DISCLAIMER: In asking my question, I am by NO means trying to suggest that the horrors of slavery were or ever could be mitigated by a sympathetic slave owner or population - the very fact that someone existed in slavery is an abomination.
After watching films like 12 Years A Slave or even Django Unchained, I'm curious as to how slaves were treated by their masters and the general white majority aside from the obvious issue of slavery. In many of these films, they are physically and verbally abused, and treated with utter contempt by nearly any single person of an upper class. If a slave says he's thirsty, he's beaten. If he makes a small mistake, he's beaten. It occurred to me that, while this could certainly be how it really was, we as a society have rightfully condemned slavery as our national shame, and as such, it seems fitting that slave owners/pro-slavery people are portrayed in the least sympathetic/most monstrous way possible.
But is this an accurate portrayal?
While it's horrific that slaves were essentially treated as machinery, would slave owners not view their slaves as investments of their own money, and therefore seen it prudent to treat them with a certain degree of care or respect (despite the obvious fact that they're enslaved)?
Abraham Lincoln has said that while he was anti-slavery, he didn't hold African Americans to be as intellectually capable as their white counterparts - it seems logical that many people might feel this way, and if that translated to slave owners, it seems that some might not feel it necessary to be aggressive and violent with their slaves.
I've also heard anecdotal cases of people like the founding fathers, like George Washington, who owned slaves but didn't necessarily treat them the way you see characters like Michael Fassbender treated slaves in 12 Years A Slave. Again - it obviously doesn't mitigate the fact that they are enslaved human beings.
TL,DR: Were slaves treated with the contempt and hatred often seen in films?
I must preface this by saying that I've never seen Django Unchained. 12 Years a Slave is both one of my favorite movies and one I've watched all the way through only twice, for the obvious reasons.
Also, and this may be obvious but I don't want to give anyone a traumatic surprise, trigger warnings for graphic depictions of violence against enslaved people, including children.
But is this an accurate portrayal?
Enslavers, overseers, and others charged with controlling enslaved labor are people and do vary, but violent "correction" is generally taken as a matter of course. An enslaver who doesn't lay it on regularly risks being thought a dangerously light touch and possibly a secret abolitionist in the minds of his neighbors. If one didn't have the stomach for whipping oneself and didn't have a regular person to do it, one could get the local sheriff to do it for a one-off fee. That's what Robert E. Lee did, incidentally.
Frederick Law Olmsted traveled the South and what he reports is largely consistent with the attitudes I see Southerners express amongst themselves. He wrote:
The whip was evidently in constant use, however. There were no rules on the subject, that I learned; the overseers and drivers punished the negroes whenever they deemed it necessary, and in such manner, and with such severity, as they thought fit. "If you don't work faster," or "If you don't work better," or "If you don't recollect what I tell you, I will have you flogged," are threats which I have often heard. I said to one of the overseers, "It must be very disagreeable to have to punish them as much as you do?" "Yes, it would be to those who are not used to it-but it's my business, and I think nothing of it. Why, sir, I wouldn't mind killing a n*****^1 more than I would a dog." I asked if he had ever killed a negro? "Not quite," he said, but overseers were often obliged to.
Olmsted's informant gave resistance to being whipped as just cause for a murder, which is something that Northrup risks in the movie. Whipping is often quantified by number of lashes and there are occasional references to sort-of standard punishments, but these aren't like modern business regulations. Enslavers are, for practical purposes, only accountable themselves even if the law says it's illegal to kill your own slaves. Getting between the "domestic" relationship of a man and his human property was suspect to the point that even people running Bible study classes for slaves with the permission and supervision of their enslavers have trouble keeping going.
Independent of Olmsted, Jourdon Anderson's famous letter to his ex-enslaver references a similar incident:
Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
Outright killing is still rare. More often you see horrific violence, which might lead to deaths. The worst Olmsted, an outsider present with the knowledge of the enslavers, saw happened to an eighteen year-old named Sall. They came on her while crossing a gully, where she had hidden out. She gave an excuse for being abroad without leave, but the overseer (Olmsted's tour guide) didn't buy it. (She said she was accidentally locked in, then got out on her own by breaking a plank loose. Then she got up and he spotted a ring of keys.) The girl's father was all of a few minutes away, so they could have gone and got confirmation but the overseer didn't feel like it.
I'm sorry; this is where it gets really bad:
"That won't do," said he [the overseer], "get down on your knees." The girl knelt on the ground; he got off his horse, and holding him with his left hand, struck her thirty or forty blows across the shoulders with his tough, flexible, "raw-hide" whip. They were well laid on, as a boatswain would thrash a skulking sailor, or as some people flog a baulking horse, but with no appearance of angry excitement on the part of the overseer. At every strok the girl winced, and exclaimed, "Yes, sir!" or "Ah, sir!" or "Please, sir!" not groaning or screaming. At length he stopped and said, "Now tell me the truth." The girl repeated the same story. "You have not got enough yet," said he, "pull up your clothes-lie down." The girl without any hesitation, without a word or look of remonstrance or entreaty, drew closely all her garments under her shoulders, and lay down upon the ground with her face toward the overseer, who continued to flog her with the rawhide, across her naked loins and thigh, with as much strength as before. She now shrunk away form him, not rising, but writhing, groveling, and screaming, "Oh, don't, sir! oh, please stop, master! please, sir! please, sir! oh, that's enough, master! oh, Lord! oh, master, master! oh, God, master, do stop! oh, God, master! oh, God, master!"
A fifteen year old boy was with Olmsted and the overseer. He watched it all, bored. None of this was new for anybody but Olmsted. He
glanced again at the perfectly passionless but rather grim business-like face of the overseer, and again at the young gentleman, who had turned away; if not indifferent he had evidently not the faintest sympathy for my emotion.
Olmsted couldn't take it and bailed, the screams chasing him. The boy caught up to him but the overseer was right behind, so it sounds like the kid stayed around and watched until it was done. "He [the overseer] laughed as he joined us." Then he went on a bit about how Sall was going to cheat him out of day's work, and now had. Olmsted asked if all that was really necessary and the overseer made basically the standard argument for it:
Oh yes, sir," (laughing again.) "If I hadn't punished her so hard she would have done the same thing again to-morrow, and half the people on the plantation would have followed her example. Oh, you've no idea how lazy these n*****s are; you northern people don't know any thing about it. They'd never do any work at all if they were not afraid of being whipped.
And that's the rub. Slaves don't like slavery. Everybody in the South knows it, for all the occasional protests to the contrary. On the scale of an individual plantation, they outnumber the whites. It takes pain and terror to keep them at work. There are certainly cases where slaves are let off easy now and then, but even treasured personal valets can be sent off to the fields to make sure they don't get ideas. The occasional less-horrific enslaver doesn't really change the overall system.
It makes cold economic sense too. The incentives you might have to labor freely are mostly not available for slaves. (Some skilled slaves are let sell their own labor in trades and retain part of the proceeds for themselves.) To get more out of them, and thus more profit, coercion is the main method. Even if you temporarily, or permanently, impair the ability of one to deliver that labor you can terrorize the others enough to make up the difference and maybe have some left over.
That's all neglecting, of course, that no one yet born has ever been the perfectly rational utility-maximizer that stars in so many economic calculations. There's also fear (if the slaves are not kept in line, they will rise up and murder us), anger (how dare they defy me!), giant helpings of white-hot racism (how dare those people resist me!), and probably more than a little pleasure at having that kind of power over others. I'm not saying they're all dirty sadists, but people in positions of power with great discretion and little accountability have a long history of giving themselves license to do things they would otherwise find unthinkable.
There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.
The author was not such a prodigy; he exercised his boisterous passions upon Sally Hemings. He's consciously talking about himself here. He learned those things. They are part of his manners. That fifteen year-old kid decades later was learning them too.
(More in a moment.)