Jack R. Davidson

Still Letting My People Go


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Ibid., 249.

      Chapter 3: The Demand of Exodus 10:3

      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