Still Letting My People Go. Jack R. Davidson

of Providence.” In Caruthers’s thinking, the poor performance of the Southern economy and its slight accomplishments in the arts and sciences were proof. Guyatt describes this kind of critique as the “providentialism of wrath” in which judicial providentialism raises unsettling questions about a providential rationale for slavery.197 Caruthers sees the South lowered in its circumstances by the providence of God and near destruction unless the slaves are freed.

      To further his point Caruthers contrasts the “habits of industry, economy, and enterprise” of young men raised in the North to the “idleness . . . hunting, fishing, gambling, and other frivolous amusements” of the ordinary Southerner. The atmosphere of the North is “like a great bee hive, where men, women, and children are all going from sunrise to sundown, as busy as bees” compared to the South where “one fourth of the population are little better than drones . . . sitting on the benches at every tavern door, some half a dozen . . . white men, generally slaveholders” or their “beardless sons . . . smoking their cigars, cracking the heels of their boots together and talking politics.” In the North where slavery is absent “intellectual powers above mediocrity” are directed into “one of the learned professions, for scientific and literary pursuits, or . . . the application of mechanical philosophy to mechanical inventions and improvements” but the presence of slavery in the South stunts similar ability resulting in “so few southerners who have made very great scientific and literary attainments.”198 For Caruthers the providence of God has made clear the “simple and undeniable facts . . . in regard to the condition of the South. ”199 “In a slave country” he writes with unequivocal certainty, “there is nothing to produce . . . a full and complete development of all the human powers.”200

      Whether providence is used to justify the enslavement of two million Africans in antebellum America, the founding of Massachusetts by the pilgrims in 1629, or something as esoteric as the addition of vowel points to the Hebrew consonantal text in the Christian era,201 or even the invasion of Iraq by the American military in 2003,202 the absolute government of God over all creation has always provoked questions about human responsibility. Caruthers’s understanding of providence descends from its seventeenth-century Reformed definition as God’s “most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all his creatures and their actions” as stated in the eleventh question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism. The latter aspect of government predominates in Caruthers’s discussion of providence and the slavery controversy in light of the Exodus passage. God, in the words of the fifth chapter in the Westminster Confession of Faith, “doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least by his most wise and holy providence.”