Cruelty was the norm, of course, but were there levels or tiers of what was considered acceptable in the South? Like, “Whipping your slaves, breeding them as lifestock and splitting up families is fine since they’re subhuman property, but if you do (this or that), that’s beyond the pale?”
Is there any record in history of some Confederate slave owner being unusually barbaric and his fellow slave-owning peers saying, “WTF is wrong with you?”
While this does not answer the OP’s question the slave states did have laws that said that the slave owners had to provide some basic clothing, food and shelter. How well these laws were followed and enforced I do not know.
I believe there was a sense that a slave was a big economic investment (they were not cheap, relatively few people had a slave).
Abusing them would be akin to someone taking a baseball bat to their own car (an example). It was not about the humanity, it was about wrecking your own investment.
If I could attach a question to this one: did whites in the antebellum South complain of slaves taking their jobs? Like, I get no self-resepecting white person would pick cotton. But, like, would one eschew training a slave to be a blacksmith, for fear of putting white smiths out of business? Were white tradesmen (tanners, etc.) opposed to slaves learning skilled trades?
I was attempting (and failing so far) to find any actual published letters from Southern confederate supporters that openly avowed for better treatment of slaves, but I did find an interesting Opinion piece published by the NYT from 2012:
It’s an interesting read, and I don’t have the time right now to follow up on the opinion and/or research involved to meet the exacting requirements of FQ, but this section sounds like a good place to start:
There is consequently a fascinating, if unsettling, paradox in the efforts of slaveholders to fulfill what they considered divinely imposed duties toward their slaves. Southern Christians believed that the Bible imposed on masters a host of obligations to their slaves. Most fundamentally, masters were to view slaves as fully members of their own households and as fellow brothers and sisters in the Lord. Therefore, as the South Carolina Methodist Conference declared before the war, masters sinned against their slaves by “excessive labor, extreme punishment, withholding necessary food and clothing, neglect in sickness or old age, and the like.”
The article’s author is apparently citing the writings of South Carolina Episcopal theologian James Warley Miles and his own analysis of them.
There was a wide diversity of views among slaveowners about how slaves should be treated, including those like Thomas Jefferson who objected to ‘excessive’ physical punishment, harsh living conditions, and otherwise grossly abusive treatment such as routinely dividing families. Of course, despite all of his writing about liberty and freedom, Jefferson only freed two of the over six hundred enslaved people he owned during his lifetime and five more (two of whom were illegitimate decedents) in his will; the rest were sold after his death to settle the debts of the estate. He also allowed overseers to exhibit considerable cruelty toward his enslaved people, routinely put children as young as ten years old into positions of hard labor, and famously had a sexual relationship with a 14 year old Sally Hemings resulting in multiple children (probably half a dozen) as well as tacitly allowing his male family members to rape other female enslaved women. So, even the ‘nice’ slaveowners were still people who enslaved people with little regard for their humanity or basic rights.
There was a culture among some slaveowners of being deliberately abusive as a way of showing how careless they could be with their ‘investments’ or just one-upping one another in displays of callousness. In fact, the entire business of slave ownership and the trade of enslaved people was a highly questionable fiscal venture. Many slave traders went broke leveraging themselves to buy slaves only to find that the market had fallen out because of failed harvests or oversaturation (Thomas’ debts were because he had inherited the debt from such a venture and was part of his rationalization as to why he could not emancipate his own slaves.) The agricultural economy of the South did not suddenly collapse when they started having to pay wages (although many former slave owners contrived to essentially force formerly enslaved people to work for a penance or under the peonage system) and if anything the ownership of enslaved people with its dependence upon the nearly free manual labor retarded the development of industry and update of technological developments.
So, slavery in the Antebellum South wasn’t about “a big economic investment” of owning and trading human beings as chattel assets; it was about living in a society where these landed white men had the literal power of life and death over others with no accountability, and the ability to behave as cruelly as they wished with no law or authority to pass judgment over them.
Stranger
On the contrary; abusing them was considered by many an important management tool. Keep in mind that slaves are people, not inanimate objects like cars; they don’t want to be slaves and have to be kept subjugated. They need to be kept in a constant state of despair and terror so they won’t revolt or resist. So you end up with things like public displays of torture to drive the point home.
Along with stranger things. I recall reading about one slaver practice where they’d dig a hole in the ground and make pregnant slaves lie face down with their belly in the hole. Then they’d whip her, under the theory that doing so would impress the proper submissive attitude upon the unborn slave. And repeat the processes regularly during pregnancy.
This is just entirely false. Cars don’t refuse to work or run way or the like. When slaves did those things (or their owners or overseers think they would), they would absolutely get abused.
Also, I don’t really agree with “relatively few people had a slave” - it all depends on what “relatively few” means to you. It was much higher in some states or counties than others. Mississippi being highest with 49% of households owning slaves, according to the 1860 census (this includes all states, so you’ll have to total the Confederate ones yourself, looks like 27%t). Someone on /r/dataisbeautiful did a county map for those interested.
You likely knew this, but in most of the south it was against the law to teach a slave to read. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn (but I don’t know) that it was considered unwise to let them learn a skilled trade such as blacksmithing.
Let me add that in Barbados, slaves were simply worked to death because they were cheap to replace. Probably true throughout the Caribbean. This didn’t happen in the US because importation of new slaves was banned in 1808.
I had a US history course taught by a Texan. He claimed that slavery would have collapsed as uneconomic by 1900. Of course that would not have ended slavery. For example, house slaves would still have been useful.
Varies in time and place. While it was illegal to teach them to read, some people did so anyway (it was actually surprising when I learned that slave literacy rate was estimated at about 10% to 20% in the US, while there were free nations with lower rates). Slaves learning skilled did exist, but was very much not the norm. But we can see an example in a thread about Jack Daniels on /r/askhistorians.
This question has been asked there, too (several times), though more in the context of factory work than skilled trades.
>Only 25% owned slaves - SOURCE
You missed the point. I was only saying a slave was an investment in the eyes of other southerners. Per the OP’s question. I made no comment on the morality of it all.
I said that. I don’t consider 25% to be “relatively few.” That’s why I said it depends on what you call “relatively few.”
I didn’t miss the point - people had very rational reasons to “abuse their investment” - for fear if they don’t that it won’t pay off (will stop working - we know work stoppage/slowage happened) or they will lose it (it will run away). Keeping the the social hierarchy was very important and when those uppity slaves weren’t towing the line, punishment was often seen as an appropriate response. Not so damaged as to be out of work a long time (again with hurting the investment) unless it was necessary to keep the rest of them in-line, but certainly physical abuse to coerce them into “appropriate” behavior.
Right I certainly don’t consider 1 out of 4 to be relatively few.
I do not want to answer this here.
We are in FQ. I will get in trouble for junior modding but this discussion seems not FQ.
If you want to talk about the morality of slavery feel free to start a new thread. I’ll be happy to participate. (I think we are on the same side though.)
No serious answer can be given to such a general question. Chattel slavery existed for 250 years before the Civil War, was a major issue in the formation of the country, and tore the country apart for 50 years as divisions and opinions deepened and festered. Regional and class variations developed in the southern states, and so did economic ones, so that selling slaves down South, i.e. to places like Louisiana, meant sending them to a different society than in Virginia. All the seceding states had a significant percentage of no votes on the subject, although the losers backed the winners afterward.
One can find any side being advocated at different times and places, and often at the same time and place, just as most issues today have advocates at every point in a multi-dimensional spectrum. The best answer probably is that attitudes hardened over time; the more pushback southerners got, the farther they went to justify their attitudes. Extremists began to command more attention the louder and more virulent they got. The situation then is uncannily like the situation today. Use modern cultural splits as a template for understanding.
Brutality toward slaves was O.K. in the old South if “justified”, but it could cost you $$ if you got carried away.
Warning: the cases in the above link, some of which are relevant to this thread, make for grim reading.