Still Letting My People Go

Eli Washington Caruthers’s unpublished manuscript, American Slavery and the Immediate Duty of Southern Slaveholders, is the arresting and authentic alternative to the nineteenth-century hermeneutics that supported slavery. On the basis of Exodus 10.3--''Let my people go that they may serve me''--Caruthers argued that God was acting in history against all slavery. Unlike arguments guided largely by the New Testament, Caruthers believed that the Exodus text was a privileged passage to which all thinking on slavery must conform. As the most extensive development of the Exodus text within the field of antislavery literature, Caruthers’s manuscript is an invaluable primary source. It is especially relevant to historians’ current appraisal of the biblical sanction for slavery in nineteenth-century America because it does not correspond to characterizations of antislavery literature as biblically weak. To the contrary, an analysis of Caruthers’s manuscript reveals a thoroughly reasoned biblical argument unlike any other produced during the nineteenth century against the hermeneutics supporting slavery.''This is the first thorough study of Old South pastor Eli Carruthers’ remarkable and original Christian critique of southern slavery. Davidson explains and analyzes Carruthers’ argument and situates it in the nineteenth-century slavery debates. Moreover, having found Carruthers helpful in his own pastoral thinking about social problems, Davidson relates that argument to today’s Christian discussions of Scripture, history, and ethics. His book will educate both scholars and popular readers--and may edify them, too!''--Jack P. Maddex, Jr. Professor of History, University of Oregon''Still Letting My People Go is a most welcome and much-needed analysis of nineteenth-century North Carolinian Presbyterian minister Eli Caruthers and his important manuscript American Slavery and the Immediate Duty of Southern Slaveholders. Jack R. Davidson’s astute interpretation of Caruthers’s life and text will be of major interest to historians and religious scholars, casting new light on the southern biblical defense of American slavery in the era of the Civil War.''--David Brown, Author of Southern Outcast: Hinton Rowan Helper''Jack Davidson’s examination of a long-unpublished treatise from 1860 is anything but a historical curiosity . . . The minister, Eli Caruthers, deserves to be much better known for the way he used an Old Testament passage (Exodus 10, ’let my people go’) to attack slavery systematically, which was unusual at the time in general and all but unknown in the South. This unusually informative book makes a powerful contribution as both history and theology.''--Mark Noll, Author of The Civil War as a Theological CrisisJack Davidson (University of Wales) is the pastor of Alhambra TrJack Davidson is the pastor of Alhambra True Light Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles and has previously served churches in Oregon and North Carolina. He has taught courses in Christianity and American Religion at the university level and written numerous papers. He is the author of ''Slavery'' (Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Ethics, 2015).ue Light Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, and has previously served churches in Oregon and North Carolina. He has taught courses in American Religion at the university level and written numerous papers. He is the author of ''Slavery'' (Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Ethics, 2015).