Still Letting My People Go. Jack R. Davidson

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

      Abraham Geiger College,

      University of Potsdam, Germany

      Introduction

      My research in the Bible, Eli Caruthers, and American slavery originated during a two-year period beginning in late 1998 while I was the pastor of a Presbyterian congregation in Eugene, Oregon. A booklet circulating in the church and throughout other congregations in the Pacific Northwest had created a stir. Southern Slavery As it Was, published by Canon Press in 1996 was authored by two ministers, one of them a member of my own denomination at the time. The title of their booklet was a play on the abolitionist work published anonymously in 1839 by Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery As it Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. In his book Weld presents multiple compilations of the statements of slaveholders about their slaves or slavery culled from more than twenty thousand copies of Southern newspapers sorted by him and his wife, Angelina, and her older sister, Sarah Grimke. Weld’s book presents and catalogues the punishments, maiming, branding, and scars resulting from a variety of tortures that were routinely mentioned in the personal descriptions of runaway slaves published in newspaper advertisements by owners hoping to recover their human property. The overall effect is a crushing indictment of American slavery.

      Douglas Wilson and Steve Wilkins, the authors of the booklet, replace Weld’s negative portrait of slavery with a substantially different and positive view of slavery they believe found in selected slave narratives. They also incorporate elements of the biblical defense offered by proslavery Presbyterian ministers in the run up to and during the war. In their view American slavery was not only biblically sanctioned, but also a social arrangement of divine beauty when purged of its racism and abuse. As a pastor, I felt a responsibility to educate my congregation, but I knew very little. My alarm over modern proslavery belief and its antecedents was then and is now the same: If the Bible sanctions slavery then there can be no biblically based objection to current forms of slavery or to the establishment or continuance of a modern slave state.

      I began reading some of the sources cited in the booklet and soon found myself buried in antebellum literature related to the Bible and slavery such as Weld and countless others. I also met with Jack Maddex, a historian of nineteenth-century America, highly regarded for his knowledge of the Presbyterian Church in Antebellum America. In one of our conversations Maddex made reference to Eli Caruthers, a Presbyterian minister and the author of an unpublished manuscript against slavery completed during the 1860s in Greensboro, North Carolina. He encouraged me to look into Caruthers and his manuscript as a unique example of Southern clergy dissent in the slavery controversy.

In 2000, with the help of friends and colleagues, I organized a seminar as a public venue responding to the proslavery booklet mentioned above. During this period I contacted Special Collections at Duke University about Caruthers’s manuscript. I wanted to select portions of it and use the voice of a nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister from the South to critique the proslavery sentiment of the booklet. Without a transcription, however, it was not possible to do this. Later on, I was still intrigued by Caruthers’s manuscript and worked with the staff of Special Collections to create a microfilm version that I began transcribing. Citations of Caruthers’s manuscript throughout this book refer to my completed transcription.1

      Before the episode with the proslavery booklet and my study of Caruthers, I was predisposed to think that my own evangelical and Reformed view of the Bible suppported an antislavery position. To the contrary, I came to realize that my training in hermeneutics, faithfully applied, led more readily to proslavery conclusions and resisted antislavery convictions. The method of biblical interpretation I had acquired in my theologically conservative seminary training and applied for over fifteen years of preaching in my congregation could not lead to antislavery conclusions. My approach to Scripture was very similar to Presbyterian ministers of the nineteenth century. Because the authors of the proslavery booklet were also shaped by the same theological tradition, our disagreement was a miniature reenactment of the crisis among Presbyterians that presaged the Civil War, a war that powerfully demonstrated the problems of our theological forefathers’ interpretive method as well as our own.

      The following analysis of Caruthers’s prophetic manuscript is merited by the ongoing controversy over the biblical roots of American slavery. Years after my encounter with the proslavery booklet mentioned above, I was not surprised to see the same booklet as the subject of an article in Harpers magazine in June 2005, entitled, “Let My People Stay.” The ironic title illustrates not only the historical and continuing importance of the Exodus text it comically perverts, but also the essence of Caruthers’s manuscript. He argues almost exclusively from Exodus 10:3—Let my people go that they may serve me, expanding its application universally to every case of enslavement. By this time, my extended consideration of the antebellum debate and interaction with modern day proslavery arguments had destabilized the approach to the Bible I had embraced from my earlier training. To put it another way: Prolonged exposure to the Bible and the American slavery controversy may be hazardous to your hermeneutics. I found myself thinking in new ways and much more cautiously about the Bible and what constitutes a biblical argument. The impetus for the change in my own outlook was the work of this minister whose views on the slavery question were determined not only by his commitment to Scripture but also by the ethical convictions that burdened his conscience and made him a kind of stranger, a sojourner living in a proslavery land.

1. American Slavery and Immediate Duty of Southern Slaveholders, Pickwick Publications.

      Chapter 1: The Manuscript and Author

      It is strange that a Christian and protestant people, who profess to value liberty above every other consideration on earth and to regard it as indispensable to the welfare of mankind should exhibit to the world such a legalized and systematized course of downright despotism.

Although the subject may have been discussed by a thousand writers and speakers, men of learning and eloquence, it is not exhausted and the discussion ought to be continued without let or hindrance until the question is finally settled.1

      Manuscript

      Eli Washington Caruthers (1793–1865), author of the quotes above, was the pastor of Alamance Presbyterian Church in Greensboro, North Carolina from 1821 until 1861. A disparaging public prayer for the Confederacy is the remembered cause of his retirement after forty years of service. The 1964 bicentennial poster for the Alamance congregation recalls the event that occurred shortly after the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April of the same year and the beginning of the war:

One Sunday in July 1861, he prayed that the soldiers of the congregation might “be blessed of the Lord and returned in safety, though engaged in a lost cause.” A congregational meeting was held, his resignation was requested, and soon the ties were dissolved that had united loving pastor and people for 40 years. Dr. Caruthers was now infirm, and died four years after. He was buried at Alamance where a monument over his grave and a memorial tablet . . . attest the esteem of his people for a pastor faithful, honored and beloved.2

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