but people don't beat their horses to within one inch of their life.

Of course they do.

In the 1930s the WPA interviewed more than 2000 slaves, who describe their treatment in detail. These are available online. Here is a selection with brief descriptions of their contents. The first link takes you to a master link of narratives. They're quite brutal. It is not pleasant reading in any sense. Of course, Solomon Northrup's own account can also be found online, here for example.

I wrote a report on slave narratives. I read Frederick Douglas', Harriet Jacob's and W.E.B. DuBois (although DuBois was not a slave himself). Not every slave owner was cruel to their slaves. Although there was a stigma of a man that wasn't stern with his slaves, as the community would think that he was not doing his job as a slave owner. However, Douglas had an awful story about how he was nearly beaten to death. And Jacob's story was about how she lived in an attic for 7 years in order to avoid her master in the hopes of one day finding an escape. Regardless, the average slave was property, therefore given the bare essentials and often lacking that. The system was all about making money. If a slave owner thought that he'd make more productive slaves by beating them and occasionally making serious examples, then it was reasonable to do so. But regardless of how they are currently depicted or whatever stories we hear from that time period, we need to be respectful of what happened and realize that it was despicable because of their status, not only their conditions.

There was a reason why masters beat slaves much more severely than they beat animals--slaves were a lot smarter. Tie an animal to a post and the animal won't and can't run away. Not so with people. If you read the book upon which 12 Years a Slave was based, you'll learn that 24/7 policing was necessary to prevent slaves from running away. You'll also note that in 12 Years a Slave, the cruelty and torture to which Northup was subjected, was not limited to just one person--it was a large number of different people in different circumstances and different states who committed it. As the WPA interviews, and other slave narratives, demonstrate, such cruelty was indeed widespread. Some slaves were lucky enough to avoid some of it. But most could not. White men could basically rape their enslaved women any time they felt like it, with no punishment or even acknowledgement that anything was wrong. In the delicate language of the 19th century, this is described in all the literature. Every slave was subject to being parted from their loved ones at any time, forever. In short, yes, things were as bad for the average slave as were depicted in the film. Not for every slave, but for a very large percentage of them. And actually, if you read the book, you'll see that things were quite a bit WORSE than were depicted in the movie. But if they had depicted it accurately, it would have become redundant and the audience would have been desensitized to the violence and degradation. What we today say is evil, was at that time considered to be normal, necessary, and GOOD. Spare the rod, spoil the child. Bible passages were quoted aplenty to show why it was important to make slaves obey and work.

There was no average life for an average slave on an average plantation -- that's one of the reasons I really enjoyed the film 12 Years a Slave. It shows the multiple ways that slaves existed, and the numerous strategies that slave owners adopted. One strategy was essentially a paternalist approach, epitomized in the film by Benedict Cumberbatch's character. The idea is that the slave owner won't face as much resistance from slaves if he treats them with some measure of decency, and develops a bond of some kind between slave and master. In case you're interested, this way of mediating between master and slave was famously charted by Eugene Genovese in his book Roll, Jordan, Roll.

The other major strategy was to inspire terror. I think that you err in assuming that these slave owners' infliction of violence on their slaves was irrational. Your comparison between them and "Hitler/Satan" and your example of people not beating their horses suggests this, at least to me. Rather, slave owners' violence was often quite calculated and strategic. As someone else noted in this thread, slaves were much smarter than horses. They saw that they could be beaten or killed for any act of defiance. In the antebellum South, many slave owners maintained a constant atmosphere of violence and fear, in order to keep slaves under control. Slave owners were not simply cruel for no reason. Admittedly, in the film, Epps seemed to be motivated by simple malice. Fassbender's portrayal didn't allow for much nuance. However, slave owners would have known precisely why they were attacking or beating their slaves.

A final point I'll make tonight is that if we look beyond the antebellum South, prior to the abolition of the slave trade, it was not uncommon for slave owners to beat or work their "property" to death, knowing that they could cheaply replace them. Admittedly, this changed to an extent after the slave trade was abolished, but I would argue that the logic was not really that much different in the mid-nineteenth century United States. Slaves were replaceable, and a slave that resisted his/her master's tyranny in any way might seem to be more trouble than he or she was worth. This logic certainly holds for other kinds of property - horses, in your example.

Note: strictly speaking this is not an answer to this question, it is more of a meta-answer, but it provides some points which I think are important so I'm posting it regardless.

First off, realize that it is fundamentally impossible to truly understand the nature of slavery (anywhere) through any narrative, no matter how intimate. The fact is that without spending years and years of your life as a slave, without having the sure certain knowledge that you will live all the rest of your years and die as the property of another man burned into your consciousness you can only possibly understand the rudimentary outlines of slavery.

Second, the truth does not solve this problem. The truth is, was, that the day to day life of many slaves wasn't all that bad. In fact, compared to the average experience of the average "free" citizen of North America through the mid 19th century it really wasn't so bad at all, and some slaves lived lives that might seem preferable compared to many non-slaves in America, even up through, say, 1850. If you were an alien from a remote stellar system who had no knowledge of the history of slavery and through some high-tech device you were able to watch, say, an entire week's worth of footage of some random subset of American slaves circa 1850 you might not think it was such a bad deal.

But such conclusions would be erroneous, and hugely so. The problem here is that humans are great at coping, it's one of our most powerful features, and statistics can lead you to incorrect conclusions because outlier events can be so important that they define the nature of a thing. As a hypothetical, imagine a father who rapes his pre-teen daughter every year on her birthday. Statistically that incest/rape is an outlier, but that event is so important that the fact that it happens at all, let alone repeatedly, makes a huge qualitative and categorical difference.

And that's the situation with oppression in general and slavery in particular. If the master only whips one of many slaves on a plantation once over a period of a decade the fact that such a thing ever happened and that it's possible for such a thing to happen utterly characterizes the master/slave relationship. You can look into someone's eyes, you can talk with them, you can spend hours and hours with them, you can think you know them but there is a good chance that you may never learn that for them every waking moment they are living in fear. There are thousands of abused spouses in this county who are living in fear and hiding their fear from even their closest friends. Imagine what it must have been like to live as a slave in 19th century America. To know the degree to which it is codified in the informal and formal rules of society and in the laws of the land that you are less. That any white man can say anything he wants to you or order you around. That your master controls your fate not you. That your master could force you to marry whoever he chose. That your master could sell your children or your wife and you could do nothing about it. That your master could rape your wife or your daughter and you could do nothing to stop it. Less. Powerless. Worthless. Hopeless.

Could you imagine how that would affect your thinking, your personality, your capacity for happiness every single waking moment of your life? And imagine how it must feel to build up little mental rationalizations in your mind, to think that your master isn't so bad, that he doesn't seem likely to ever rape you or your friends or loved ones, or sell you or them off to some other plantation. And then one day something happens that's just slightly out of character for your master, maybe he gets angry and is verbally abusive when he's never been before, who knows. Or maybe he just takes ill for a little while and you're faced thinking about what will happen if you're forced to work for another master. Suddenly your little house of rationalizations is in doubt, suddenly there is nothing that you can depend on in your life. Suddenly the possibility of being whipped repeatedly, casually executed for sport, raped or see your loved ones raped, all of that becomes a lingering possibility at the back of your mind.

That's the true horror of slavery. And it's that sort of thing that is impossible to get across without dressing up slavery in "stage makeup" and focusing on abuses more than ordinary daily life, because those events are by and large more relevant.

Abuses were not universally the norm, they were often the exception. But the fact that they did still happen and the fact that they could happen at any time is what characterized slavery in that setting and time period. As I said, there is absolutely no way to get across the entirety of the experience of slavery through the medium of film, television, or literature, so then it becomes necessary to provide a sketch, an impression of the nature of slavery. And any such sketch which does not include abuses as a fundamental aspect of the nature of slavery in America is one that is irredeemably flawed.

I find your question fascinating in that it proves that the post-war propaganda of former confederate leaders was really successful. They managed to make it sound, against all evidence, like the war was not about slavery, and that slavery was not that bad. Their declarations during or before the war attest to their dishonesty.

As for your comparison with Hitler, as far as I know he never got his hands dirty killing jews. In fact if I'm not mistaken he saved at least one, his childhood doctor and his family. At the same time, the actual perpetrators were, in their own words, "just following orders." Even if the end result is similarly horrible as what you describe, nazism was thus actually much easier for the human psyche.

Thus it took extremely bad people, or a system powerful enough to turn normal ones into very bad ones. That's probably why racism is still so rampant in the Southern US, it had to be extreme so as to have cognitive dissonance resolve towards treating slaves like chattel.

I didn't want to make another thread about the movie, but I wanted to ask a side question: How often were black people kidnapped and forced into slavery. It always seemed like a very plausible thing to do as record-keeping was spotty.

I wrote an essay in my undergrad on the sexual lives of slaves in antebellum south. The primary source I used were interviews with surviving slaves, most of whom were children during the war. The conclusions I drew were that masters controlled virtually every aspect of a slave's sexual life, except that which the slave could carve out for him/herself in private.

Masters controlled who slaves had sex with, and would "breed" them. They would separate them from their spouses and chidlren, and might consider selling families together, but pretty much only if they were convinced that such a sale would increase their productivity.

Masters would have sex with their female slaves, who had virtually no way of resisting. They would use rape as punishment, as well as just because they could.

I'd respond to your question with a definitive yes. I'd suggest reading up on how Cecil Rhodes exploited black South Africans in the 1800's as a way to extract minerals that were plentiful in the area, or how black people were treated in King Leopold's Congo Free State. To imperialists like these, blacks were considered to be less than human beings,were seen as instruments for economic advancement, and were treated accordingly.

It depends (as everything else) on when you are talking about. Before Slavery began to be restricted in terms of import/export, it was cheaper in French Caribbean and British West Indies sugar producing colonies to import slaves, and simply work them to death and purchase new ones, afterwards, it was not.

In that time before restriction, on sugar plantations, your idea of a slave as a performing asset held little weight and the death tolls were staggering, and are often overlooked.

But, post 1807 for the Brits, and 1808 for the US, the actual trade if not the condition of slavery ended. This made it harder to obtain slaves. The British on one track, having not had slavery in Britain itself, were on the way to freeing slaves in the imperial colonies by 1834. The US on the other hand, demurred from making a nationally binding decision and continued chattel slavery in their slave states until the American Civil War decided the question.

This makes the idea of a slave as a performing asset somewhat more valid, as simply buying up a load of new people became far more expensive, new slaves had to be bred, or bought instead of simply harvested.

But the literature and narratives often show us that far from being the kind of class that would treat a slave like one should a productive asset, and ensure full output, they instead opted for what is called the BPM in Poli/sci and economics, and that is do just enough to succeed and no more than necessary. So slaves were fed, and clothed, but not exceptionally well. They were disciplined, sometimes harshly, sometimes to death. And let us not be naïve, part and parcel of the condition of being a slave was the mental conditioning that kept them from rebelling or running away, which to the present mind, is cruel beyond comprehension. And the possibility of rape, the division of family, and of punishment unto death, hangs heavy on the present mind. These all existed, like Damocles’ sword above their heads, whether they were inflicted or not.

Although, it also has to be said that not every slave tried to escape and some didn't see any hope in an attempt, the condition and conditioning thereof was designed to convince them of same, round the clock, their entire life.

And furthermore, underneath that conditioning, that lay upon the human spirit like a blanket, the slave was still a thinking human being who without that conditioning, had a natural desire for freedom and a natural desire to use all of their powers to obtain that freedom, if they had not been broken. This made a strong motivation for the owning class to keep them alive and working, but not too much else, less they gain enough faculty or strength to overcome their condition by force. So treating them too well, was expressly against good management practice of the time period.

The lives of slaves were horrible. And the lives of mixed women with white fathers were even worse. They were often used as sex slaves. That goes for any "pretty" slave.

Thanks OP. A very good question and the answers here are so enlightening. Saving this reddit.

I would suggest reading the book.