We're not talking prisoners. We're talking of men, women and children as property.
It depends on what is meant by property.
There is no shame in being the servant of someone else as we are all God's servants as well as freemen, and he calls us to be servants of one another.
No one is self-determined. A king/lord/official is responsible for the people under him and those under him are to honor, respect and obey the king/official and in a sense, are responsible for him too.
A country/territory is a family. If the father is head of the family, why is it controversial that a king/official/lord being a country's father, ask that those in the country (his household) serve and honor him as he serves them? Especially if the people and land are something he himself worked for or inherited.
If a king didn't consider his subjects pastorally, he would have no call to go to war to defend them or provide for them spiritually and physically.
Was Joseph who was set over his brothers as second only to Pharaoh really blessed as second in command or was his position a necessary evil in order to open the grain stores? All the Patriarchs had servants. Job was restored by God giving him back his servants. The Law makes provision for servants who love their masters and even the system of servitude was set up so as to provide for the one serving. Christ is called God's servant, but that doesn't mean he is somehow less than God. The father and king in Christ's parables had servants. Paul tells servants to obey their masters in everything and for masters to treat their servants fairly.
I realize that my argument doesn't account for the exceptionalism that is the America system, but slavery was inherited from Europe.
In some cases, skilled men and women who could have lived their own lives given the chance.
They did live their lives. Nothing is outside the Providence of God. God put them where they were meant to be in order to save their souls and reward them for their good work. If their masters treated them terribly, their masters will answer to God.
As they could have been by Jefferson (see the details of his friend's will in the earlier post). So no, there was no humanity if you're treated as collateral.
What post # is it?
And consider that if you had been Jefferson's slave, you would have been encouraged to 'increase your numbers' to swell his bank balance. Do you see much humanity there?
Why is this a problem? If I lived on a plantation with a good Christian master who loved me in Christ, I would understand that his prosperity is the prosperity of the whole. It's only when the master doesn't share the fruit of common labor with, or is abusive toward those who work, that these sorts of things turn evil.