You touch on a good point, one I don’t think has ever been addressed . That is how poor Southern Whites felt about slavery, not so much from the moral position but how did they feel seeing blacks, for better or worse, being kept feed and working, albeit as slaves but certainly their lot was slightly better than poor whites if simply because sick and hungry slaves do little work. Dead ones don’t do any at all. For all intents and purposes no one gave a damn what happened to poor white Southerners.
I had not thought about how the poor whites could regard slavery. It is so true that slavery was a dying institution when the Constitution was ratified, mainly because of all the useless mouths the plantation owner had to take care of. One unexamined fact is that the cotton gin was invented after the Constitution was ratified. The passage where a slave was counted as 60% of a person was contradicted by everything else found in the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. The compromise becomes much more reasonable once you understand slavery was economically doomed. Eli Whitney made slavery pay. Therefore, the best strategy for owners in the border states who couldn’t grow cotton would be to take the vigorous slaves and “sell them down the river”,and with “an out pouring of compassion” free the remainder. I don’t remember anyone adopting that dual strategy, but I remember many stories about owners choosing one or the other.
Liberalism with its geometrically increasing reliance on federal administrative laws and regulations is a gradual encroachment of slavery. Thinking of the healthcare bill, once again politicians offered enchanting material security, while obscuring subservience to rules vastly increasing their power. That legislation attacks our Bill of Rights by confiscating speech and religious freedoms, personal life without access to courts and trial, and Ninth Amendment personal freedoms guaranteed, but not enumerated by our Constitution.
To me pursuit of happiness has always meant spiritual prosperity within the hazards and uncertainties of personal freedoms. However, I can certainly see how slavery could be an attractive tradeoff for someone unmotivated spiritually, and persuaded to see only material poverty. They would not perceive the enormity of human poverty associated with having to beg an elected official or bureaucrat for relief from a law.