I'm a fourth generation Canadian who has been researching his genealogy over the last few days. It appears my family first came to America in 1774 and arrived in Philadelphia, eventually settling in North Carolina. During my research I came across the 1810 and 1820 census and discovered that my family owned two slaves for at least 10 years.
As a Canadian I didn't learn a great deal about slavery beyond the basics. I'm interested in understanding what kind of relationship my ancestors had with their slaves, how were they treated, what was their life probably like? Obviously this would all be speculation, but if someone can comment on what rights and freedoms slaves enjoyed at this time, as well as some specific commentary about how slaves were treated in North Carolina during this time period, it would be much appreciated!
As /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov said, we could only speculate about what individual enslavers did or didn't do. Given the time and state, there are a few possibilities:
If your ancestors were Quakers, there's a chance that they "owned" the slaves in the sense that they held legal title but de facto let them live as free people. This usually happened because manumission was legally difficult or likely to divide families, though the last is probably less of a concern this early. NC's Quaker community was well enough known for buying people and freeing them in practice to generate complaints from their neighbors about how they were stealthily increasing the number of free blacks and so threatening the whole system. As the South becomes more hostile to even fairly lowkey antislavery practice, a process from around the 1790s onward with a significant acceleration around the 1830s, so it becomes much harder for to sustain these arrangements over time.
If your ancestors lived in a city or fair-sized town, it's likely that they used their enslaved people for domestic duties or hired them out as skilled labor. That can mean better treatment, but often does not. Enslaved domestic workers are under white supervision much more closely and often than enslaved field workers. They may have had less physically onerous duties, but that comes with a tradeoff. Skilled slaves (mostly men) might live something approximating the lives of free blacks most of the time, though that's by no means certain. Best case, they would be able to live independently from their owners and keep a fair portion of their wages.
If your ancestors were farmers, then two slaves still puts them at least into the lower middle class. Their arrival at the household would have substantially changed life for the whites, though with so few people involved it wouldn't be as much as at a major plantation. It's likely that the enslaved people and their owners lived under the same roof and had broadly similar living conditions. The slaves would surely get the least pleasant jobs, but there's enough work to go around that everyone would end up pitching in most of the time. Small operations can't afford a division of labor. Come harvest time, Mom, Dad, the kids, and the people they owned would all be out in the field and it would be just the same at any other labor-intensive period.
All of these possibilities involve things being less awful than you might expect, but let's push back on that. Enslaved people are still enslaved and the horrors of slavery are fully available to their enslavers, whether they own one person or one thousand (one guy did), from beatings to undernourishment to sexual violence. (Domestic duties were a common cover/primary occupation for slaves also used sexually...though some where literally bought as "fancy" slaves and the domestic chores are the sideline. This is much rarer than the other way around for small holdings, though.) There are some scholars who believe these are less common in small operations, but there are always exceptions and small slaveholders tend to leave less records behind than the big magnates who hold fifty or more people so it's really hard to say.
Meaning no disrespect to your ancestors, we should be really cautious about assuming relatively gentle treatment in the absence of strong evidence that it's there. Even when it is, because an enslaved person is property they can be seized for debts. They can be sold because the owner's finances require it at the moment, whatever they might prefer on their own. They can be inherited by less enlightened people. A slave is always profoundly insecure and vulnerable to mistreatment. There's always a danger of looking for the relatively "good" enslavers and letting them stand in for everyone, to the detriment of considering the lives of the enslaved themselves
Sources
Slaves Without Masters by Ira Berlin. This is a book about free blacks, but can give you an idea for how a nearly free enslaved person might live in the South.
The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South by Clement Eaton. Quite dated (original is from the Forties) but Eaton is interested in how the South closed down domestic dissent on slavery so he's valuable in watching the transition.
Roll, Jordan, Roll by Eugene Genovese. Only read this with great caution. Genovese has lots of good information and is very comprehensive, but his argument is close to an outright whitewashing of slavery. He's also not very sensitive to time and place, so it's much harder to take his generalities and put them into a good context.
The Peculiar Institution by Kenneth Stampp, the pioneering work in modern slavery studies. Talks specifically about the Quaker practice.
We can only speak in generalities, obviously, as how any given slaveholder conducted themselves doesn't necessarily conform to the general pattern, and of course can go in either direction. SO with that said, you should check out This AMA, especially the responses from myself and /u/freedmenspatrol on the antebellum South.