In honor of the ongoing 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the NYT is providing a daily blow by blow of what happened. Yesterday's contains an interesting observation from one on Thomas Jefferson's grandsons:
Randolph considered these non-choices. He trembled over Virginia’s fate if the convention chose the new federal Union. He scoffed at the fantasy, held by many of the state’s Unionists, that Southerners would bring the “Northern people … right after a while” on slavery’s blessings. “Sir, they are much more likely to make us wrong than we are to bring them right. Their anti-slavery is as old as slavery itself. … It has all the signs of a great mental movement. The opposite sentiment with us … is comparatively a thing of yesterday — it has not been inculcated in early life. … It has hardly had time to be understood and appreciated. … To dash it now against the iron-bound fanaticism of the North would be the height of folly.”
His point, clearly, was that the north was winning the battle for public opinion. Once that is lost, little else matters.
