If you look back through the archives of FR, you’ll discover that I posted about Anthony Johnson many years ago. He bought his own wife out of slavery. Her name was Juana or Juanita.
The qualifier “as a group” was intended to cover outliers who were themselves always free, or were indentured servants who worked out the term of their indenture, and in the case of Mr. Johnson, became a slave owner himself.
Bondage was clearly not viewed in the light that we view it, at that time.
The Trans-Atlantic slave trade did rise in part because of disease resistance. Indentured servants from the British Isles, primarily Irish, died too quickly to be of much benefit to the rice and indigo plantations of the swampy, subtropical south where malaria was then common.
The whole indentured servant/slavery thing was pretty convoluted with a lot of legal wrangling going on from the earliest days.
The Puritans themselves seemed to support slavery but only as a means of bringing them out of Africa and to God with freedom being the eventual goal. (different world then so I’m not qualified to judge them)