If you are white, chances are your ancestors lived and died indentured servants, little better than slaves, sometimes worse.
If you are black, your ancestors lived and died slaves, little worse than indentured servants, sometimes better.
One well known example: many poor white indentured servants were a whole lot worse off than a slave like Sally Hemings, or than household slaves in good circumstances.
It even sounds as if Nat Turner actually had it better than many indentured servants.
By no stretch of the imagination was the existence of either Hemings or Turner either cruel or barbaric by the standards of their time, and for him by his own account.
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