus text but the “whole tenor of the Bible is a demand on all who are holding others in bondage and oppression to give them up and leave all free to serve God.” He singles out specific “passages which may be cited as corroborative.”159 Throughout the range of biblical literature Caruthers hears the echoes of God’s initial demand for the release of Israel from Egypt and argues for its continuing moral implications.

Within the parameters of existing biblical interpretation practiced by American Evangelicals, proslavery advocates argued that slaveholding could not be identified as a sin because it was not expressly forbidden in the Bible. Donald Mathews has observed that “the Evangelical emphasis upon the necessity of a conviction of sin, . . . led a person into psychic confusion, from which he was saved by conversion and reintegrated into society through the church.”160 Because slavery was not expressly forbidden in the Bible, there could be no experience of specific conviction with regard to it. The institution of American slavery was not identifiable as a specific sin so it should not be expressed or experienced as such. Here, in the words of one historian, “was southern evangelicalism’s first, essential, and constant proslavery position.”161

Antislavery writers responded by moving away from the description or regulation of slavery found in the Bible to texts they believed more clearly reflected the divine will. In his explanation of the demand of Exod 10:3, Caruthers briefly discusses eight other texts that corroborate his understanding, specifically that “every one must be left free to act on his own responsibility.”162 In the order they appear in the manuscript the texts are Ezek 18:4, Rom 12:1, Rom 6:1, Jer 34:8–22, Neh 5:1–12, Isa 58:6, Ps 72:4–14, and Ps 68:31.

The first text touched on by Caruthers is Ezek 18:4: “All souls that is all persons, all men and women, are mine” and “the soul the man or the woman, that sinneth shall die.” In Caruthers’s view, slavery confuses the accountability envisioned. If a master commands a slave do things which are “palpably wrong and injurious to the interests of vital piety” and especially in the case of an ongoing repeated violation ordered by “impenitent masters and mistresses” such as “desecrations of the Sabbath” that become “inseparable from the institution as it now exists” then their accountability to God no longer makes complete sense. The passage can only make ethical sense if “all men and all women, all human beings are his and woe to those who infringe upon his rights or dare to interpose, in whole or in part, between any of them and his authority.”163

Similarly slavery does not allow compliance with the consecration of Rom 12:1 and 6:13. The passages urge readers to “present your bodies a living sacrifice” and “neither yield your members as instruments of unrighteousness.” If a slave is a Christian and “their masters claim the whole of their time and strength it is impossible” for them to be consecrated and devoted in the manner “and to the full extent of the . . . requirements” prescribed by the Apostle Paul. What about the plain New Testament teaching that servants are to serve their masters? According to Caruthers those passages were addressed to servants “who were rendering a voluntary service and therefore had the disposal of their time” or to slaves “who belonged to . . . unchristian masters.” He does not allow for the possibility of a Christian owning a slave. A slave who is a Christian in the south, and of “any intelligence” cannot comply with the teaching of Romans “as he wishes to do” because “his time and his physical powers are all at the disposal of another.”164

Jeremiah 34:8–22 is singled out by Caruthers as providing “the clearest proof that there could be no such thing as slavery among the Jews” like that of America. Jeremiah condemns the failure of “the king, the nobles, and all who were able to employ servants” for not keeping their covenant to set them free as they had said they would do. Instead they “forced them back into service” and this was “an act of cruelty and a violation of their solemn engagements.” Soon after they broke their word, Caruthers points out, “the city was taken and burned, the king, the nobility and all the better classes of people were seized and carried captives to Babylon.” In these events, Caruthers sees “God’s abhorrence” of slavery.165

Nehemiah 5:1–12 demonstrates that “in the mind of all pious Jews” there was “an invincible opposition to slavery as we understand the term.”166 Nehemiah is “indignant” upon learning about the bondage imposed on some of the Israelites and requires a “solemn oath of the nobles that they would no more oppress their brethren.”167 All of the teaching of the major and post-exilic prophets “was in constant and direct hostility to anything like an entailed or perpetual enslavement of each other or strangers.”168 The “explicit and comprehensive” language of the Isaiah 58:6—“undo the heavy burdens and let the oppressed go free”—exemplifies their attitude.169

Psalm 72:4–14 is “a most animated and glowing description of the Messiah’s universal reign.” Surely, Caruthers figures, “the slaves of our country must certainly be included among the poor, the needy and the oppressed” whose rescue by the Messiah is announced therein. And if Psalm 68:31, “Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands to God,” does mean that the “African race will believe in Jesus Christ,” then a slave’s rightful claim upon such a deliverance is undeniable. Caruthers specifically identifies American slaves as included in the psalm’s messianic vision of the future. Strictly understood, this is a Messianic interpretation of Israel’s earthly king and empire presented by the psalmist. However, Caruthers’s identification of the psalmist’s local vision for the needy and oppressed of Israel with universal freedom for all in bondage further demonstrates the role of typology which underlies Caruthers’s application of the Exodus passage to American slavery.

Summary

For Caruthers there are no limits to the application of the Exodus text: “God is demanding the surrender of them to his service. All men and all women, all human beings are his, and woe to those who infringe upon his rights or dare to interpose, in whole or in part, between any of them and his authority.” It cannot be restricted to the realm of history. “The passage which we have placed at the head of this discussion . . . ” he writes in reference to the Exodus text, “ has no condition or limitation and makes no allowance for the interest or convenience of those on whom the demand is made.” There can be “no time . . . to sell them off or to make the best arrangements” since “all nations, the Africans included, were given to Jesus Christ in the covenant of redemption and they belong to him.” Slaveholders are “to give them up and leave all free to serve God with whatever powers he has given them.”170 “You,” he says to slaveholders, “have no valid claim to them and must let them go.”171

Although Caruthers probably would have appreciated Goppelt’s understanding of typology and its emphasis on “the church’s place in redemptive history,” he does not allow the political liberation of the Exodus event to be diminished, as Goppelt’s understanding tends, by the “new people of God, a new humanity, which is distinct from the Jews and no longer needs their shadowy means of redemption because it possesses the reality.”172 To the contrary, Caruthers hears in Exodus a continuing echo of “the whole tenor of the Bible” which is “a demand on all who are holding others in bondage and oppression.”173

If the Exodus text “has been overlooked, in its true import, for more than two hundred years, it is not the only important one that has shared the same fate.” Important texts on the doctrine of justification were overlooked or misunderstood “for a thousand years.” Romans 3:28 and Galatians 2:16 along with “scores of others teaching the same doctrine, were “misapplied by the whole Christian world” except by “ a little handful” who are “now known as witnesses for the truth.”174 The larger meaning of the Exodus text has suffered a similar fate but now it should be recognize that, as all of the above passages confirm, the “demand which was first made on Pharaoh, king of Egypt by Moses and Aaron and is now made by the lively oracles of God on all, here in America and every where else, who are holding their fellow men in bondage.”175

Providence

God’s demand regarding the American slaves is to “Let My people go” and it is also “enforced by his Providence.”176 Caruthers asserts God’s demand for the “unreserved and speedy surrender of our whole slave population.”177 The deteriorating economic and intellectual conditions of the slave states are cited as providential evidence of God’s demand. Caruthers understands “providence” as the “constant and absolute good which God exercises over this world and all that it contains,” including “humans and all other agencies and his employment of these agencies to accomplish his own purposes.” In the distinctive national providentialism of nineteenth-century America, providence demonstrated God’s favor on the nation as it carried out its divine purpose. While Caruthers probably embraced such a form of providentialism, he also challenged providence as a justification for slavery. “There are few words in our language,” he writes of providence, “that are in more frequent use and few that are more oftener perverted or misapplied.”178 In a longer passage on providence he writes,

It is strange how inconsiderately and unmeaningly the term is generally used; for Providence is made to favor every successful undertaking whether right or wrong. If a man has prospered in his efforts to accumulate property, tho’ it has been been by taking advantage of those who are ignorant of business or less crafty than himself, Providence has certainly favored him; . . . Slave holders talk very fluently about the wise and kind Providence which brought the negroes into this country to be civilized; but as an army when unsuccessful in battle has nothing to say about Providence, they have no notion of giving them up or of thanking Providence for taking them away.179

Caruthers challenges the assertion of God’s benevolence toward the institution of slavery often made by slavery’s proponents in the name of providence by focusing on a judicial interpretation. As explained by Nicholas Guyatt, historical providentialism interprets providence in terms of a nation’s imagined and future significance on the world stage. The rewards or punishments of providence unfolding in history are thus supportive of and tending toward that nation’s special role in the overall improvement of the world. A judicial interpretation views providence as a negative assessment of national virtue. The rewards or punishments of God’s providence are thus related to a nation’s ethical conduct rather than some larger scheme or plan.180

Both these forms of providentialism and their variations intermingle in American religious discourse and in Caruthers’s manuscript. In some parts of his argument Caruthers’s asserts his belief in the larger divine purposes for America, but in this section of his manuscript the Exodus text summons a judicial interpretation of providence in which the South is punished for slavery. The declining and poor industrial record of the South, along with its lack of contributions to literature, art, and technology, are contrasted with the North resulting in clear evidence that Providence is blessing the North and pressuring the South. From such punishments the demand of God for the freedom of the Africans can be heard.

The Five Cotton States and New York: Remarks upon the Social and Economic Aspects of the Southern Political Crisis, a lengthy pamphlet published in 1861, is cited by Caruthers at the beginning of this section, and in a few pages he offers a providential interpretation of the pamphlet’s theme. Its author, Stephen Cowell, contrasts the growing population and commercial prosperity of the Northern states with the stagnate conditions of the South. Cowell is not against slavery—it “has more friends in the Northern States than it has in all the world beside” and constitutional protection –but he details the decline of South Carolina.181 In “her colonial days . . . South Carolina stood in the front rank in point of wealth, education, and aristocratic style of living,” he writes, and the state enjoyed “high distinction in many other respects, in comparison with her sister colonies and States.” “Charleston” he says, “enjoyed a like distinction among the cities of North America, its inhabitants being in high repute for their intelligence, refinement, and liberal style of giving” but now the “State and city have fallen far behind many others in the race of population, wealth, and power.”182

Caruthers characterizes these and similar findings along with other aspects of Southern society as evidence of God’s providential demand for the release of the slaves. The divine operations of providence are enforcing the demand of Exod 10:3: “The greater prosperity of the free than of the slave states first occurs to us an important fact in God’s providential government of the world enforcing his demand for the unreserved and speedy surrender of our whole slave population.”183 The industrial, literary, and intellectual accomplishments and contributions of the north are providential signs indicating God’s blessing on the absence of slavery in the northern states. The stagnation and decline of the South is providential evidence of God’s disapproval of a slave society. Even though “southern men have as good minds as northern men,”184 the South is “indebted to the North for everything we have worth having.”

for all our valuable works on mathematics, science, and on natural, mental, and moral philosophy; on law and medicine, theology, government and jurisprudence; for all our histories, poetry, and works of taste and general literature, for our books of surveying, navigation, and improvements in farming and farming implements; for our improved breeds of horses, cattle and sheep; for our household furniture . . . In the South we may have invented a pretty good straw cutter and a bedstead that affords little or no harbor for bugs, but nothing, I believe, of more importance.185

Mark Noll has described the “flourishing of providential reasoning” during the American slavery controversy and the war that accompanied it in which Caruthers and many others of his era understood their world, its influences, events, circumstances, and “how the moral balance sheet should be read” with greater certainty. Such reasoning made “it easy to reduce the complexities of the war to simple, if sharply contrasting, providential calculations.”186 By Caruthers’s calculations the providence of God made it clear that the south should free the slaves, but like Pharaoh the south was incorrigible and would not comply. Threats of slave insurrections and the massacre of whites prompted the adoption of measures towards emancipation and education by the government however “as the price was high, when the danger seemed to have passed away, all their good feelings and resolutions vanished and, like Pharaoh of old, they resolved again that they would not let them go.”187

Caruthers reasons that the war is the outworking of the demand of Exod 10:3 now finally coming in full force upon the south: “Now what is all this for? . . . it is a war for the defense and perpetuity of slavery on the part of the South and for its abolition on the part of the North.”188 The South is like ancient Egypt under Pharaoh. Its plagues are the paucity of accomplishment in the various fields of human endeavor. The free North has prospered but within the slave society of the South “the boundaries of science have never been extended and nothing of importance has been added to human knowledge. No great inventions have been made in the useful arts and very rarely has much excellence been attained in music, poetry, painting, or sculpture.”189 The South’s deficiencies were God’s judgment against slavery according to Caruthers. Judicial providence, the “ providentialism of wrath,” explained the current economic status and intellectual accomplishments of Southern culture.190 Until the South met God’s demand to free the slaves, its demise would continue.

If the slavery debate generated opposing interpretations of scripture, it did also of providence. As expressed by Mark Noll “ providence meant different things to different people at different times.”191 The proponents of slavery use providence to justify slavery, while Caruthers uses providence to judge it. Like their seventeenth-century counterparts, Reformed and Presbyterian theologians of nineteenth-century America understood and emphasized providence as God’s “design and control” of all history, an “indefinite number of subordinate ends” or “a vast concatenation of causes and effects, from the first to the last moment of time –a successive flow of events, which none can arrest, but He who first set it in motion”192 but there was much more. For the historical or national providentialism of Caruthers’s generation, the term “providence” encapsulated more than the belief or fact of God’s ongoing involvement in the world. It was a term of positive evaluation in the national discourse.

God’s supportive and beneficent involvement in the making of the nation descended from seventeenth-century beginnings through the American Revolution and on into the nineteenth century, but slavery created difficulties in this scheme. America was a favored nation under the providential care of God, and there was confidence in the divine plan for the country, but the plan was largely conceived to be along strict racial lines, without Native or African Americans. The presence of slavery created nationwide confusion. The increasing population of African Americans confronted the nation with the question of how its racial diversity could fit into what was believed to be divine purposes for a nation of single color. “God had placed the United States on an upward trajectory and had shaped its past and future toward the improvement of the world,” writes Nicholas Guyatt, but “the extension of slavery . . . confounded this effort.”193

The proponents of slavery were saddled with the responsibility of providentially defending slavery, in Guyatt’s words, “until the mists that surrounded the purpose . . . of this baffling institution finally cleared.”194 For James Henley Thornwell, writing in 1861, providence justifies slavery. It is part of “a vast providential scheme” in which “God assigns to every man, by a wise and holy decree, the precise place he is to occupy in the great moral school of humanity.”195 The capacity and abilities of the Africans suit them for slavery, and until they progress, slavery practiced according to the Scriptures provides them the best possible arrangement for their improvement. It is, in fact, “a gracious Providence” for the slaves whose living conditions were now so vastly better than they had been in Africa. And the prospect of Christianizing the Africans shrinks the problem of slavery to a mere “link in the wondrous chain of Providence, through which many sons and daughters have been made heirs of the heavenly inheritance.”196

For Caruthers, writing a year after Thornwell, providence did not favor slavery but condemned it. Decisions should be made with “reference to great moral principles, or, which is the same thing, to the inspired oracles of revealed truth, and not by the permissions of Providence.” In Caruthers’s thinking, the poor performance of the Southern economy and its slight accomplishments in the arts and sciences were proof. Guyatt describes this kind of critique as the “providentialism of wrath” in which judicial providentialism raises unsettling questions about a providential rationale for slavery.197 Caruthers sees the South lowered in its circumstances by the providence of God and near destruction unless the slaves are freed.

To further his point Caruthers contrasts the “habits of industry, economy, and enterprise” of young men raised in the North to the “idleness . . . hunting, fishing, gambling, and other frivolous amusements” of the ordinary Southerner. The atmosphere of the North is “like a great bee hive, where men, women, and children are all going from sunrise to sundown, as busy as bees” compared to the South where “one fourth of the population are little better than drones . . . sitting on the benches at every tavern door, some half a dozen . . . white men, generally slaveholders” or their “beardless sons . . . smoking their cigars, cracking the heels of their boots together and talking politics.” In the North where slavery is absent “intellectual powers above mediocrity” are directed into “one of the learned professions, for scientific and literary pursuits, or . . . the application of mechanical philosophy to mechanical inventions and improvements” but the presence of slavery in the South stunts similar ability resulting in “so few southerners who have made very great scientific and literary attainments.”198 For Caruthers the providence of God has made clear the “simple and undeniable facts . . . in regard to the condition of the South. ”199 “In a slave country” he writes with unequivocal certainty, “there is nothing to produce . . . a full and complete development of all the human powers.”200

Whether providence is used to justify the enslavement of two million Africans in antebellum America, the founding of Massachusetts by the pilgrims in 1629, or something as esoteric as the addition of vowel points to the Hebrew consonantal text in the Christian era,201 or even the invasion of Iraq by the American military in 2003,202 the absolute government of God over all creation has always provoked questions about human responsibility. Caruthers’s understanding of providence descends from its seventeenth-century Reformed definition as God’s “most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all his creatures and their actions” as stated in the eleventh question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism. The latter aspect of government predominates in Caruthers’s discussion of providence and the slavery controversy in light of the Exodus passage. God, in the words of the fifth chapter in the Westminster Confession of Faith, “doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least by his most wise and holy providence.”