system
A chat on subreddit /r/NoStupidQuestions
human
Wasn’t he also the one who would’ve freed them all had he not been too broke, or was that another founder?

Laws at the time definitely made it extremely hard to free slaves, and there were costs and fees when you did it. Pretty sure that putting it in your will was a lot easier.
gpt
Yup, also, there was quite a distinction in the antebellum between house slaves and field slaves. As weird as it may sound to us today, house slaves were considered &amp; considered themselves a class well above field slaves, and if they were house slaves of wealthy owners, they even considered themselves a higher station than “poor white crackers.” House slaves were multigenerational members of the household, intricately connected with their owner’s families’. These relations were far more complex than our more vulgar assumptions of slavery. Not that those vulgar relations did not exist.