You would be surprised.
There have been two basic types of slavery throughout recorded history. The most common has been what is called household, patriarchal, or domestic slavery. Although domestic slaves occasionally worked outside the household, for example, in haying or harvesting, their primary function was that of menials who served their owners in their homes or wherever else the owners might be, such as in military service. Slaves often were a consumption-oriented status symbol for their owners, who in many societies spent much of their surplus on slaves. Household slaves sometimes merged in varying degrees with the families of their owners, so that boys became adopted sons or women became concubines or wives who gave birth to heirs. Temple slavery, state slavery, and military slavery were relatively rare and distinct from domestic slavery, but in a very broad outline they can be categorized as the household slaves of a temple or the state.
The other major type of slavery was productive slavery. It was relatively infrequent and occurred primarily in Classical Athenian Greece and Rome and in the post-Columbian circum-Caribbean New World. It also was found in 9th-century Iraq, among the Kwakiutl Indians of the American Northwest, and in a few areas of sub-Saharan Africa in the 19th century. Although slaves also were employed in the household, slavery in all of those societies seems to have existed predominantly to produce marketable commodities in mines or on plantations.
Okay, I'll grant you that some were used for "social status". In elite social circles, house servants sent a social message to peers, but this was not the dominant purpose in the USA, and without the field slaves producing excess income, the house slaves likely wouldn't have existed.
House slaves were a luxury the wealthy could afford, but could not have existed without profit slaves.
Expecting Slo-Joe be surprised? Not likely. Slo-Joe is in denial.
For example, Slo cannot fathom why the slavers were trying to expand into the territories.
There would *BE* no significant slavery in the territories regardless of what anyone said, because there was no profit in it.
Meanwhile, back in reality, the democrats were aggressively trying to expand into the territories.
In November 1854, thousands of armed pro-slavery men known as "Border Ruffians" or "Southern Yankees", mostly from Missouri, poured into the Kansas Territory and swayed the vote in the election for a non-voting delegate to Congress in favor of pro-slavery Democratic candidate John Wilkins Whitfield.
The following year, a congressional committee investigating the election reported that 1,729 fraudulent votes were cast compared to 1,114 legal votes.
In one location, only 20 of the 604 voters were residents of the Kansas Territory;
in another, 35 were residents and 226 non-residents.