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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.

      Chapter 2: The Claim of Exodus 10:3

Caruthers hears God’s claim upon American slaves expressed in the words, “My people.” He divides the claim under two subheadings: “On the Creation and Preservation” (pp. 5–60) and “Redemption” (pp. 61–136). A similar division is found in Caruthers’s undated sermon on First Samuel 15:29, where he describes God’s character and the “corresponding affections towards him as our Creator, Preserver, and Redeemer.”34 Using this same division, American Slavery and the Immediate Duty of Southern Slaveholders develops lines of argument under each of these headings. In this chapter

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