This is actually a fairly common question, though I don’t remember seeing any answers to it recently. On the surface, it’s a reasonable one. Why wouldn’t slaveholders, as rational economic actors, do whatever they could to make sure that their property in human beings was well provided for? Wouldn’t that inevitably lead to them working harder and making their enslavers more money?

It sounds a bit like the arguments made by antebellum anti slavery writers like Frederick Law Olmsted, who argued that a free market wage labor system simply made more economic sense than slavery, since a person working to provide for their family and perhaps to move up in the world would be inclined to work harder than a person who was coerced. And there lies the first issue with this question.

Why would an enslaved person want to make money for their enslaver, regardless of their own material comfort?

The obvious answer is that most enslaved workers did not wish to maximize their enslavers’ return on investment. They quite reasonably resented their condition and every day devised ways to confound their enslavers’ desires to coerce a profit out of them. These included intentionally slow work, playing dumb, faking sick, stealing, destroying equipment, arson, and occasionally more overt forms of violent resistance. Slaveholders had problems with maximizing the profit they could force out of their slaves far beyond whether they had enough food to eat.

But there’s another problem here as well: slaveholders, like any people, were not wholly rational economic actors. There were many ideological constructions that slaveholders understood to be true that guided the way they interacted with the people they enslaved. There was, of course, a luxuriously articulated (if incoherent) ideology of white supremacy and black inhumanity. It argued that people of African descent were childlike simpletons at best, lazy inherently criminal inhuman beasts at worst. Prone to slovenly behavior, totally lacking in work ethic, a slave could not be trusted with luxuries, and “luxuries” could mean anything from clothing that wasn’t painfully coarse to rations of food that didn’t need to be supplemented by extra labor (Landon Carter, an 18th century Virginian slaveholder, gave out rations of a peck of dried corn and a pound of meat per week, half that for children under the age of 16, he thought that the extra labor of cultivating a garden would be good for the people whose lives and labor he had stolen).

With these realities established, I don’t think you have to stretch your imagination much to see why slaveholders overwhelmingly used torture as the most reliable means of getting a return on their investment, even if kindness and decent provisioning seems more reliable to you. And while there were technically legal limits on what slaveholders could do, they were never enforced. And while occasionally, some communities intervened in cases of sadism so gruesome that even fellow slaveholders found them perverse, a challenge to the power of a slaveholder to torture with impunity had to be made with extreme caution, for it constituted an attack on the very foundations of slavery itself, so there were many cases of outright sadism (that is, torture purely for the pleasure of it rather than to force labor out of an unwilling person, though these often blended into each other) that went unchallenged, and many more no doubt that never made their way into the archives that we historians study.

In short, enslaved people lived in horrifying conditions because their enslavers saw it as the most rational way to get a return on their investment, however shocking that is to us now. A kinder, gentler form of slavery would have constituted an unacceptable challenge to the institution itself, so was out of the question.

Amazing, thank you! This is exactly what I was looking for.