Hank Trent wrote:
...So slavery was, at base, inevitably about ownership, and that idea is
enough to horrify most people today, as it should...

I agree, but I think the concept that slaves lived in a society in which 
they were another person's property is difficult to fathom since we have no 
equivalent in our experience to compare it to.

Mistreatment, brutal beatings, rapes, etc., are something we can better 
understand, so they are more often used to describe slavery. But they are 
only some of the the consequences of status as property. (Some free people 
suffered brutal beatings, and some free women supervised by men were raped).

Slaves had relationships with other people in their community besides their 
masters. Their status as someone else's property before Emancipation must 
have had some effect on later developments like Jim Crow.
Paul 

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