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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

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