Many blacks and a large number of the Indians in the South and North owned slaves. Slavery was sort of a given.
But there was a difference between the chattel slavery practiced in the British colonies (chattel means possession, which meant that a slave was not a human being and had no human rights) and the slavery that existed in Spanish colonies, where they were not slavers but had bought slaves from the Muslims and the British to provide labor in Latin America. The difference was that a chattel slave could never earn money and profit from his skills, never buy his freedom, and never marry or have control over a family or a property. There were laws in South Carolina and Georgia that forbade freeing slaves upon the death of the owner, teaching slaves - or even baptizing them, because this meant that their owners might have to treat them like human beings. Some counties in Georgia even had the death penalty for Christian missionaries preaching to slaves!
By contrast a slave under Spanish law had to be provided with religious instruction, permitted to receive all the sacraments and marry, be sold only with his family, be freed by his owner and be able to earn wages and buy his freedom.
Certain Indian groups were big slave-hunters, capturing other Indians to sell to the British, or recapturing fleeing black slaves. As life in the US got harder, these groups merged (the Spanish affiliated Indians and blacks had already fled to Cuba) and were reconstituted as the Seminoles, a mixed-tribe, mixed-race band located south of Orlando, to the Gullah Geechee on the South Carolina coast, most of whom are also a mixture of black and Indian.
But there was a difference between the chattel slavery practiced in the British colonies (chattel means possession, which meant that a slave was not a human being and had no human rights) and the slavery that existed in Spanish colonies, where they were not slavers but had bought slaves from the Muslims and the British to provide labor in Latin America.A little disagreement here, While under the legal systems on slavery between the Spanish and British systems were indeed different, the Spanish themselves ran a very robust slave trade between West Africa and the Americas, and they transported far more captives to the 'New World' than the British did. Also, the slaves sent to Spanish territories had far lower life expectancies than those sent to British lands, especially the North American colonies.
Mostly a difference in the work they were required to do and the climate I'd suppose, but if you had to be a slave back then, you were better off in British North America than in Spanish, French, Dutch or Portuguese colonies.
