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Slavery 101 - Just to clear up a few misconceptions.
Somebody at some point, in some thread that I can't find, stated that slaves were only owned by 3% of all Southerners and were usually well treated. In order to rebut, I needed facts, and by the time I got facts, I couldn't find the thread. So I'm posting this for General Discussion, just in case people need data.
https://www.history.com/news/5-myths-about-slavery
The 1860 census shows that in the states that would soon secede from the Union, an average of more than 32 percent of white families owned enslaved people. Some states had far more slave owners (46 percent of families in South Carolina, 49 percent in Mississippi) while some had far less (20 percent of families in Arkansas).
https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/08/07/percent-of-whites-owned-slaves/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treatment_of_slaves_in_the_United_States
The treatment of enslaved people in the United States varied by time and place, but was generally brutal, especially on plantations. Whipping and rape were routine, but usually not in front of white outsiders, or even the plantation owner's family. ("When I whip niggers, I take them out of the sight and hearing of the house, and no one in my family knows it."[1]) An enslaved person could not be a witness against a white; enslaved people were sometimes required to whip other enslaved people, even family members.[2]:54 There were also businesses to which a slave owner could turn over the whipping.[2]:24 Families were often split up by the sale of one or more members. There were some slave owners considered to be kind and relatively enlightened — Nat Turner said his master was kind[3] — but not on large plantations. Only a small minority of enslaved people received anything resembling decent treatment, and even that could vanish on such occasion as an owner's death. As put by William T. Allan, a slaveowner's abolitionist son who could not safely return to Alabama, "cruelty was the rule, and kindness the exception"
Brutality
According to historians David Brion Davis and Eugene Genovese, treatment of slaves was harsh and inhumane. During work and outside of it, slaves suffered physical abuse, since the government allowed it. Treatment was usually harsher on large plantations, which were often managed by overseers and owned by absentee slaveholders. Small slaveholders worked together with their slaves and sometimes treated them more humanely.[29]
Besides slaves' being vastly overworked, they suffered brandings, shootings, "floggings," and much worse punishments. Flogging was a term often used to describe the average lashing or whipping a slave would receive for misbehaving. Many times a slave would also simply be put through "wanton cruelties" or unprovoked violent beatings or punishments.[30]
Inhumane treatment
After 1820,[31] in response to the inability to legally import new slaves from Africa following prohibition of the international slave trade, some slaveholders improved the living conditions of their slaves, to influence them not to attempt escape.[32]
Some slavery advocates asserted that many slaves were content with their situation. African-American abolitionist J. Sella Martin countered that apparent "contentment" was in fact a psychological defense to dehumanizing brutality of having to bear witness to their spouses being sold at auction and daughters raped.[33] Likewise, Elizabeth Keckley, who grew up a slave in Virginia and became Mary Todd Lincoln's personal modiste, gave an account of what she had witnessed as a child to explain the folly of any claim that the slave was jolly or content. Little Joe, son of the cook, was sold to pay his owner's bad debt:
Joe’s mother was ordered to dress him in his best Sunday clothes and send him to the house, where he was sold, like the hogs, at so much per pound. When her son started for Petersburgh, ... she pleaded piteously that her boy not be taken from her; but master quieted her by telling that he was going to town with the wagon, and would be back in the morning. Morning came, but little Joe did not return to his mother. Morning after morning passed, and the mother went down to the grave without ever seeing her child again. One day she was whipped for grieving for her lost boy.... Burwell never liked to see his slaves wear a sorrowful face, and those who offended in this way were always punished. Alas! the sunny face of the slave is not always an indication of sunshine in the heart.[34]
How many hours did slaves work?
On a typical plantation, slaves worked ten or more hours a day, "from day clean to first dark," six days a week, with only the Sabbath off. At planting or harvesting time, planters required slaves to stay in the fields 15 or 16 hours a day.
This last article doesn't allow copying, but it is very good, short, to the point. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2956.html
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