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First, it seems to me that there was little in the way of chattel slavery in England before colonization. There were serfs, sure, but they were generally if barely considered as human beings, being Christian and all. Chattel slavery is a different category from that.
The other thing is that most nations did not set out to become a nation which did things better than existing nations did, the US is the exception here. "Slavery was normal" works equally well as an excuse for Leopold II as it works for the US. Most apologists of the US argue (often convincingly) that the system (freedom, democracy, rights) is what set the US apart from contemporaries. "Hey, we were no worse than Leo II" is not a great way to plead exceptionalism.
Slavery was extremely common in Europe before the medieval era, when it was phased out for serfdom. Just like it was common across Asia, Africa, and the Americas up until modern times.
Why mention Leo instead of, say, The Woman King?
But the point is entirely backwards. "Hey, you did this thing everyone else did too until you decided it offended you, and then stopped at great cost and tried to make everyone else stop too" is a terrible argument that the US is exceptionally bad. The only people who can plausibly claim to have done better are the very European nations that started the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the first place and sold the peak.
Meanwhile, the early US was itself being actively raided by slavers. Find me a single Turk willing to grovel like an American progressive for the way they enslaved my Italian and American ancestors - consider it table stakes for me to care about accusations regarding American slavery. Turkey didn't abolish slavery until 1924. I recommend perusing that whole article, actually. It's great for getting an overview of the extent of the issue, and who exactly ever cared.
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