Given the axiom of self-ownership, there's very little difference between those two verbs. To govern someone is to override his own wishes; he wants to do X, but government commands him to do Y. Likewise, to enslave someone is to override his own plans; he wants to be an Econ Professor and columnist, but the slave-owner commands him to pick cotton, and gets his friends in government to return him for a whipping, should he manage to escape.
Such close similarity of meaning ought to give the one verb an entry in the thesaurus for the other--but I found none, at thesaurus.com--and my hard copy of Roget is no better. Under "govern," the site shows various words of similar meaning including "call the shots," "hold dominion" and even "tyrannize"--but not "enslave." Under "enslave," it shows among others "coerce," "compel" and "subjugate," but not "govern." I wonder why not, but discount any theory suggesting that thesaurus compilers got together to deceive students of the language. Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity; and here, the error may even be innocent. Everyone is so conditioned by government's propaganda machine to believe that governance is beneficial but slavery is shocking, that nobody thought to place the words side by side. I'm happy, here, to repair the omission.
It might be said that there is a difference, in that governing is for the public good while slavery benefits only the cruel, greedy master; but that falls apart when we probe a little deeper. Governing brings such a rush of intoxication that men spend fortunes to get elected; its purpose is to enjoy ruling the governed, not arranging for tidy streets and low crime rates. Holding slaves, in contrast, was done to make money, there being no other visible way to find labor to plant and harvest crops (there really was, and they didn't look hard enough, but at least slaves weren't held just for the pleasure of dominating other people). Consider also what happens when governing power is under threat. Rather than surrender some in 1861, Lincoln waged a war that killed one American in 60, and today Syrian President Assad is killing as many dissidents as is necessary to keep them down, last week by systematically bombing one of "his" own cities. No doubt recalcitrant slaves were executed now and again in the Antebellum South, but such wholesale slaughter was not practised by slaveowners--because to do so would have destroyed what they (falsely) regarded as their own productive assets. So it could even be argued that governance is actually more cruel and vindictive than slavery. At least, the opposite belief is simply not true--however widely held.
The purpose of today's needed education is twofold: to prepare the slaves to live free (most folk are reluctant to admit they are enslaved, so are ill equipped to take responsibility for themselves) and to persuade the overseers and drivers to quit their jobs. The same program should suffice for both, and my Transition to Liberty visualizes how it will take effect.
That's how it must be done, in my opinion. It's not the way used in 1861, though abolition was never an objective of that war--just one of its results, and its "justification" after the fact, rather as ending the Holocaust was never the reason WWII was waged, but merely its "justification" after the fact. The violence of the War to Prevent Secession ended America's "peculiar institution," but it was followed by at least a century of resentment and bigotry, forming a much more subtle kind of exclusion, for blacks, from the American promise of freedom and opportunity for all.
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