Never had much of an opinion on slavery, never would have wanted one but I will not cast aspersions upon my ancestors.
I think one could spend a lifetime studying the White/Black/Indian dynamics of Southern History. I believe Antebellum Southern society would seem to most all of us completely surreal. Seems like on balance, neither Whites nor Blacks of that last generation wanted to talk much about slavery after it was done, at least not by the Twentieth Century when researchers were tracking down this by then elderly generation.
OF COURSE there was the horrific fact of more'n a million people facing life-long confinement and forced labor, and OF COURSE incidents of what today would be called rape or forced sexual servitude were widespread (try and find a Black American today who AIN'T part Euro, and the beauty of some quadroon and octoroon prostitutes was legendary )....
...but because it involved humans, it was more complicated than black and white. We all know about Jefferson and his de-facto Black other wife and kids, I'm trying to recall too the Texas ranching family from what was then the very unsettled Denton County TX area where one of the brothers was, in fact, Black.
Further west and a generation later famed cattleman John Chisum, (who had grown up in a slaveholding family) never married, except he supported a former slave woman and his two daughters by her comfortably in Dallas, and when he contracted smallpox he was nursed to health by a devoted Black ranch hand who, if he weren't his son, was at least a blood relative through his former slave "wife".
Those familiar with "Lonesome Dove" may recall the wooden tombstone carved by Captain McCall for Deets, paraphrased directly from the granite one Charles Goodnight had carved for his indispensable Trail Boss, Boze Ikard, a former slave so formidable on the one hand and trustworthy on the other, that he was generally trusted to keep safe the payroll, among his other duties.
N****r Britt Johnson too, actual slave when he did it, famous for riding alone into Comancheria to ransom his own and his White neighbors' children after the Elm Creek Raid.
As far as apparent moral contradictions among White folks of that era, one needs to look no further than Noah Smithwick....
http://www.lsjunction.com/olbooks/smithwic/otd.htm..worth the time to read if ya got the patience....
Smithwick was already in Texas before the Alamo (he prob'ly would have died there but was in Bastrop suffering from malaria at the time) and was one of the early Texas Rangers.
On the PC side of the coin Smithwick lived with Comanches for a while and sometimes partnered with Cherokees to pursue Comanche horse thieves. The Lipan Apaches that rode with Jack Hays also hung out at Smithwick's gun shop and smithy at Webber's Prairie south of Bastrop.
Webber's Prairie was named after Smithwick's business partner Webber, a White guy from Connecticut who, when he got a slave woman pregnant, bought her freedom and married her so his kid wouldn't be a slave. Smithwick rails bitterly about Weber and his family eventually being forced to leave when the country filled up with, as Smithwick called 'em, "the better sort" who had moved in only after the country was safe.
When Secession came, Smithwick, being a Union man like his hero Andrew Jackson had been, left the state for California.
Yet Smithwick, PC as he was by modern standards, also owned at least two slaves, when he left Texas in 1861, he sold them to help finance the trip.
A chapter in his book is devoted to him and his neighbors attempting to capture two runaway slaves, to the point that shots were exchanged, the slaves succeeding in escaping pursuit. Smithwick explains apologetically that chasing down runaways and returning them to bondage was just what people did in that time and place. Here's his quote, written decades after the fact, on that whole episode....
They were never recaptured, though one or two other parties attempted it. I hope they reached Mexico in safety. That big fellow deserved to; he certainly was as brave a man as I ever met. Singlehanded - his companion being unarmed - he had whipped six white men, all armed, and as many fierce dogs.
That was unquestionably the worst fight I ever got into. I think now, looking back over a life of ninety years, that that was about the meanest thing I ever did. Though having been all my life accustomed to such things I did not then take that view of it. The capture of fugitive slaves was a necessity of the institution...and of the opinions of his own two slaves...
It was curious to note the different views taken of that affair by the negroes - a man and a woman - in my possession. The woman, who was a mulatto, openly avowed her sympathy for the fugitives, while the man, a full-blooded negro, took the other side...and here he is speaking of the aging slave of an elderly neighbor, who was the sole support of his owner, a White widow woman, because the widow's own sons were deadbeats...
It would have been a distressing affair had old Joe Allen been killed [by Indians on a raid], as he was the sole support of a poor widow with a large family, among them several grown-up sons.
The injustice of the situation forced itself upon my recognition at the time, and I often wondered how it fared with Joe and his wife Mandy when they were free. Two more honest, faithful people could not have been found in all the country. Joe was so entirely trustworthy that his mistress permitted him to hire himself to suit himself, himself collecting his wages, which were faithfully delivered to the mistress, while his own wife went barefooted and in rags, her hire and that of one of her children by a former husband supporting another white family.
I had both Joe and Mandy in my employ, and never had the least cause to find fault with either one. At another time the widow's family had a narrow escape from losing their means of livelihood. Joe was wending his way to his work early in the morning, after having Sundayed with his wife, when he was bitten on the leg by a rattlesnake. He had a chunk of tobacco in his pocket, which he chewed up, hastily binding it on the wound with his handkerchief, and went on his way, not losing a day's work.Like I said, there was a lot of shades of gray in that black and white, and I ain't referring to breeding.
Birdwatcher
