I see allot of questions about north American slavery. I guess it's 12 Years a slave raising the issue. Here's my question:
Watching the movie and reading the Wikipedia article on slavery, it is just as terrible as I had imagined. One thing that strikes me is that the close to abolition we get in North American history, the more human were the slaves in the eyes of the whites. Please understand me, in no way am I trying to whitewash what happened. I'm just saying that from reading Solomon Thorpe's memoirs and looking at paintings from mid-late 1800, many slaves were living a life of hard labor and deprivation of all liberties. But they were still referred to as human beings, and I read that there were laws against how bad a slave could be treated (which was still really bad).
So my question is, when in history did slaves go from just being treated like livestock tortured and killed for no reason, into being human beings forced into hard labor?
I'm going to respectfully challenge you on your premise. I would say that you've got it in reverse here. Black slaves in the U.S. were actually worse off overall in the middle of the 19th century than, say, a hundred years prior.
In the 18th century and before, racial ideology was still in the process of formation. As the 19th century wore on, slave owners became more firmly entrenched in the slave system and in the racial ideologies that supported it. Racial thought in the mid-19th century stressed the separate origins of whites and blacks, which had the effect of dehumanizing them in many cases. This can't be said to be true of every case, of course, but it's a trend that historians have noted.
A second major factor is the increased power of capitalism throughout the 19th century. As the 19th century went on, slavery became integrated with an increasingly sophisticated capitalist economy. Arguably, capitalism tends to reduce human beings to numbers and labor output regardless of their race. A growing global market for slave products, complex debt relationships, and a suddenly finite labor source (with the abolition of the external slave trade) meant that slave owners were under increased pressure during the 1800s to push their slaves harder and treat them as machines of both agricultural and reproductive labor.
That said, if we're talking about the slave trade, rather than slavery itself, then you have a fair point. The Atlantic slave trade, which was arguably the process during which slaves were most dehumanized, was ended in the early 19th century. However, the end of an Atlantic slave trade did not mean that slaves stopped being commodified. In his now-classic book Soul by Soul, Walter Johnson traces the awful interstate slave trade of the 19th century. If you want to read a book that will convince you that the 19th century American slave system dehumanized black men and women, then that is the book I would recommend.