Still Letting My People Go

“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“Jack Davidson’s examination of a long-unpublished treatise from 1860 is anything but a historical curiosity .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 Crisis