But often indentured servants were children who were sold by their parents, they were poor people who had no choice but become indentured servants or face much worse hardships. At times judges made the "voluntary" decision. And there were times and places where if you beat an indentured servant to death you weren't guilty of all that big a crime, but it was already illegal to do that to slaves. After all, you weren't responsible in the same way for a servant. If you were born into indentured servitude you served with your parents. Of course, the laws were often not enforced in either case and varied a lot over time and by location.
Slaves often started their servitude because of choices they made. They were captured, sometimes in battle, sometimes because they were too close to an ethnic or political border and they were subject to raiding parties. We minimize that--but like how you deal with poverty, there's a choice buried in there (even if all the choices really, really sucked). Sometimes captives-to-be just fell afoul of their local leaders. A lot of local leaders made a lot of money selling slaves to the Europeans, and the trade in slaves continued as the mainstay of some areas long after slavery was formally ended even in the US. In the institution of chattel slavery there's something of ignominy for both sides of the racial divide. Of course, the children of slaves were truly innocent--they had no choice in the matter.
Yes, there was a difference. But to make that big a deal of the difference is to miss the injustice of both and to make virtue out of a difference in grievance.
The biggest difference wasn't in how one became a slave or servant, it was that indentured servanthood would eventually end. It might drag on because of unfair practices by the owners of the indentures, but it would end.
I still go with 3. While the institution of slavery wasn't such an ideological thing in the 1600s--there were slaves of all colors kicking around through to the end of the 1700s, with white slavery pretty much ending only as the result of a decisive shift in power pretty much everywhere in the direction of Europe. The shift to an ideology of skin-color or 'race' became justification for continuing an economically important practice. And once the ideology was there that ethnicity/skin-color = merit or worth, it could be applied to anybody, not just blacks: Chinese, South Slavs, Indians, Italians, Mexicans were all described that way. Now, the ideology wasn't really unique--many cultures have considered those not of their own to be inferior, from the Greek terming of non-Greeks as "barbarians" to the irritating habit many groups have of calling their own tribe by their word for "humans" or "men" or "people". My brother's grandmother always referred to the Calabrese as "stupid" just because they were from Calabria (she was Sicilian) and all Calabrians are born inferior. Even the Muslim slave trade was based on religion. But notice that cultural superiority is based on mutable traits. One can convert, one's kids can learn the new culture or language, assimilation was the norm for 50,000 years or more, and cultural genocide a normal way of ending ethnic conflict. It's when feelings of group superiority and one's identity come to be based on bloodline and genetics that things go right off the rails and the discrimination goes from generation to generation.
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