What Our Ancestors Knew

According to Robert Lewis Dabney:

It will in the end become apparent to the world,A Southside View of Slavery, by Nehemiah Adams not only that the conviction of the wickedness of slaveholding was drawn wholly from sources foreign to the Bible, but that it is a legitimate corollary from that fantastic, atheistic, and radical theory of human rights, which made the Reign of Terror in France, which has threatened that country, and which now threatens the United States, with the horrors of Red-Republicanism. Because we believe that God intends to vindicate His Divine Word, and to make all nations honour it; because we confidently rely in the force of truth to explode all dangerous error; therefore we confidently expect that the world will yet do justice to Southern slaveholders
A Defense of Virginia and the South

Dabney was certainly not alone in viewing Abolitionism as an attack upon the authority of the Scriptures.

Nehemiah Adams, a Christian minister in Boston, had many of the same things to say:

The apostolic spirit with regard to slavery, surely, is not of the same tone with the spirit which encourages slaves every where to flee from their masters, and teaches them that his swiftest horse, his boat, his purse, are theirs, if they wish to escape. Philemon, traveling with Onesimus, was not annoyed by a vigilance committee of Paul's Christian friends with a habeas corpus to rescue the servant from his master; nor did these friends watch the arrival of ships to receive a fugitive consigned by "the saints and faithful brethren which were at Colosse" to the "friends of the slave" at Corinth. True, these disciples had not enjoyed the light which the Declaration of American Independence sheds on the subject of human rights. Moses, Paul, and Christ were their authorities on moral subjects; but our infidels tell us that we should have a far different New Testament could it be written for us now; but since we can not have a new Bible now and then, this proves that "God can not make a revelation to us in a book." Every man, they say, must decide as to his duty by the light of present circumstances, not by a book written eighteen hundred years ago. Zeal against American slavery has thus been one of the chief modern foes to the Bible. Let him who would not become an infidel and atheist beware and not follow his sensibilities, as affected by cases of distress, in preference to the word of God, which the unhappy fate of some who have made shipwreck of their faith in their zeal against slavery shows to be the best guide
A Southside View of Slavery [Boston: T.R. Marvin and B.B. Mussey and Company, 1854], pages 199-200).

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All our statesmen, of all parties, had taught us, not only that the reserved rights of the States were the bulwarks of the liberties of the people, but that emancipation by federal aggression would lead to the destruction of all other rights. A Clay, as much as a Calhoun, proclaimed that when abolition overthrew slavery in the South, it also would equally overthrow the Constitution. Calhoun, and other Southern statesmen, with a sagacity which every day confirms, had forewarned us, that when once abolition by federal aggression came, these other sure results would follow: that the same greedy lust of power which had meddled between masters and slaves, would assuredly, and for the stronger reason, desire to use the political weight of the late slaves against their late masters: that having enforced a violent emancipation, they would enforce, of course, negro suffrage, negro eligibility to office, and a full negro equality: that negro equality thus theoretically established would be practical negro superiority: that the tyrant section, as it gave to its victims, the White men of the South, more and more causes of just resentment, would find more and more violent inducements to bribe the negroes, with additional privileges and gifts, to assist them in their domination: that this miserable career must result in one of two things, either a war of races, in which the Whites or the blacks would be, one or the other, exterminated; or amalgamation. But while we believe that "God made of one blood all nations of men to dwell under the whole heavens," we know that the African has become, according to a well-known law of natural history, by the manifold influences of the ages, a different, fixed species of the race, separated from the White man by traits bodily, mental and moral, almost as rigid and permanent as those of genus. Hence the offspring of an amalgamation must be a hybrid race . . . incapable of the career of civilization and glory as an independent race. And this apparently is the destiny which our conquerors have in view. If indeed they can mix the blood of the heroes of Manassas with this vile stream from the fens of Africa, then they will never again have occasion to tremble before the righteous resistance of Virginia freemen; but will have a race supple and vile enough to fill that position of political subjection, which they desire to fix on the South.”