Maybe, but in all fairness to Southern whites, slavery was a business model which worked, spectacularly in some cases like cotton, and the social ideal of slaveholding in time was seen by many other Southerners as praiseworthy.
Indeed, it's been argued, slave work-gangs in, say, cotton were the original basic industrial process, later adapted for Northern factories & immigrants.
Cotton & slavery made Deep South whites, on average, the most prosperous people on earth, at the time.
By 1860, with now generations of success, most could not even imagine a different "way of life".
And slavery was global in those days, so where in the world could slaveholders look to see business & social models which worked better than theirs?
But one problem was, like a powerful medicine, slavery came with major side-effects, effects noticed and written about already by Thomas Jefferson.
In so many words, Jefferson said in effect: slavery rots the slaveholders' souls.
The bottom line was, even in such minimal slave states as Delaware, with very few slaves or slaveholders, they never seriously considered abolition before 1860 and after 1865 only because forced to by the 13th Amendment.
Why remains a mystery, so far as I know.