This submission has been removed because it is soapboxing, promoting a political agenda, or moralizing. We don't allow content that does these things because they are detrimental to unbiased and academic discussion of history.

Statistically, there had to be benevolent people who owned slaves

Such a statement is a contradiction.

Slavery ownership presupposes that a person can be property, and that an owner can control the life of that slave. In no way can restricting human rights - restricting one's agency - ever be construed as 'charitable' or 'desiring to help others', as benevolent is defined to be.

If your idea of 'benevolence' is ownership, while treating the people nicely (no violence, food, shelter, etc), then why is it necessary to remove that person's agency in order to provide such benevolence? Surely, if you were a kind and charitable person who needed workers, then those with agency would choose to come to you and work for you if they agreed with the terms of the situation - removing their agency only shows that "employing" them was only possible through use of force.

We are led to believe that slaves were constantly beaten and abused, but that doesn't seem very conducive to productive farming

What seems or doesn't seem conducive to you matters not. A slave could still provide productive output even under repeated acts of violence - it's fairly easy to inflict many forms of pain that do not disable a person or limit their ability to work. The entire premise of slavery - removing a person's agency - relies in part on establishing a relationship where a person is fearful of asserting their own agency, and thus, requires negative reinforcement and conditioning - violence.

The implications made in this post amounts to slavery revisionism.