But what you're saying doesn't change the nature of slavery or mitigate its
fundamental evil--being under the control of another's will. Yes, the
treatment of slaves in minor matters might differ greatly between masters
but the basic matter--personal freedom and dignity--did not. Slavery,
moreover, was a system that depended upon laws and upon community control,
on slave patrols. It rested upon a shared sense of white supremacy that
united slaveholders and non-slaveholders.

Your assumption that slavery was something seen as evil only in retrospect
certainly doesn't apply to any time after the founding of the United
States. Otherwise, there wouldn't have been such an elaborate, at times
hysterical, attempt to justify and protect it. Slavery was attacked as a
violation of religious teachings and of the fundamental natural rights
proclaimed in the American founding documents. The defenders of slavery
more and more in the decades before the Civil War turned to "scientific
racism" to justify slavery and the denial of citizenship rights to Free
Blacks.

And, of course, the owners of slaves were dealing with human beings, not
animals (though the slavery sought to reduce slaves to that status).

Jim Hershman

On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 10:02 AM, Hank Trent <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I wonder though if surveying wills demonstrates the obvious, while missing
> nuances. Yes, slaves were property to be distributed to heirs, and the
> relatively few manumissions at death show that owners generally desired to
> keep them as property--but then, if they didn't, they probably wouldn't
> have bought them in the first place.
>
> So slavery was, at base, inevitably about ownership, and that idea is
> enough to horrify most people today, as it should. But if one looks
> further, I think there were differences in relationships, in the same way
> that a beef farmer and a dog lover both own their animals with the same
> legal status and could will or sell them, but their psychological
> relationship to those animals is vastly different. Even the same person
> might mourn the death of a dog and lovingly bury him under a tombstone,
> while callously shipping steers to be slaughtered and eaten each year, with
> a prize bull treated somewhere in between. Such nuances among slaveowners
> can only be teased out by looking at other clues--letters, other legal
> documents, observers' writings, plantation records, burials, etc.
>
> That is no excuse for slavery of course, but instead I think it shows how
> humans always are capable of compartmentalizing their feelings, and that
> social conventions and pressure can make ordinary people do things that
> seem obviously evil only in retrospect.
>
> Hank Trent
> [log in to unmask]
>
> On Tuesday, September 9, 2014, Paul Heinegg <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > The largest collection of statements by Virginia slave owners on the
> > subject of their slaves is contained in the wills recorded in Virginia
> > counties, so it should be useful to analyze those.
> >
> > I abstracted the wills of two counties (Halifax County, North Carolina,
> > and King George County, Virginia) to see how slave owners referred to
> their
> > slaves. I did no analysis, but "to my loving wife...a negro, horse, cow,
> > furniture" is typical.
> > http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/halifax.htm
> >
> > Paul
> >
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