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You"re going far afield from the point of this thread now, delighting in the sound of your own voice, and doing the very thing you accuse me of doing ("what is this idea that that 160 years ago and now are the same?") such as the idea that farmers with large families to help work the farm and livestock settled down with a controversial popular novel like Uncle Tom's Cabin in the evening by the fireside. The only book in most American homes for more than the first two centuries since the Mayflower landed was the Bible. Which, by the way, was interpreted in one verse or another to support both sides of the slavery issue, and was quoted by both sides.

The point of showing parallels is not, and is never, to declare that the past and the present are "the same." But a series of events are often eerily similar in ways that truly bear examination when a simliar threat is looming.

Over and out.

You"re going far afield from the point of this thread now, delighting in the sound of your own voice

I take that to mean that I took the trouble to intelligently and carefully answer your rambling comments as best as I could and you don't know how to respond to what I said.

The only book in most American homes for more than the first two centuries since the Mayflower landed was the Bible.

In under one year, 300,000 copies of Uncle Tom's Cabin were sold in the United States. That in a country of 23,000,000 people (20,000,000 free people). It was second only to the Bible in the 19th century. If a novel sells that many copies today, it's a runaway success, and that's in a country and that's in a country about 14 times bigger.

Albion White: "The only book in most American homes for more than the first two centuries since the Mayflower landed was the Bible.
Which, by the way, was interpreted in one verse or another to support both sides of the slavery issue, and was quoted by both sides."

First, on Uncle Toms Cabin, it sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the U.S. alone, millions worldwide, was in the 1850s second in popularity only to the Bible.
Of course, Uncle Toms Cabin was effectively outlawed in the South, where it was condemned as unrealistic, and where Southern authors wrote their own versions.
So, I don't think we can overestimate the book's influence on Northern attitudes towards slavery.

Second, it's true that both sides quoted the Bible to defend their positions.
However, a true understanding of the Bible shows it to be violently OPPOSED to slavery for God's people, meaning Jews & Christians.
That is one reason why some slaveholders resisted teaching slaves to read, learn the Bible and become baptized.
There is just no Biblical authority for holding God's people in permanent bondage.

This also reveals just how radical young Stonewall Jackson was in teaching slaves to read & write from the Bible.