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