There was no “real-life” Benjamin Martin. To the extent that the character was based on real historical figures, he was a combination of a few different people.
And they do, indeed, portray the black workers on his plantations as free laborers rather than slaves. Which, if you know anything at all about South Carolina in the 18th century, is about as realistic as having the Patriots fight the English using automatic weapons and rocket launchers.
Willy Wonka.
Not sure if you’re joking, but the Oompa-Loompas are expressly described as having willingly (nay, joyfully) come to work for him, in exchange for as many cacao beans as they cared to eat. Previously they had been living in the jungle, eating mashed green caterpillars, mixed with the bark of the bong-bong tree. And being themselves eaten by Whangdoodles.
Not slaves. 
One of whom was Francis Marion, who had a reputation as a notoriously harsh slaveowner.
Actually I think he did have slaves, but freed them after marrying his wife, who objected to slavery. Again, probably not the most historically accurate portrayal, but he never shies away from admitting having owned slaves.
Wonka has been to a distant land and brought back an entire population of coloured people to work for him. He has set them to work in his factory, in exchange for their lobour he gives them food (a diet mainly consisting of cacao beans.) They apparently receive no pay, no holidays. They never leave the factory, not ever. And he expects them to sing all the time to show how happy their lives are.
Basically, Wonka is a slave-driving plantation owner in the Deep South. What a bastard.
Also, there is the thing about using them to experiment on. Just how many did he destroy in chewing-gum trials?
Ooh, I forgot about that last part. That is past slavery and into Josef Mengele shit right there. :eek: 
The ‘spry old slaver’ of the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar”? 
In the Outlander books, the lead characters, Jamie and Claire, briefly own a slave. Actually I guess they technically still do, but he escaped tout suite.
Their daughter Brianna takes on an indentured servant. Not quite slavery, but given that the servant is a 14-year-old girl, it kind of is.
Jamie’s aunt Jocasta also owns many, many slaves. I don’t know if I would call her an entirely sympathetic character, but she isn’t one of the bad guys.
That’s the one I was going to mention. Not only do all the French and Spanish creole characters of any means own slaves, but the free people of color with the means to own slaves do as well - including the main character’s mother and half-sister. There’s a strong contrast between the creoles and the Americans emigrating to New Orleans in that the creoles recognized, if unofficially, their children by slaves and almost always freed them as well as recognized a third class of people outside of white slave owners and black slaves - the ranks of freed slaves and their descendants. The newly arrived Americans, on the other hand, are portrayed as viewing any person who wasn’t clearly white as being a chattel slave, little more than an animal which required ownership or was wasted goods.
In that light, most of the creole slave owners come off as much more sympathetic.
I’m a little fuzzy on this because I’m still reading the book (and not enjoying it very much–it’s for a course I’m taking) but wasn’t the slaveowner Mr. Garner portrayed as being relatively positive in Beloved? It was only after he died that his brother the Schoolteacher took over the plantation and made the slaves’ lives hell.
What got me thinking was the 600 year old Hob Gadling in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. In 13th England he’s effectively granted immortality - life for as long as he wants to live - by a whimsical Morpheus in what’s effectively a bet with Death about how long Hob will stick it out. And Hob is something of a bastard initially, wanting to get rich not caring too much about how, and by the early 17th Century he’s busy pioneering the African slave trade to America. It’s gently suggested to him by his patron that this is not a good thing {with the implication that if he continues the immortality deal is off}, and over the next few centuries he’s shown as progressing from regretful to remorseful to horrified about how he’s made his fortune. Hob’s moral progress mirrors that of Morpheus himself, of course, who has to journey from being cold and autocratic to more sympathetic and flexible, but of course Gaiman “cheats” by giving Hob 600 years to do it. He is a sympathetic slaver, or more accurately a sympathetic former slaver, but I was wondering if any author had managed to pull it off a similar character in real time.
It’s been a while since I read the book, mind you. But my memory of Mr. Garner is a not positive one. Didn’t he only buy male slaves and force them to stay celibate so that they were compelled to have sex with sheep? Or some other pervasion?
He and his wife may have been “good white folks” in the eyes of the slaves. But that wouldn’t have been a hard standard to meet.
It’s been a few years since I read Alex Haley’s Roots historical fiction, but I recall being surprised that he portrayed several of the slave owners as being kind and fair. Well, as fair as one can be to humans you bought and owned, anyway.
You’re probably right. I need to read the book again, because I had a lot of trouble following what was going on the first time through. If I didn’t have to read it for this course I probably would have given up by now.