[Chickensoup]

A better answer? Ya mean one that would have appeased more people.


No, a more accurate answer. Many slaves were not just "slaves." They had special functions and trainings. Southerners were businessmen who for the most part, used their slaves wisely and trained them to produce income.

[HostileTerritory]

Also, you know, you're working with kids. Slavery is a fact of history but it's a painful one for kids to understand and there are better ways of doing it.

It's like how you don't lead 7 year-olds into the Holocaust Museum and say, "who here is Jewish? You would have been gassed with your Mommy!" There are better and more sensitive ways of approaching the truth in a way whose first message isn't to restate the dehumanization.

[Cheburashka]

Southerners were businessmen who for the most part, used their slaves wisely and trained them to produce income.
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Umm, duh. A human being needs to be fed, clothed, sheltered. A slave owner will have to pay those monthly costs, as well as the initial cost of acquiring the slave, whether by purchase of by support of a slave child born to its slave mother until it is old enough to be put to work. The only reason you would do such a thing is that you expect to make a profit. Therefore the profit motive is the underlying basis and sole reason for slave holding.
Every slave (with the temporary exception of children too young to be put to work) had work to do for the benefit of the slaveholder. This is true of slave holding at any time or place in history. The implication that slaves in the South were were were utilized in any way differently than slaves in Greece of Rome is clearly erroneous. Training given to the slave is irrelevant.
Slave holding was never charitable work, and never done for the benefit of the slave.