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Content Warning: Explicit Sexual Violence

I'm sorry, but I have to take issue with your premise. All the high, formal discourse around politics is a perfectly fine thing to consider but what is always and only at issue is who gets to do what to whom. There are lots of ways we sugar coat that: politics are about morals, values, how we should organize our civilization. Those are even true, but it's just when we get to places where the answers we have given don't seem to withstand scrutiny that we retreat to abstractions. Because these issues are very much still with us and key to understanding monstrous injustices, let's be direct.

The slavery question in the US was, literally, whether or not white people should keep enslaving black people. Either one accepted their being tortured, raped, and all the rest to make money for whites or one did not and thought that should stop. There are disagreements over the best path to that end but they aren't really arguments against emancipation...and even some of those are really racist. A common position for antislavery whites was basically that they rejected slavery in their communities because it would bring black people there and slavery's continued national rise would ensure the integration of their lily white communities and a continent they believed rightly reserved to them. For example, here's antislavery congressman and later Senator David Wilmot discussing his proposal to ban slavery in the Mexican Cession:

I have no squeamish sensitiveness upon the subject of slavery, no morbid sympathy for the slave. I plead the cause and rights of white freemen. I would preserve to free white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.

Wilmot is not an abolitionist firebrand -he hates being lumped with them- but he's a very normal antislavery white. Sometimes they'll be as explicit as stating that one prefers no slavery because it means no black people, but if black people must come then slavery is preferable to freedom. For instance, here's a white colonizer in Kansas:

When I came to the Territory I cannot say that I belonged to either party; I took the position that slavery was just and legal, but, as a matter of expedience, I would prefer to have Kansas as a free State, provided there were no negroes allowed to live in the Territory. If they were to be here, I preferred that they should be under masters.

That's Andrew Francis being more explicit than most westerners, but his attitude is much of a piece with Wilmot. He felt strongly enough about it that he formed his own party, the Free White State Party, until he was reassured that the ordinary Free State (antislavery) party in Kansas was also resolved against the existence of black Kansans. They voted by an overwhelming majority to ban black Americans from their state, with only a few abolitionists dissenting. Such bans were common in the Midwest -Lincoln's Illinois and his childhood home of Indiana both had them- though they tended to fail against the presence of local free blacks who were more established in their communities. Where black people were rarer on the ground, such as in Oregon, they were far more successful.

That's the antislavery side's dirty laundry and, admittedly, the worst of it. Black antislavery writers don't have those hangups, of course. Some antislavery whites do much better than others, but among them any kind of racial egalitarianism is rare. The proslavery side is much worse. This ultimately comes down to the nature of the beast. You can't have a non-racist argument for instituting or preserving the enslavement of anybody on the basis of race. That's trying to take all the hydrogen and oxygen out of water and still have the water. American slavery isn't something coincidental to white supremacy, but rather a key component of it and there's a reasonable historical argument that slavery and the genocide of Native Americans created white supremacy rather than the other way around.

So what you see in proslavery discourse isn't even an attempt at being non-racist. Instead everything they write is explicitly racist, all about how black people need enslaving and benefit from it. The best you could get is a very marginal and overstudied, because he's so weird, George Fitzhugh. Fitzhugh argued that slavery was good, black people needed it, and it was so good they ought to enslave poor whites too. But Fitzhugh is smart enough to know that's never going to happen. His objective is really to defend slavery by libelling free labor. In that he has most every other proslavery thinker for company. They'll go on about how the wage laborer has no expectation of benevolence from his boss, while the enslaved person is part of the family and so forth. To my knowledge, no one else goes so far as Fitzhugh along those lines -which is why he's overstudied, since he's so unrepresentative- but on the surface that can all look like just discussing economics or even a reasonable critique of wage labor. Let's take a more typical example again. Here's John C. Calhoun:

I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good. I feel myself called upon to speak freely upon the subject where the honor and interests of those I represent are involved. I hold then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other. Broad and general as is this assertion, it is fully borne out by history. This is not the proper occasion, but, if it were, it would not be difficult to trace the various devices by which the wealth of all civilized communities has been so unequally divided, and to show by what means so small a share has been allotted to those by whose labor it was produced, and so large a share given to the non-producing classes. The devices are almost innumerable, from the brute force and gross superstition of ancient times, to the subtle and artful fiscal contrivances of modern

Calhoun's argument is explicitly proslavery ("a positive good") and he situates it in a defense of inequity in general. Every society, he informed the Senate, has winners and losers, rich and poor. Enslaved people are just on the poor end. But even with his abstractions -and Calhoun loves abstractions and theoretical constructs- he comes explicitly to racism ("of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual"). He's definitely fine with their being unequal division of wealth among whites too -he's rich and white, after all- but he does not propose there or elsewhere that poor whites should be enslaved. He has singled out black Americans for special, far worse treatment than he would countenance for a white man. That would be true even if he'd left off the prefatory reference to racial distinctions.

It's vital in thinking about this that we don't lose sight of what's actually at stake. Even in some other world where it was just coincidence that black Americans were the ones enslaved, or that they were merely disproportionately the people enslaved, the question is still one of who gets to do what to whom. Policies which have a disproportionately negative impact upon a race of people are policies against those people functionally, whether or not they are intentionally. It doesn't matter to the person with bloody furrows down their back, or seeing loved ones in that state, or seeing their children stolen from them, or fearing or suffering sexual violence whether or not the person doing it has malice in their heart. That's almost certainly true -and the behaviors I've listed are exactly the things we would look for to find out- but even if it wasn't, they are suffering just the same.

It's easy to get lose in the formalisms and academic language, so let's look for a moment at what proslavery argument actually defended. Frederick Law Olmsted saw it firsthand. An enslaved teenager had skipped her work duties and hid. The overseer found her:

“That won’t do,” said he [the overseer], “get down on your knees.” The girl knelt on the ground; he got off his horse, and holding him with his left hand, struck her thirty or forty blows across the shoulders with his tough, flexible, “raw-hide” whip. They were well laid on, as a boatswain would thrash a skulking sailor, or as some people flog a baulking horse, but with no appearance of angry excitement on the part of the overseer. At every stroke the girl winced, and exclaimed, “Yes, sir!” or “Ah, sir!” or “Please, sir!” not groaning or screaming. At length he stopped and said, “Now tell me the truth.” The girl repeated the same story. “You have not got enough yet,” said he, “pull up your clothes-lie down.” The girl without any hesitation, without a word or look of remonstrance or entreaty, drew closely all her garments under her shoulders, and lay down upon the ground with her face toward the overseer, who continued to flog her with the rawhide, across her naked loins and thigh, with as much strength as before. She now shrunk away form him, not rising, but writhing, groveling, and screaming, “Oh, don’t, sir! oh, please stop, master! please, sir! please, sir! oh, that’s enough, master! oh, Lord! oh, master, master! oh, God, master, do stop! oh, God, master! oh, God, master!”