There seem to be some confusion between indentured servitude and chattel slavery.  Slaves are called “indentured servants” and indentured servants are called “slaves”.  In reality, there were considerable differences between these two.  Indentured servants were considered to have rights and could complain to the authorities if they were mistreated.  Their situation was limited to a set amount of time and was not hereditary.  Chattel slaves were without any legal rights whatsoever.  Their status was life-long and hereditary by default.  Basically, slaves were equal to domesticated animals in a country without any animal protection laws.

Cattel slavery was not just a matter of having to work for someone who has the right to beat you.  People were brought and sold as if they were livestock.  In some cases, family members were sold to different owners.  Moreover, slave-owners had the right sexually exploit their own slaves.  I am not talking about sexual harassment here.  A slave-owner could rape his or her own slaves every week for years without anyone who cared being able do anything about it.

Early on the treatment of slaves in the US was rather mixed.  It depended on the slave-owner’s personal experience and ability to think outside the box.  The import of new slaves was outlawed in 1808.  This was done in the hope that slavery would be gradually abandoned.  Instead, this created a perverse incentive in slave-owners to install fear in slaves in order to control them.  Also, a machine for separating cotton fibres from their seeds had stated to spread.  This made cotton-growing slave-plantations more profitable and slaves an even more precious resource.

During the following decades cruel slave-owners become in great majority.  They probably would not beat their slaves for not working fast enough.  However, they would arbitrarily punish them for doing other things contrary to what the slave-owner wanted.  I suspect only the high price of a slave would have prevented the worst slave-owners from killing their own for breaking a drinking glass.  (This is a Roman example of unfair punishment.)  Officially, a slave-owner could only legally kill his or her slaves in self-defence.  But if everyone took it for granted every killing was in self-defence it could as well have been legal to kill them.

The slave-owning class used to brag about how virtuous they were.  In reality, they sexually exploited their slaves to such a degree every generation was more European-locking than the previous one.  Many of the slaves freed at the abolishment of slavery were not “black” in any meaningful sense.  Yet it was taken for granted that chattel slavery was the best for them.  This just because they were known to have at least one Sub-Saharan African ancestor after around 1500 AD.

Uploaded on the 22nd of September 2023.