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Still Letting My People Go
An Analysis of Eli Washington Caruthers’s Manuscript against American Slavery and Its Universal Application of Exodus 10:3
Jack R. Davidson
foreword by Kathy Ehrensperger
Still Letting My People Go
An Analysis of Eli Washington Caruthers’s Manuscript against American Slavery and Its Universal Application of Exodus 10:3
Copyright © 2018 Jack R. Davidson. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Pickwick Publications
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-0086-9
hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-0088-3
ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-0087-6
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Names: Davidson, Jack R., author. | Ehrensperger, Kathy, 1956–, foreword.
Title: Still letting my people go : an analysis of Eli Washington Caruthers’s manuscript against American slavery and its universal application of Exodus 10:3 / Jack R. Davidson ; foreword by Kathy Ehrensperger
Description: Eugene, OR : Pickwick Publications, 2018 | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326-0086-9 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-5326-0088-3 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-5326-0087-6 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Caruthers, E. W. (Eli Washington), 1793–1865. | Slavery—North Carolina. | Presbyterian Church—North Carolina—History. | Presbyterians—North Carolina—History.
Classification: e446 .d26 2018 (print) | e446 .d26 (ebook)
Manufactured in the U.S.A. 07/05/17
Abstract
Within the theological and historical context of nineteenth-century America, Eli Washington Caruthers’s unpublished manuscript, American Slavery and the Immediate Duty of Southern Slaveholders, is an authentic alternative to the nineteenth-century hermeneutics that supported slavery. On the basis of Exodus 10:3—“Let my people go that they may serve me,” Caruthers argues that God was acting in history against all slavery. Unlike proslavery or antislavery arguments guided largely by the New Testament, Caruthers believes the Exodus text is a privileged passage to which all thinking on slavery must conform. Permeation of nineteenth-century antislavery literature with the Exodus text gave divine impetus to the struggle against slavery and a genuine social dimension to the Christian faith. As the most extensive development of the Exodus text within this field of literature, Caruthers’s manuscript is an invaluable primary source, especially relevant to historians’ current appraisal of the biblical sanction for slavery in nineteenth-century America. It does not correspond to characterizations of antislavery literature as biblically weak. For example, historians Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese assert that the proslavery argument is based upon scripture and the antislavery argument is less biblical, dependent on the ideals of the Enlightenment. To the contrary, the analysis of Caruthers’s manuscript reveals a thoroughly reasoned biblical argument unlike any other produced during the nineteenth century against the hermeneutics supporting slavery.
Foreword
It is with great pleasure that I see the fruits of this important research reach the point where they embark on the journey to a wider academic and interested readership. Jack Davidson embarked on a challenging journey himself when he decided to research the manuscript American Slavery and the Immediate Duty of Southern Slaveholders and its author Eli Caruthers. He made the life-changing decision to leave his position as the successful pastor of his congregation and to dedicate several years of his life to a project he was passionate about. It was this passion that led to his search for a supervisor for his dissertation project, and I was lucky enough that he made inquiries at the University of Wales, Lampeter, UK, where I was teaching at the time. I was impressed by the project and the depth of engagement Jack demonstrated, and being involved in research about the relevance of hermeneutical presuppositions in biblical interpretation myself there was obviously a deeply shared concern for the role of the Bible in society past and present. That we both as pastors were also deeply concerned about the role of the Bible in our respective church traditions rendered the cooperation on this project all the more fruitful and personally important also for me.
With the publication of the remarkable manuscript of a remarkable pastor from Greensboro, NC, and its theological analysis, Jack makes the largely forgotten manuscript American Slavery and the Immediate Duty of Southern Slaveholders by Eli Caruthers accessible to the public. But not only that, he presents a succinct introduction and analysis of this remarkable piece of work, highlighting its historical and, to a greater extent, its theological significance as a voice from the South that, based on biblical texts, had not tuned into the majority pro-slavery argumentation. Through his careful historical contextualization and theological analysis of the manuscript Davidson is able to demonstrate that specific hermeneutical presuppositions lead Caruthers to a firm argument against slavery. He demonstrates that Caruthers was informed by contemporary philosophical and ethical literature from which anti-slavery arguments generally drew but that his primary hermeneutical key was firmly rooted in biblical texts. By recognizing the passage of Exodus 10:3 as the key theological parameter over against which the Bible as a whole, including the New Testament, had to be read, Caruthers established a theological-hermeneutical key that unlocked the liberating potential of the Bible with regard to the question of slavery. This hermeneutical move appears very modern in that Caruthers claims that a specific narrative of the Bible was the core over against which all other texts had to be evaluated. He thereby acknowledged that a text does not speak for itself but that the reader is conditioned by hermeneutical presuppositions, which guide his or her reading of the Bible. There are analogies to this move in feminist and liberationist interpretations beginning in the 1970s, but also to the core role the Exodus narrative plays in Jewish tradition. There is probably no direct connection, but it is noteworthy that Abraham Lincoln had close connections to Jews, who were involved in the abolitionist cause and he was the first to appoint Jewish army chaplains to serve the thousands of Jewish soldiers fighting for the Union during the Civil War. With Lincoln, Caruthers shared the love for the Old Testament prevalent in many Protestant traditions inspired by Calvin, but Jack demonstrates that although Caruthers had earned his theology degree from Princeton Seminary he was very likely inspired by a combination of thought traditions, with the Exodus narrative providing the decisive structure and argument for his American Slavery and the Immediate Duty of Southern Slaveholders. This anti-slavery stance rooted in the Exodus narrative as the hermeneutical key to the Bible is without precedent. Jack Davidson’s publication of Eli Caruther’s manuscript and his excellent theological analysis demonstrate that the awareness of the hermeneutical framework, now something that is required of biblical interpretation generally, is in nuce already present in this remarkable text of the nineteenth century.
Although it is now several years since the thesis was successfully defended, Jack had to prioritize other tasks in his life, but I had always hoped that he would one day be able to get the time and space to get his excellent dissertation ready for publication. That this has happened now is fantastic and I am sure it will be invaluable on many levels of biblical interpretation and theological discussions, but above all for the debate on the role of the Bible in the pro-and anti-slavery debates of the nineteenth century.
Kathy Ehrensperger
Research Professor of New Testament in Jewish Perspective