As a side question... was slavery in the early usa actually tied to race? I mean was it impossible to own a white slave?

No. Slavery and race (understood as a distinctive phenotypic traits) were not tied in any way basically anywhere until modern times. Speaking of Roman slavery, it is important to state that unlike modern people, Romans did not consider personal freedom as a natural, unalienable right but simply one of several possible legal situations that could have changed should specific legal requirements were met and thus 'slave' was just a legal status.

The most common source of slaves were prisoners of war and thus, in the Republic era, most Roman slaves were conquered neighbours, that were, obviously, very similar, or basically indistinguishable from other inhabitants of Rome. This changed later, when the reach of the Roman Republic extended well beyond the Apenine Peninsula and potential slave pool was extended to Gauls, Iberians, Carthaginians, Macedonians, Eqyptians etc. But still, there was absolutely no link between the origin of the slave and their legal status - an Egyptian was as likely to be a Roman slave as a person whose family lived for centuries in Lazio.

Free Roman citizens could have also become slaves as a mean of punishment. Unlike later developments, where this was basically impossible and the worst thing that could happen was an indentured servitude (the main difference being that such servitude was usually established for a set period and regardless of that the servant remained personally free, as described above), in Roman republic and later Empire a citizen could have lost his or her status of a free person permanently. Such punishment was usually reserved for debtors, deserters and people evading the census (which was more or less an equivalent of tax evasion in modern times). Additionally, anyone sentenced to death or life imprisonment (usually doing forced labour, most commonly in mine) has also been 'reclassified' as a slave.

While are we at it, it is also worth noting a peculiar status of 'semi-free' people who were personally free yet were bound by certain legal arrangements to a particular person or institution. This group included people leasing their land who became bound to their lands (coloni glebae adscripti) in late principate period and mercenarii, or labourers bound to their workshops. Much like medieval serfs they are considered precursors of, they were personally free, they could hold property and freely participate in legal and commercial proceedings, but they were unable to leave without consent of the owner of said land or workshop. Another group of semi-free people were redempti ad hostibus, people bought from hostile captivity who were bound to work for their liberator until the debt was settled (of course, this could be a very short period of time, as his family could contribute to paying off the debt). A quite curious case were auctorati, or free people who joined a ludus to work as gladiators.

Summing it up, there was no relation between ethnicity and slave status in Roman Republic and Empire, as technically anyone could become a slave.