Two things spring to mind here. A will is in essence a legal document and will have a language structure of its own, tending to be formal. Given that slaves were viewed as property, the logical expression generally would be dispositive, especially as most folks tend to follow the template in legal matters. Also, where a number of slaves were owned, household slaves were obviously more familiar than field slaves, leading again to a differentiation from more or less friendly to chillingly cool terms. The other issue is that we view that era through the filter of Jim Crow, seeing African-Americans as essentially an unknown "other" set of folks (not in the TV program Lost "other" sense). The owner-slave dynamic was then much less separated than it was in Jim Crow. How might that affect perception and interpretation? And again, we are not dealing with monolithic blocks of people on either side but rather people with wide ranges of sensibilities crammed into the mores of the day. Lyle Browning, RPA