Lots of that sort of slavery went on, and still goes on today but that's another thread.
Well, yes -- and it was -- but it plugs in here, too, inasmuch as liberal opinion, which is plugged into the old Abolitionist moralizing against the South for the same reasons -- South-bashing -- uses those same, exclusive and focussed themes Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass used to play up Southern wickedness.
They abandoned Enlightenment discourse because it balanced off interests and rights on either side. That wasn't what they wanted. They wanted an asymmetrical result, so they needed a different kind of discourse.
They went back to neoclassical oratory and its emphasis on drama and invective -- polemic -- which Cicero had used and taught in De Oratore. For Cicero, oratory was about mobilizing the public and decisionmakers in a worthy public cause. That was right up their alley -- not the parsing of differences and equities in an attempt to arrive at a dispassionate, detached, objective truth as per the Enlightenment tradition.
Modern liberals are using the Abolitionist tools for the same reason: they have the same Enemy -- the South -- and they want to move the public and destroy the ability of the South to respond to their policy initiatives.
That's why it's useful to remember that the Abolitionists were isolating on, and having a cow about, a distinct and narrow subset of all human miseries, emphasizing the horrors of the Middle Passage while ignoring the equal or worse horrors that had obtained for 300 years already in the English practice of "Barbadosing" people -- impressing them into corvees of indentured laborers, who were essentially slaves for a time certain.
In fact, the first slaves brought to Virginia Colony were indentured, and one of them, a black man from Africa, served out his period of labor and then began importing indentured labor from Africa himself -- and he was the man who figured out a way to have his time-limited indentures recognized as open-ended by a Virginia court, essentially making his indentured servants into chattel slaves. And he was a freedman.
So that is why I say Stowe lied by omission, by deliberately focussing on just the part of the problem that allowed her to beat up polemically on the South.
She was very modest about it, though. This is what she said about her composition afterward, feigning ignorance of rhetorical techniques (yeah, right):
"I no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house, thinks of the teachings of the rhetorician or the elocutionist . . . I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did His dictation."