http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/a-closed-book/?partner=rss&emc=rss#
“”Maj. Robert Anderson sat at his desk in Fort Sumter, composing a letter that might never be read...
Since their move to Sumter in December, the skeptical Capt. Abner Doubleday, a staunch antislavery man and uncompromising foe of secession, had done his best to get inside the commander’s head. He had observed the pious Kentuckian intently, tried to draw out his opinions, and even baited him on the subject of slavery.
Anderson confessed he was disgusted by the North’s refusal to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, and quoted the Bible to demonstrate that God himself had ordained human bondage. Doubleday, in turn, wheeled the Bible around like a howitzer and fired it straight back at Anderson, pointing out that since the slaves in the Old Testament were white, he saw no reason why some pious Southern master should not enslave the major himself, “and read texts of Scripture to him to keep him quiet.” Anderson, Doubleday later boasted, was unable to counter this merciless logical volley. (A less tolerant superior might have clapped the captain in irons.)
On the morning of the move to Sumter in late December, when a rebel envoy had come to demand an explanation, Anderson had told the man ruefully, “In this controversy between the North and the South, my sympathies are entirely with the South. These gentlemen” – here he turned to his blue-coated officers – “know it well.”...
“The red tape of military duty,” Lincoln’s secretary John Hay would later sneer, “was all that bound his heart from its traitorous impulses.” Though it may also have reflected Lincoln’s private views, this was unfair to Anderson. His heart was bound – or perhaps more precisely, pulled upon – by forces far more powerful and complicated than red tape alone.””
>”[Abner] Doubleday, in turn, wheeled the Bible around like a howitzer and fired it straight back at Anderson, pointing out that since the slaves in the Old Testament were white, he saw no reason why some pious Southern master should not enslave the major himself, ‘and read texts of Scripture to him to keep him quiet.’ Anderson, Doubleday later boasted, was unable to counter this merciless logical volley.”
I don’t see what’s logical about it. It was well known that white slavery — and every other kind of slavery — was common in ancient times (for instance, among the Greeks and Romans). Pope Gregory I is said to have exclaimed when he first saw some unusually fair-skinned slaves from what later became England, “Non Angli, sed angeli [They are not Angles, but angels].” But the fact that the slavery of whites had been accepted in the past is not a good argument against the slavery of the blacks.
I’m not saying this in support of slavery, of course. I share the anti-slavery attitude not only of Northerners but of early Southerners such as Jefferson and Madison, and wish they’d been able to find a way to end it early in the country’s history. In 1784 Jefferson wrote an ordinance that would have outlawed slavery in all the nation’s territories, the southern ones too, but it failed to pass by the margin of a single vote (when a person who had intended to vote for it was ill and missing the vote). That measure would have excluded slavery from the fertile cotton lands to which it later spread from the Atlantic states, and almost certainly have caused it to end in a gradual and relatively peaceful way. Instead, sectional divisions hardened, leading to the Civil War.