I have the letters that my gg grandfather the private in the cavalry wrote home to his wife while he was away at the war. He was trying to manage the farming by remote control, and he gave detailed directions on just about everything. I might have been able to manage myself with all that advice, but everybody went to bed dog tired, including his wife.
A couple of interesting points - he gave instructions that if she leased any of their slaves out she must not separate families, and that she must put in the contract that they could not be taken out of the county so they would not be taken to the rice plantations or made to do dangerous work. They had to rest two hours in the heat of the day, and when one of the young women was expecting her first child she was to have the doctor for her rather than the midwife. And apparently he performed marriages and taught his slaves to read and write, because he enclosed a note from Bas, who accompanied him to Montgomery, to Bas's wife. Bas was apparently educated and also was a skilled blacksmith, and when he returned from Montgomery my gg grandfather instructed his wife that when he did smithing work for others in the area he was to keep 10% for himself.
And he was probably speaking straight truth because he never imagined that anybody but his wife would ever read the letters. He was probably a little unusual (in after years when my grandmother asked him why he was so solicitous for his slaves, he would huff a little and say that "it behooved a man to take good care of his own") but he wasn't alone.
No reason that your ancestor couldn't have been one of the other people who acted honorably and humanely within the system as he found it.