Maybe someone should start a thread about this whole thing of how far people carry some kind of ownership or responsibility for threads they start, or that they become heavily involved in.

It might be an interesting enough thing to discuss - but I think it'd be better if it didn't cut short exploration of the primary topic of this thread.
....................

The essential difference between chattel slavery and indentured servitude is surely the position of children. If an indentured servant has a child, that child is not in any sense the legal property of the person to whom the servant was indentured. I'm sure that if you hunted around (more especially in other parts of the world) you could find cases of indentured servants being given treatment as bad as any slave, and even cases of favoured slaves living in relative luxury - but that's beside the main point.

There have been, and continue to be, a wide variety of systems of slavery and near slavery - but the peculiarly horrible thing about the American was that it operated within a modern system of property ownership and capitalist enterprise, in an society that saw itself as founded in liberty and with a politics that was aggressively "democratic".   

Is there any reason to feel confident that our society could never reinvent the system, or something very close to it, perhaps involving some sophisticated version of debt bondage? More especially if the incidental - and inefficient - cruelties and excesses of chattel slavery could be eliminated?