You have a very strange perspective on history, to which I have already responded in another reply, to another poster. Slavery is not the defining issue in the determination of human morality. Slavery, for example, was tolerated and accepted in both the Old and New Testaments of the Western Bible. It has existed in one form or another in virtually every non-Biblical religion, as well.
I believe that it is a mistaken system--unfair to both slave and master, for a variety of reasons. But you cannot revise the whole human experience, the way many hereabouts have tried to do, in order to make an angry statement.
And so far as relations between the races? There was then, and still is now, more goodwill between Caucasian and Negro inhabitants in the South than in the North. The reason why the Old South was considered the last true Civilization was because it accorded everyone respect, from the greatest plantation owner to the lowliest field hand. There is no equivalent respect between different classes and conditions in America today.
No, the system was not a good one. But it was not the consummation of evil, either. Read what Booker T. Washington, who rose from it had to say, a generation later: Booker T. Washington.
William Flax
...up to the point where the field hand didn't want to be property anymore, then the skin was torn from their backs. In a "civilized" manner, of course...
I'm sure black inhabitants of the South throughout its history would disagree. I don't know what notion of respect you refer to, but I do not find much respect in slavery or Jim Crow laws, which were predicated on the notion that blacks were mentally, morally, and socially inferior. Sure, slavery existed thoughout human history, but history turned against it, and the fact that most people, at least in our country, today find it morally repugnant is a good thing. Now, I have no intention of lambasting the South, it is part of our country, and the North was complicit in slavery as well, but sugar-coating oppressive race-relations and a slave-ownership society is contrary to the values of our great nation and the self-evident truths upon which it was founded.