Yeoman slaveholders in the United States, like all slaveholders and like all people, varied dramatically in their temperaments and strategies towards running a household and interactions with their "dependents" (I'm using this term in a broad sense to refer to women, children, and enslaved people in a given household). That is to say, some slaveholders believed that they were duty bound to do their best "by their people," and to ensure that their material and spiritual needs were taken care of (though a slaveholder's view of what that constituted almost never amounted to a rejection of what they viewed as their right to demand eternal servitude from human beings they legally owned); some slaveholders were sadistic and depraved, mutilating people or selling them away from their families over minor offenses, reinforcing their dominance over the bodies of enslaved people through sexual assault (which was not viewed as a criminal offense in the antebellum South). That is to say, "typical relationships" are hard to describe concretely and accurately over millions of people and uncountable daily interactions.

Analysis of material conditions for enslaved people in yeoman households is also elusive, though we can make a few very broad, and therefore cautious, generalizations. Without the massive complex of outbuildings that constituted the large plantation households (defined for my purposes as having 20 or more people enslaved on the property), enslaved people in yeoman households were likelier to share quarters with their enslavers. Yeoman farm houses were not luxurious. They were often small, dark, and dirty, with little in the way of furniture or amenities. But leaving aside 21st century notions of domestic comfort, I think that proximity is worth thinking about. Time away from the eyes of an enslaver could be a valuable thing to enslaved people in the United States. It was time that could be spent maintaining your own housing (some enslaved people took great pride in their homes, in the food they prepared for their families, all outside of the eyes of their enslavers), spending time with whatever friends or family you might have on that property, even sharing gossip or jokes about white authority figures (Landon Carter, an 18th century tidewater Virginia aristocrat and large slaveholder, once hurt his penis very badly in a horseriding accident, forcing him into an awkward limp for a while. It is not hard to imagine that sight making for a good source of fun in the slave quarters when Landon stopped overseeing their labor and returned to "the big house"). Possibilities for all of those activities and more are limited by constant shared space with the slaveholder and their family. Think too about what it meant to be the only enslaved member of a household, without a large enslaved community as a source of emotional support and strength (though of course, large enslaved communities had their own enmities and resentments, frustrations and dislikes), without any family (though a full 50 percent of sales of human beings in the antebellum South involved breaking up a family, so even on large plantation properties you weren't necessarily among kin, the odds were certainly better than if you were one, or one of two enslaved people in a household), without people who you could call your equals. White yeoman farmers were jealous of their status as free and independent men. If you were an enslaved woman (and typically, if a household held one enslaved person, she was a woman), you could not reasonably expect anything resembling friendship with your enslaver or their family.

Some historians have argued that if you were enslaved on a large plantation property, meaning your enslaver was rich, you were more likely to have higher quality food, clothing, and housing. This is more or less true depending on who you're talking about. As I mentioned earlier, some large slaveholders might have viewed it as their duty to ensure that "their people" had (What they saw as) a wholesome diet and decent clothes, some very much did not.

But beyond discussion of material conditions, I think this quote from the great historian and philosopher W.E.B. DuBois reveals an essential truth about the interactions between any enslaved person and their enslaver, however rich or poor they might have been:

"[The meaning of slavery] was in part psychological, the enforced feeling of inferiority, the calling of another Master; the standing with hat in hand. It was the helplessness. It was the defenselessness of family life. It was the submergence below the arbitrary will of any sort of individual."

Some enslavers, rich and poor, sought to respect family and marriage bonds among the people they enslaved. That didn't matter if they died in large amounts of debt (and they often did) because such promises had no legal weight. Whether their enslaver was rich or poor no enslaved person could testify against them in a court of law (imagine the latitude this gave slaveholders to abuse with impunity). Small slaveholders still saw their enslaved workers as property, still sought to submerge the identities of their enslaved workers into extensions of their wills. They could be as kind or cruel as any other person, but their is little evidence to suggest that interactions between small slaveholders and the people they held in bondage were any less fraught with mutual antagonism than those between enslaved people and large slaveholders.