Slavery is wrong, which is a no-brainer, at least for those of us alive today. However, what many don't realize - slavery had been going on for thousands of years. It was around in ancient Greece (Aesop and Diogenes were slaves, as were several others who are now famous). Slavery was also practiced by the ancient Romans, the Mongols, the ancient Maya, the Chinese, the Arabs, by black Africans in Africa, by American Indians, by the Vikings, etc. I think the Irish were often taken as slaves and in fact St. Patrick was a slave originally, I think.

Slavery was universal, or close to it. Great Britain was the first country I know of that made slavery illegal, and the US followed a few decades after that, Like most wars, there was an economic motive behind the Civil War. Some Southern historians have posited that even without the Civil War, slavery was on the way out because it was becoming less economically viable.

Regardless, hundreds of thousands died during the conflict. As Gone With the Wind makes clear, there were many widows left behind, some of them black as well as white, because black male slaves, freedmen, and soldiers were also killed.

Even after we ended slavery in this country, the slave trade continued in other areas of the world - black slaves continued to be sold to the Arab states until modern times. Slavery was still legal in Mauritania until the 1990s, I believe.

And women and girls are still cruelly sold into sexual slavery and young African children sold into slavery in the mines, which is horrific. In the Belgian Congo, workers had their limbs chopped off if they tried to escape, and they also did that in Tibet to serfs who were disobedient.

People who claim to be for the rights of people but who continue to buy products that use child slaves... I wonder about what they are thinking.