My US History teacher told me that while physical beatings did happen, it was very rare. He stated that doing so was very ineffecient for the slave owner, considering they're property, and that this would decrease their profit margin.
Furthermore, he said that because of historical documents and caloric calculations, we know that slaves were generally fed fairly well(otherwise they'd die from exhaustion in the fields, again decreasing profit and becoming inefficient).
Lastly, he stated that slaves generally finished picking cotton(as an example) around mid-day and tended to food and provisions for themselves because they were expected to grow agriculture and raise chickens in a coop for themselves and the plantation.
How much of this is true, because it definitely goes against the narrative that I'm sure most everyone was taught in early US History and most of life?
One of the key pieces of evidence cited by Edward Baptist in The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014) is that the contemporary press contradicts this version of events.
Obviously, the murder of an enslaved person meant a loss of the capital invested in their person. Slaves were also transformed into important property for loans, as slave owners could borrow against their slaves the same way you could borrow against your house, your business, or your car.
But this didn't mean that slaves weren't mistreated. Countless periodicals on missing slaves contained stories of branding, whip marks, missing eyes, cuts, etc., as basic parts of their descriptions of the missing individuals.
Slightly more inside my wheelhouse were forms of torture used in Cuba. One technique popular in the Atlantic world was the so-called boca abajo which involved digging a hole in the ground so that you could fit the pregnant belly of an enslaved woman in it as you lashed her back. The fact that the earth encompassed her belly protected it from lashes which could otherwise potentially miss and harm the child instead of just the mother. The Escalera (stepladder) conspiracy of 1844 is known as such because slaves would be tied to ladders, like this, and repeatedly whipped until they gave up information on the conspiracy and co-conspirators.
The reasons for having regimes of violence and terror against their slaves were several. The first, being that violence obliged enslaved peoples to work hard and for long hours in terrible heat at a frightening pace. The second, because violence and fear kept slaves in line, especially in areas where slaves outnumbered free whites, and slave masters were terrified of another Haitian Revolution, but on US soil. Third, because even with these practices in place, it all worked out in terms of economics. Slaves could be bought, worked to death, and then thrown out the same way you'd chuck a warn out farm tool, because prices for the goods sold, the efficiency obtained through violence and terror, and the relative prices of slaves themselves, all worked out and kept plantations in the black.
In the recent book No God But Gain we see this in all its brutality as Stephen Chambers traces New England merchants as they made fortunes in slave trading despite losing huge portions of the slaves they'd import into the Americas or as they mention, in passing and almost without feeling, finding the corpses of enslaved peoples hanging and rotting on trees.
You may also find several comments in our recent AMA on Roots and American Slavery useful.
Hope it helps.
