It wasn't an angel, it was God Himself according to the Haggadah. And it wasn't the firstborn of slaveowners, but the firstborn son of all Egyptians that did not put the blood of the lamb on their doorposts.
http://www.chabad.org/holidays/passover/pesach_cdo/aid/661624/jewish/English-Haggadah.htm
[edit] Obviously this isn't a historical answer, but it's good to ask the right question.
This question and similar ones have come up many times before on /r/AskHistorians So I am mostly pulling my answers from previous questions and tailoring them to this thread. One of the originals can be found here
The Exodus The first, and primary concern, is that we have absoletely no evidence that any large number of Jewish slaves were ever held for any period in Egypt. Exodus attests that there at least 600,000 men (probably about 1.5 to 2 million people total if this number was accurate) at the time of the Exodus, and that they had been enslaved for 430 years. (Exodus 12:31) yet there is no record of this anywhere. There is no record of any great migration, no artifacts from the Sinai Peninsula, and of course, no written records from any of the civilizations in the area of this happening. This poses a serious problem since if we can't confirm that 2 million people existed in one area. Truthfully, it is worth mentioning that western civilizations did not even begin mentioning the existence of the Jewish people until about 1200 BCE. Likewise, there aren’t many ancient accounts from other nations about ancient Israel from before the first millennia BCE with the earliest being an Egyptian stele. World Renown Egyptian historian Eric Cline wrote about the very first mention by anyone of Israel and its people outside of the bible.
Merneptah is perhaps best known to students of the ancient Near East as the Egyptian pharaoh who first uses the term “Israel,” in an inscription dating to this same year (1207 BC). This inscription is the earliest occurrence of the name Israel outside the Bible. In the Pharaonic inscription, the name—written with a special sign to indicate that it is a people rather than just a place— appears in a brief description of a campaign to the region of Canaan, where the people whom he calls “Israel” were located.
Source: Cline, Eric H. (2014-03-23). 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Turning Points in Ancient History) Princeton University Press. (pp. 6-7)
I mention this because this was the time period when Egypt ruled over all the city states and tribes in the Levant (present day Palestine) and many scholars have asserted that the Egyptian story of Slavery and Moses came out of a desire to demonize their Egyptian rulers rather than tell a factual story.
On the Prospect of Jewish Children being killed
The idea that a first born son would be killed by god and have any real symbolic significance doesn't make sense if you understand ancient Egyptian culture. We have an incredible amount of information on figures such as Ramessess II (which many have claimed is the pharaoh from the Exodus narrative), which is exciting for historians. We know he was in power for 60+ years. He Left behind 59 daughters and 79 sons (keep in mind that most Egyptian kings and Pharaoh's around this time had well over a dozen wives). The transition from him to the next successor was smooth immediately there-after and we know that Pharaoh lived well into his 80s when he died. Ramessess II was in no way unique to most other Egyptian rulers -- most had many wives and most had many sons and order of birth did not automatically select a child to inherit the throne. In fact, when the king named an heir, whichever mother of the son he chose would then be called “Queen” but their word for queen translates to “primary wife” which is like a title. The pharaoh did this after waiting for the children to partially grow up and we often know that it was rarely any first born son to get the title of "heir". The idea of a first born son having automatic royal inheritance is a Hebrew cultural element, not an Egyptian one.
There is no evidence that he held any mass incarceration of any Hebrews at any time. Now a lack of evidence is not definitive proof that something did not happen. However it would be the imperative of those who are in favor of this idea that would have to supply some evidence for this -- which they have not.
Books worth reading that discuss both Ramessess II and how children were selected to become the next Pharaoh are:
Clayton, Peter. Chronology of the Pharaohs.
Shaw, Ian. The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt
Kitchen, Kenneth. Pharaoh Triumphant: The Life and Times of Ramesses II, King of Egypt.