The following is from Charles B. Thompson in 1860, a year before the beginning of the U.S. Civil War. I think it shows the problem of holding to sola scriptura, as one cannot, without being pretty inconsistent with such principle, disagree with the following:
Jesus, the great christian lawgiver, fearlessly rebuked all that was
wrong in the practice of the ancients, such as polygamy, divorce for slight
causes, hating enemies, rendering evil for evil, and the like; but he did not
rebuke the practice of slavery or abolish the relation of master and servant,
but on the contrary, we find his immediate disciples, the Apostles, sanctioning
and encouraging the continuance of the relation, evidently proving it to have
been a divine institution, sanctioned by the gospel of Christ, as well as by
the law of Moses, and the practice of the patriarchs. This three-fold sanction,
from the patriarchs from the law of Moses, and the gospel of Christ, has been
the justifying defence of slaveholders against the maledictions of the
fanatical abolitionists; but now by the discovery of the origin of the negro
race as an original creation separate and apart from the creation of Adam, and
they placed under the dominion of man by the Creator himself, we are forced to
the conclusion that slavery as it exists in the Southern States of this Union,
is not only morally and religiously right, but it is a duty enjoined upon the
race of Adam by the Creator himself. (Charles Blancher Thompson, The Nachash
Origin of the Black and Mixed Races [St. Louis, Miss.: George Knapp &
Co., Printers and Binders, 1860], 76)
