Read about serfdom, and how widespread it was. It was another form of slavery, and plenty of white people toiled under it. The reality is that human beings can be very cruel to one another, and those things that were done wrong in the US were not unprecedented. That doesn’t excuse them, but they weren’t in any way the exclusive sins of the US.
“Read about serfdom”
It is remarkable how similar serfdom is to modern day socialism....where socialism has become “ripened” to the point that the government (ruling class) has taken all prosperity from the masses under the guise of benefiting the masses...and all of the wealth winds up with the ruling class...with crumbs left for the masses.
In the second half of Black Rednecks and White Liberals. Thomas Sowell discusses the fact that no other time and no other culture rejected the institution of slavery than the Christian, especially Protestant and especially English-speaking ones in the 18th and 19th Centuries.Christianity turned against the institution of slavery despite the existence in the Bible of the Epistle to Philemon which condones it.
The reason for the (near) abolition of slavery in the world was the Nineteenth Century influence of the British Empire, which covered 2/3 of the world’s land. Without any monetary incentive, the British created a squadron of the Royal Navy which was dedicated to the abolition of sea-borne trade in slaves from Africa. Sowell reports that although that squadron would enter ports in Africa, their seamen were not given shore leave there because they would see the human trafficking going on there, and they would inevitably riot.
Sowell also acknowledges - even emphasizes - that the only pro-slavery literature in history was produced in the American South. He makes the point that the institution never needed any defense at any other place in any previous time. I would add that the American South was, among Christians, uniquely situated to be “the last to get the word” on the immorality of slavery.
Due to commercial electricity and electrical appliances, air conditioning and central heating, plentiful and high-quality food, commercial transportation and automobile/fuel production, plastics, health care technology, etc., an American secretary today would have to think hard before swapping circumstances with Queen Victoria. If you reflect on that fact, and consider how owning “servants” would ameliorate conditions which we ourselves would find intolerable in the absence of the above amenities, you can see where slaveowners might consider the abolition of slavery to be an imposition similar to our being ordered to abide by the “Green New Deal.” Or worse.