I was reading a bunch of threads on Reddit about slavery and the general thought that keeps coming up is that slaves were considered another person's property (although I'm aware that the extent of this differs per time period and culture). In many hollywood films, most recently 12 years a slave, we are shown that black slaves in the deep south of the United States are punished to the point of incapacitation and even death.
However to me this doesn't seem logical. If slaves were indeed considered your property, why would you punish them to such an extent that they can't fulfill their function anymore? I know the Belgian king Leopold II is infamous for cutting of the hands of the slaves in the Belgian Congo for not working hard enough. But then how are they going to work without hands? This, to me, seems akin to going to town on my television set with a sledgehammer because the volume button's stuck.
So my question is, were slaves, at least in the European colonies during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, really punished as brutally as often depicted?
Just some prior discussions to get you started:
12 Years a Slave: Was life for slaves really as bad as these movies depict
They absolutely were victimized as badly or worse than film depictions. Former fugitives were marked (i.e. burnt to mark them), intentionally crippled, or worse. One slave narrative (I think it might be Charles Ball's but not sure) describes a slave who is leased by a major slaveholder for years, they develop a great relationship and he is the star worker, and after years of working together he finally buys him. What's the first thing his 'friend' and new owner does? Beats him brutally because, "All of my slaves have to understand that I am the master." Southern towns had 'public whipping posts,' where masters could send slaves to get punishments while not sullying their own hands with the brutality. Just read Frederick Douglass' narrative or "The Half has never been told," to get a sense of this. It was a carefully calibrated torture system that made enslaved people more productive than any free labor force and that made dangerous slave professions like railroad building or mining where slave leasing corporations ratcheted down the violence but increased the danger of the workplace seem like excellent alternatives to the master you knew.