In July of 1862, Henry McNeal Turner published “The Plagues of This Country” in the Christian Recorder newspaper. Turner, born free in South Carolina in 1834, was a Methodist minister who would be appointed by the U.S. Army as the first African American chaplain in the United States Colored Troops the following year.
In the essay, Turner described the not-yet-freed slaves through the prism of the Passover story—and painted Lincoln, unable to yet let those chained people go, as Pharaoh. “Abraham Lincoln and not Jeff Davis becomes the Pharaoh of the mystic Egypt (American slavery),” Turner wrote. “And however unwilling to comply with a dispensation of liberation, nature’s God calls from heaven, echoed to by five million of mystic Israelites, (subject slaves) in peals of vivid vengeance, let my people go. Moses and Aaron, in the garb of threats for the nation’s heart-blood, stand before the mystic Pharaoh with a demand endorsed by the purposed [sic] of God, for their redemption; but, being refused, a series of plagues begins, commencing at Fort Sumter.”
The Confederacy’s victory at that battle, Turner believed, was indicative of God’s anger that the cursed institution of slavery still existed. The North would suffer through continual plagues echoing those experienced by ancient Israel’s enemies until it mustered the strength of Moses and achieved victory. The country, “with mystic Pharaoh at its head, may refuse compliance to Heaven’s demand; but the inexpressible tortures inflicted upon ancient Egypt, the cruelties of Antiochus to the Jews, the devastation of Jerusalem by the Roman Generals Titus and Vespasian … will all hardly bear a comparison to what will befall this nation” should the scourge of enslavement not end.
Turner was hardly alone in evoking the Ten Plagues in the context of the war. In fact, the punishments of the Pharaoh and his country served as an inescapable refrain for the abolitionist movement. In an 1828 issue of The Genius of Universal Emancipation, an abolitionist newspaper, its founding editor, the Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy, recalled for his readers how Egypt had been struck by God with ten plagues for enslaving six hundred thousand Israelites. What punishment would America suffer, Lundy wondered, for subjecting an even greater number of souls to more wretched conditions?