Still Letting My People Go. Jack R. Davidson
be removed nor arrested in their course. The smallest asteroids have an important purpose to answer in the solar system as well as the mightiest orbs but must be left free to revolve in their appropriate spheres.56
Caruthers’s intends all this as an analogous illustration: It is the Africans who have been “removed” from their home, “arrested in their course” and so the universe has been plunged into chaos. The supremacy of human freedom cannot be empirically proven but is instinctively perceived and supported by heuristic arguments drawn from the creator’s ongoing relationship with the world. Just as God “has made every planet and asteroid in solar system the right size,” he writes, “so he has made the earth and every thing on it—every continent, sea, and river, every man and everything else of the right proportions; but has given man no authority to meddle with his arrangements.”57 Just as the “mightiest orbs” move along their course undisturbed, so all humanity “must be left free.”58 Caruthers deduces from both the creation and preservation of humanity that the “inequalities which the Creator has made to subserve his own wise and beneficent purposes” must never be used as the basis of the wrongful inequalities in the realm of “civil and religious rights.”59
Caruthers believes that “if left to the unrestricted operation of those laws which the Creator has established the inequalities would not be of long duration in any one line of descent but soon change . . . ” due to a process of “unceasing alternations of depression and elevation . . . indispensable to the progress of society.”60 Specifically, “an unvarying law” of human society is that “those who have acquired or inherited wealth and favor and high position gradually lose their intellectual enterprise and are left behind in the race of improvement and of social advantage.”61 Such a law accounts for the experience of the African people. “ In the early ages of Christianity,” he writes, “the gospel had quite an extensive and thorough influence along the Nile and over all the northern part of Africa,” a region populated by “flourishing churches”, and the “most learned pious and useful ministers” but now they are treated “with contempt and rigor.”62
According to Caruthers not only were the early ages of Christianity times of flourishing for the Africans, but the larger history of the African race reveals the working of this “unvarying law” mentioned above and contradicts the presuppositions of racism. The creation and preservation of the African race is not without change or “vicissitude” that is found in “all the works and operations of the divine Being.”63 Caruthers’s thinking on this point is best understood in the larger context of the battle against nineteenth-century racism waged by nineteenth-century Afrocentrism. Determining the degree to which he was in agreement with or influenced by the tenets of nineteenth-century Afrocentricism—a universal history of humanity in which blacks are the founders and leaders of all cultures—is beyond the scope of this book. Regarding the debate over the world-wide significance of the ancient African culture, he might have concurred with Wilson Jeremiah Moses’ conclusion that “certain aspects of the so-called Afrocentricism have been sensibly argued” but are “unrelated to the fanciful exaggeration that African Americans are, in some exceptional or exclusive way, heirs to the civilization of the ancient Nile.”64 There is not enough information to know what Caruthers actually thought on the matter. Nevertheless, his emphasis on the change or “vicissitude” that is found in “all the works and operations of the divine Being”65 and the elaborate ethnography found in his manuscript are both elements typically associated with Afrocentrism.
Caruthers’s use of “vicissitude” or change is a version of the Afrocentric emphasis on the “mutability of human affairs.” The phrase initially appears in an article published in the African Repository and Colonial Journal in 1825 and later becomes the title of a three part series in Freedom Journal in 1827. The first issue of the monthly journal, published by the American Colonization Society in March, 1825 includes “Observations on the Early History of the African Race.” The author, identified only as “T.R.,” describes the once great Ethiopian civilization as the people “who brought the arts and sciences of civilization to the world” and who were once the pinnacle of world culture but who are now diminished because of the “mutability of human affairs.”66 In the appeal to “mutability,” antislavery literature employs history in the racial debate.67 The state of the African, according to this line of reasoning, is due not to presumed innate inferiority, but to changing historical circumstances.
Bruce Dain has noted the dependence of this article and much of this kind of literature on Travels through Syria and Egypt, the reflections of Constantine Volney published in 1784. Samuel Stanhope Smith, successor to John Witherspoon as head of Princeton College, demonstrates Volney’s influence in early America recalling in one of his lectures “a remark made by Mr. Volney when contemplating the head of Sphinx in Egypt.” Smith recounts Volney’s belief that the Sphinx “exhibits a type of the countenance of the ancient inhabitants of the country who resemble more the natives of tropical Africa than the present population.”68
The travels of Volney, a recognized skeptic and critic of religion, convinced him that it was “to the race of negroes, at present our slaves, and the objects of our extreme contempt, we owe our arts, sciences, and even the very use of speech.”69 T.R.’s “Observations on the Early History of the African Race,” bundles Volney’s research together with studies on the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone, the history of Herodotus, and the Bible. All are combined to prove the divine role of the once great Ethiopia in the universal salvation of Africa, and all in fulfillment of the champion verse for T.R. and the American Colonization Society, and even Caruthers, Psalm 68:31: “Princes shall come out of Egypt and Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands.”70
Caruthers utilizes such history against the formidable pretense of African inferiority in his era. By the 1850s the craniology studies of Samuel George Morton had become foundational for scientific racism. Utilizing skull size and capacity it was argued that the African was incapable of having the intelligence of a Caucasian thus rendering African inferiority an unalterable and indisputable fact. Morton’s research methods were seriously flawed but his conclusions were embraced by many and used by some proslavery advocates to justify belief in the Africans’ inferiority.71 Against this background Caruthers’s counters: “For long generations they appear to have been the superior race and . . . long buried monuments of their greatness have been brought to light on the Nile, the Tigress, and the Euphrates.”72 He presents an account of an ancient Africa far more capable and accomplished than their nineteenth-century circumstances indicated. The achievements of their past were proof of the Africans’ capacity for greatness. The race of Ham is the “intrepid, earnest, and successful” forerunners in human improvement and development, “building cities and establishing governments” or engaged in commerce, ship building, and fine arts, while the other races displayed only “idleness and indifference about the future.”73
Drawing historical and