Still Letting My People Go. Jack R. Davidson

Instead of acknowledging God’s claims and “bringing them to the knowledge of salvation through the mercy of our God,” American slaveholders have enslaved and kept the Africans “in ignorance, degradation and wretchedness, from generation to generation, without any crime alleged and without any authority whatsoever from the Lord whom they profess to serve.”123 American slaveholders are therefore acting criminally towards God. They are violators of creation, preservation, and the covenant of redemption, claiming ownership of people who belong only to Christ through creation and through a pact with roots in the ancient bond God made with Abraham, reiterated throughout the Mosaic and Davidic eras, celebrated in the psalms of Israel, fulfilled in the appearance of the Messiah, and carried to the ends of the earth.

34. Caruthers, “First Samuel 15:29.”

35. The section on the covenant of redemption is the analysis of pp. 61–64 in the manuscript. Because Caruthers’s understanding of the covenant’s bearing on the question of slavery is unique in the nineteenth century, the entire second part of the present chapter is given to its explanation. Excised for separate consideration because they are more typical of antislavery literature, pp. 65–136 are examined in chapter 7 below.

36. Caruthers, American Slavery, 5.

37. Ibid., 6.

38. Ibid., 4.

39. Ibid., 5.

40. Ibid., 202.

41. Ibid., 207.

42. Caruthers, Preface to American Slavery.

43. Caruthers, American Slavery, 202.

44. Ibid., 207.

45. Ibid., 4.

46. Ibid., 6.

47. Ibid., 30.

48. Ibid., 29, 30.

49. Ibid., 30.

50. Ibid., 36.

51. Ibid., 29.

52. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:581.

53. Sherlock, A Discourse concerning the Divine Providence, 22.

54. Caruthers, American Slavery, 8.

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid., 9–10.

57. Ibid., 250.

58. Ibid., 10.

59. Ibid., 8.

60. Ibid., 9, 11.

61. Ibid., 12.

62. Ibid., 21, 24.

63. Ibid., 9.

64. Moses, Afrotopia, 6.

65. Caruthers, American Slavery, 9.

66. Dain, Hideous Monster of the Mind, 105.

67. Rael, “A Common Nature, A United Destiny,” 193; Dain, Hideous Monster of the Mind, 112–48.

68. Smith, The Lectures Corrected, 1:43; Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion, 119.

69. Dain, Hideous Monster of the Mind, 77.

70. Ibid., 106.

71. Ibid., 197–99.

72. Caruthers, American Slavery, 17.

73. Ibid., 22.

74. Shavit, History in Black, 47.

75. Dain, Hideous Monster of the Mind, 105–6.

76. Caruthers, American Slavery, 20.

77. Ibid., 19.

78. Ibid., 249.

79. Ibid., 25.

80. Ibid., 26.

81. Ibid.

82. Ibid., 249, 403.