[Non-Sequitur]

The subject of the sentence is the relationship that existed between master and slave.

No, you're talking about the relationship between owner and property, master and chattel, the ownership of one human being by another. Nothing justifies that.

It was rarely whips and chains.

No, but it was white southerners looking at black southerners as fit for nothing but servitude. As something less than human. To be bought and sold at will, with no more thought that selling a table or a cow. Try and pretty it up all you wish, you can't deny the underlying sentiment.

My gripe with you guys is the myth you want to promote that there was some fundamental difference between the North and the South over the morality of slavery. The difference was the economics of it.

The difference is that men like Robert Lee and Thomas Jackson and Jefferson Davis saw the morality of slavery and men like Abraham Lincoln and William Seward did not.

[groanup]

The institution of slavery existed all over the world prior to the WBTS. It certainly existed North of the MDL. Your argument is that the North and its leaders were morally superior. That would make the guy who quit beating his wife in March morally superior to the guy who quit beating his wife in April. The North, Lincoln, Seward et al did NOT go to war with the South over slavery. The South did NOT go to war over the abolition of slavery. ONE of the many reasons the South went to war was the issue of expansion of slavery to the west.

But you know all of that.