>>7620275The casual brutality and mistreatment is somewhat embellished. You wouldn't want to fuck up a slave any more than you would want to fuck up a plow horse or a dairy cow. They were expensive and they produced goods for you to sell. If they're beat to shit they ain't working. This went double after the British Empire outlawed slavery and began actively hunting slave transport ships and trying to destroy the trade (their position was more "we've decided to give up slavery and if we can't have it we don't want anybody else having that economic advantage" than any sense of moral outrage). Slaves became hard to acquire new from Africa and elsewhere and so you had mostly what stock was already in America to work with.
That is not to say they wouldn't harshly punish someone for trying to escape or other serious disobedience. Order had to be maintained and you needed to make examples of people so the other slaves didn't get any ideas about taking off. Again, doubly important when acquiring fresh slaves became problematic.
Miscegenation (a pretty word for fucking your slaves) was a widespread problem and was doubtless varying degrees of awful for the women involved.
And of course in the final analysis chattel slavery is a terrible injustice and that kind of servitude is contrary to the most basic desires of any human being. However the hyperbolic depiction of white masters brutalizing slaves for funzies while sipping a mint julip and twirling their moustache is misleading.
