I was going to stay out of this but as a historian, not a revisionist, I find it hard to understand how we can place 19th, 20th and 21st century views on an institution as old as humanity...or lack there of.
After the Age of Reason, man began to question topics never before explored, such as slavery, the role of women and the rights of kings.  Slavery was a normal way of life for the tribes of Africa who raided enemy villages and those not slaughtered were taken to be sold as slaves.  They were either sold to Arab slave traders or to the Portugese.  As late as the early 1800's Arab slavers were raiding Spain, France, Italy and Sicily for slaves...where is the Moral outrage.
Slavery was an institution that had been a normal way of life for thousands of years.  Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Hittites, Asyarians, and the kingdoms of Africa all maintained slaves.  Europeans began to question that institution, it spread to the America's and finely came to end after a bloody Civil War.  
The indentured, slaves and Indians were not citizens but they were most certainly part of the American fabric.

Carl M. Dozier
Chesapeake , Virginia
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