Still Letting My People Go. Jack R. Davidson
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Creation and Preservation
The claim—“My people”—of the Exodus text is based on creation. The unity of the human race guarantees that if the Hebrews are God’s people then so are the Africans. God’s claim upon Israel or any nation is based first on his relationship to them as their creator. We can understand God’s absolute right to creation, Caruthers argues, by way of our own feelings about the imperfect but legitimate claims of people to their possessions, inventors to their inventions, or farmers to their crops. God “has made everything out of nothing and has given to all men their existence” thus he has “a perfect right to employ or dispose everything as he pleases.”36 If the creator has made humanity “of one blood” then “for one to compel others . . . to serve him all their life without compensation, and to entail that compulsory service upon his unborn posterity, is unjust, inhumane and criminal before high heaven.”37The claim of Pharaoh or American slaveholders is “no right that can be made good in the court of heaven, nor at the bar of reason or before their own consciences . . . but God’s claim is valid and cannot be disputed.”38
Moreover, in the creation of humanity God has already given “everything which makes existence comfortable or desirable.”39 The explicit declarations of Gen 1:28–30 and their alteration after the flood in Gen 9:2–3 are in view. “The fruits of the earth, the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air and fish of the sea, with the earth itself as the source from which the means of subsistence for man and beast are to be obtained include all that has been granted to the children of men by the Creator,” he writes, warning, “and all they can claim as their property.”40 “You may have the earth and its products,” he warns again, “but on your fellow man you must not lay your hand unless it becomes necessary in self defense or for the prevention of a crime.”41 From creation Caruthers deduces a “ fundamental principle, that we can have no right to hold any thing as property without an express grant from the Creator,” which he makes, “ the basis of all my arguments.”42 Everything that humanity should or ought to possess was expressly given by their creator but “all the rest, the world of intelligent beings, he has reserved for himself.”43 No allowance was made at creation for human beings to possess their own species. Humanity is not made to rule over humans, only the lesser creatures. As such life and labor is marked by a measure of freedom, self-sufficiency, and self-determination which ought not be encroached upon by others. From the creation of humanity, Caruthers sees “great principles . . . distinctly given which are easily comprehended and are applicable at all times and in all circumstances.”44 In its historical context the text is God’s counter claim to the illegitimate demands of Pharaoh upon the Hebrews but ethically it applies to all situations of similar circumstances in the created order. It is on this foundation that Caruthers asserts the universal claim of the Exodus text.
Caruthers casts American slaveholders in the mold of Pharaoh. Just as his claim to the Hebrews usurps God as their creator, “so is the claim of all slaveholders to the services of their slaves,” Caruthers writes, “ entirely false and consequently sinful.” Because the slaveholders’ have no such authorization from God, their claim, like Pharaoh’s, is “utterly unfounded.”45 Humanity is in the image of God, created to enjoy God’s favor, and his possession alone. Because there is no allowance for slavery at creation, American enslavement of Africans is a criminal action against God, “robbing them of their birthright and invading the prerogative of God.”46
Nor does the slavery generally found in antiquity justify American slavery. Speaking of slavery’s advocates, he finds it “strange that men of talents, extensive learning, and hopeful piety, would, in this nineteenth century and in this land of boasted freedom, science and general intelligence” attempt to justify slavery because it is found in antiquity.47 Since “every conceivable abomination” and “every possible form of injustice and oppression” and “every atrocity” and “every wrong” and “every species of vice” could be justified by its alleged antiquity with this line of reasoning, then the advocates of slavery are only demonstrating by this assertion “a conscious want of more substantial arguments or a careless indifference in regard to truth.”48 If the slavery issue “ can not be settled by a fairer process of reasoning” than this, then “it had better be given up.”49 Caruthers then devotes twenty pages of his manuscript to an examination of the histories of Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome in order to prove that American slavery has no parallel in the ancient world. Not even in Egypt, he insists, did Israel’s situation reach such a height of inhumanity because there was “no intimation of an edict that their bondage should be upon them forever.” Pharaoh, he writes, probably “thought of nothing more than holding them under authority while he lived.”50 Finding no parallel to the perpetual racial slavery of Antebellum America, he argues that the “alleged antiquity of slavery furnishes no justification of the practice.” And even if “slavery always has existed in the world and . . . always will exist,” he writes, still “it would be no proof that slavery is right and that we or any other people can perpetuate it without woeful criminality.”51
Joined to creation is the category of “preservation,” which describes the stability of creation under God’s continuing care. For Caruthers and his contemporaries, “Preservation” is the first part of a two-fold concept of “providence” formulated in chapter 11 of the Westminster Confession of Faith and elsewhere as God’s “preserving and governing all his creatures and all their actions.” Charles Hodge explained preservation as “the omnipotent energy of God by which all created things . . . are upheld in existence, with all the properties and powers with which He has endowed them.”52 William Sherlock reasons similarly, citing Acts 17:28 and Heb 1:3 to support the division of providence into “preservation and government,” the former emphasizing “that God upholds all things in being from falling back into their first notion, and preserves their natural virtues, powers, and faculties, and enables them to act, and to attain the ends of their several natures.”53
Slavery violates God’s ongoing relationship with creation because it interprets perceived differences between ethnic groups for the purpose of exploitation, undermining the unity and equality of humanity established at creation. Any physical, mental, or external inequalities that might exist between people or races “subserve his own wise and beneficent purposes” but the “inequalities which man has made . . . immensely increased the degradation and wretchedness of our race.”54 The use of “inequalities in physical strength, in mental capacities and external advantages” to justify slavery, in Caruthers’s view, is only “subserviency to personal and local interests.”55 To the contrary, inequalities in the “variety of phenomena and uniformity of design” in the natural world constitute an instructive analogy for similar variations in humanity. He writes:
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