Not in the United States, to my knowledge. The following pertains to American slavery.

Slave sales tended to focus on the physical (health, color, etc) and moral (will the slave resist too much) qualities of the slave, which were sometimes taken as proven by their origin in Africa when slave imports were legal. Particular skills a slave possessed also factored in. There's a basic rundown of these in our FAQ, which I'm happy to expand on if you have more questions.

Free range slaves are obviously out of the question, since slaves are not to be allowed to roam lest they steal themselves off to freedom. Any black person who could move about freely was seen as a likely menace to public order. Slave states instituted pass systems and gave whites the right to challenge, detain, and punish any slave they saw abroad who couldn't produce one. That doesn't mean that slaves were always nailed down -it's likely that in most places they moved about with a relative degree of freedom at night- but you wouldn't want to advertise that your merchandise had been indulged. That would make you a lax enslaver and your slave less valuable.

Cruelty-free is basically an impossibility. Beating slaves was taken as pretty basic management. They would couch it in terms of correction and so forth, but from fairly early on one didn't "correct" one's kids, white servants, or wife like one did a slave. Stern discipline was necessary to overawe and terrorize the slave, at which point they would remember their natural submission to whites. The natural submissive vision of black Americans is at odds with the other one, that they're a naturally mischievous, deceptive, sort and so require close observation. But either way, enslavers want human chattels they can control closely and with violence. A slave never whipped would likely be seen as ungovernable, if one even thought to ask.