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Them refers to the enslaved Africans and the owners in the South. It’s pretty obvious the owners needed the labor to acquire the wherewithal to provide all with food and shelter so eventually they’d work out a deal.

Work out a deal? In an owner/slave relationship there is no "deal" to be worked out. The owner has all the power. And funny how you can claim a deal would have been worked out when the political leaders of the seceding states weren't interested in any deals with the U.S. government, but rather took up arms against the rest of the nation in order to protect their peculiar institution.

At any rate, being an enslaved African in the South was considerably preferable to being an enslaved African in Africa, Arabia, the Caribbeans and virtually everywhere else. It was even preferable to being a Russian peasant or a European serf.

How very kind of you to be so thoughtful and speak on behalf of the slaves--Massa knows best! Maybe it's just me, but I think being a free man (and woman and child) in the South would have been preferable to being a slave in any other country or a serf in Russia or Europe. By the way, serfdom was abolished in Western Europe long before the Civil War, and in Russia in 1861. So your faulty comparison--slaves here vs. slaves there instead of free men here vs. slaves there--doesn't hold any water.