He is not justifying slavery. He’s asking a question. Are they better off under the slavery of the old days or the slavery of today?
And, by the way, the Democrat Party was the primary supporters of the old slavery and is the primary cause of today’s slavery.
People are too stupid to correlate that idea. Language comprehension has shrunk to concrete interpretations only. I see it in my children they cannot take anything away from a conversation that deals with any abstraction or euphemism.