Nobody, but nobody, is an apologist for slavery in the sense of defending its righteousness or advocating its return. When people talk of the complexities of relations between slaves and their owners/masters/captors, for you to position them in that way is simply a bullying way of insisting on a simplification, which is obnoxious no matter how many books you trot out to demonstrate the utterly uncontested fact that there were absolutely hellish abuses inseparable from the system itself, the only disagreement being their statistical distribution. So you are presenting yourself as an extremist of the position everybody already shares. This is exactly the kind of posturing-to-prevent-thinking which passes for scholarship in way too many academic circles nowadays, which is the only reason I'm getting so het up about it. The fact is, there were genuine ambivalences in these necessarily intimate relations. Society is a complex thing, and no society can long endure on the basis of unidirectional terror (I spend a long time every semester explaining that the pax romana was not a 300-year military occupation, and that 5% of Europe did not keep 95% quivering at swordpoint for a thousand years, tho' those are myths very useful to our present self-understanding). My guess is, slavery would have collapsed from its own internal contradictions and anti-adaptions in another generation or so, but it wouldn't have ended in a bloody revolt, which is the only outcome the reign-of-perpetual-terror model would predict.

Adam