I was thinking about this while watching 12 Years a Slave. The book was published the same year Solomon Northrup was rescued from slavery, so Edwin Epps was probably still alive and would have been aware of the book. While I have no doubt that slave owners were capable of great cruelty, it seems like we only get one side of the story from slave narratives. They were written and published with the support of abolitionists who had an agenda to promote (ending slavery), so they should not be seen as perfectly objective accounts of the events. Did Epps or any other slave owner ever deny the accusations made about them?
To those entering this thread with the intent to answer: Please review our rules for answers, in particular that they should be in depth and comprehensive, such as a historian would give. The name of a book you've heard of once or an article you just Googled does not meet this requirement.
Thank you.
This is outside the realm of my expertise, but I have some knowledge of this period from requisite courses required in my graduate schooling. Based on the texts and lectures for these courses, these slave owners or former slave owners likely would not have cared. After Radical Reconstruction, the South made a number of attempts to return the South, as nearly as was possible, to conditions pre-Civil War. Convict leasing, in particular, was indicative of the culture that developed. There were no longer slaves and plantation owners still needed workers - where do you get them? Many former slaves refused to work for their former masters. Others left the South to go west or north. Put there were prisons with a ready made labor pool. Lease out their labor from the state prisons. This was great for plantation owners. Previously, some care had to be given since they had made an investment by buying a slave. Under convict leasing programs, prisoners could be literally worked to death and simply replaced with another prisoner since it was labor being paid for, not a person's body. This system was part of a larger culture of violence and antagonism towards black people that developed in the South in the post-Civil War period. Jim Crow laws developed that made it much easier to arrest black people using color blind language - vagrancy laws, unduly harsh petty theft laws, and segregation laws (especially after Plessy v. Ferguson) are just a few examples. With this type of culture developing, it seems very unlikely that former slave owners would care what their former property had to say about them. It would be interesting to see where Northrup's book had its highest sales numbers. I doubt it sold many copies in Mississippi. The conditions black people had to endure in many places in the South were sometimes truly horrifying. Someone with more expertise can probably answer you in a little more depth, but here are some other books that offer some similar perspectives:
(1) David Oshinsky. Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (1997).
(2) Anne Moody. Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968).
(3) Frederick Douglas. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, written by Himself (1881) -- one of the most famous accounts
(4) Harriet Jacobs. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861, published under the name Linda Brent)
(5) Edward Thomas. Memoirs of a Southerner (1923)
(6) William Dusinberre. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (2000)
(7) Frances Anne Kemble. Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 (1863, 1984).
(8) LeeAnna Keith. The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (2004)
(9) Jeannie Whayne. Shadows over Sunnyside : An Arkansas Plantation in Transition, 1830-1945 (1995).
Hope this helps a little. Happy Reading!