British historian here, with a decent familiarity with the Caribbean iteration of plantation slavery, and some familiarity with the American experience. I have not seen the movie, so I am going by your description, and interested to see what others would say. The simplest direct answers to your two questions (did enslaved people seek to influence the slave-owning class by manipulating their egos, and did individual enslaved people feel affection for owners), might be “yes, definitely” and “some of them, certainly, though one must understand the context.” More detail, for which a general trigger warning is likely appropriate…

As for the first question: there was a time when historians conceptualized slave “resistance” in fairly crude terms – limiting it to violent rebellion, essentially – and characterized all other behaviours as collaboration or complacency. This distorts the qualitative record, in which no such dichotomy can be traced; scholars today tend to assert that enslaved people deployed a wide continuum of behaviours – from violent physical confrontation, to less direct forms of non-compliance such as poisoning or sabotage, to flattery, feigned illness, evasion, escape, etc. – to protect themselves from violence and violation, and when possible, to seize opportunities to ameliorate their position or the position of those they loved. Some consider some cases of self-harm, suicide, and the killing of infants to also exist on this spectrum. In an extreme situation like enslavement, one can assume people used all options available, and indeed, this is exactly what most slave memoirs and narratives express.

As for the second question, the response is necessarily qualified. Reading the accounts of enslaved people (which, it must be remembered, were often published for an audience of white people who would identify with “good” slave owners), one finds that some enslaved people, at least, engaged in a comparative evaluation of the varying character of slaveowners, and that in certain instances, positive or warm emotions of attachment and even affection doubtless arose. Solomon Northup, for example, described one of the men who held him in slavery, William Ford, in this way:

“I was sometime his slave, and had an opportunity of learning well his character and disposition, and it is but simple justice to him when I say, in my opinion, there never was a more kind, noble, candid, Christian man than William Ford… Were all men such as he, Slavery would be deprived of more than half its bitterness.”

If this is the first description of a slave owner by an enslaved person you have read, it will seem fairly clear. However, you need to keep in mind that slavery was a situation of extreme violence, violation, and trauma (and reading Northup’s account makes clear this was true regardless of the character of the individual slaveowner). A broad reading of qualitative sources arising from such scenarios – if it is helpful, you could also think of conditions of intimate partner violence, the Holocaust, some iterations of serfdom in the middle ages or early modern Russia, etc. (not because situations of extreme violence should be “compared” in a morally evaluative sense, but because they are all instances of trauma) – leaves one with little room for doubt that in such situations, “normal” relational patterns and habits do not apply. Thus, if you read a slave account with a simple question borne out of the experience of a free person – for instance, “did this slave like his master?” – you are going to come up with a confusing and indeterminate answer, because you will come across behaviours which seem to strongly contradict one another based upon your own experience. An enslaved person might feel a master is a good master, but still do great violence to them in the context of a slave revolt. Another enslaved person might suffer horrific abuse, but still show protective or “affectionate” behaviours towards the person who so abuses them. And then there is a chaos of small, indeterminate moments and patterns you will come across which will simply be inscrutable, because you are reading them from so far outside the experience of those who lived through them.

If you have seen the movie 12 Years a Slave, well, William Ford is played by Benedict Cumberbatch – he comes across as a cowardly and hypocritical figure, who could have protected Northrup from terrible harm, but chose not to do so as to avoid fairly minimal risk to himself. His choices are reprehensible, and lead to devastating trauma for Northup. Part of Northup’s intent in portraying him “justly” in his memoir is thus to demonstrate to white northerners the important fact about slavery that individually moral, even admirable people, possessing clear and undeniable virtues, could still participate in slavery as an institution to terrible effect. As Northup writes about Ford:

“The influences and associations that had always surrounded him, blinded him to the inherent wrong at the bottom of the system of Slavery. He never doubted the moral right of one man holding another in subjection. Looking through the same medium with his fathers before him, he saw things in the same light. Brought up under other circumstances and other influences, his notions would undoubtedly have been different.”

So – did Northup feel “affection” for Ford? Seems fairly complicated. I must note, while it would be nice to say that historians of slavery always write about the experiences of the enslaved with the necessary tolerance for doubt and nuance, in my experience most works on slavery still tend to try to reduce the behaviour and actions of enslaved people to categories more accessible to modern readers. This is problematic both as a matter of historical practice and as a moral question, but one would have to say it is clearly a difficult habit to break.

One final note – I strongly recommend two books to anyone interested in this question; one primary, one secondary. The first is A North-Side View of Slavery, edited by Benjamin Drew, and widely available online. This is an 1856 collection of interviews with a number of African-American former slaves who escaped to Canada; I don’t know of a better single-volume collection of such a wide spectrum of slave experiences. Obviously, it cannot “capture the slave experience” in any final way, and there is a source problem in the question of Drew’s own influence on the interview, transcription and editing processes, but it at least serves as an excellent introduction to the breadth of slave experiences and the necessity for humility and negative capability when reading slave accounts. For a secondary work, I likewise always recommend Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection. It is an academic text, and can be difficult going, but I don’t know of another scholar who has plunged into the full complexity of the task of reconstructing slave subjectivity to the same extent.