The badhistory

despite what the narrative on slavery likes to teach us... slavery wasn't "roots" or "12 years a slave" most of the time.

sadly people back then considered slaves as property. it wasn't always a matter of skin color, there were slaves of all colors, but more often than not it was black slaves who were captured by black tribes in africa and sold into bondage as part of the spice and slave trade.

if someone owned a slave, in a majority of cases, it was considered a piece of farming equipment. in the same way that a farmer today wouldn't intentionally smash his combine into the barn or leave his tools in the rain to rust... a slave owner didn't just beat the fuck out of his slaves or starve them to death...

beaten and weak slaves can't plow your field, it was in the slave owners best interest to keep his slaves fed and clothed and healthy.

did they live in a nice house and eat steak and drink champagne... fuck no they didn't... they were slaves.

but they damn sure weren't treated like shit "cause racism" as many responding to this thread would have you believe (because they have been led to believe that nonsense).

bottom line is slaves weren't ready to kill their masters because their master was the one who fed them and gave them a place to live. you kill your slave master and without your papers of freedom you would just be willed away or auctioned off with the rest of his property... possibly to someone who would treat you poorly.

TLDR: slavery was a fucking abomination on a human rights level... but it is nothing like what hollywood likes to portray. most slave owners took care of their slaves like they did all their other property.

And I'm stealing this pretty well sourced response from /u/thesweetestpunch because I honestly couldn't do much better. I'm ^{so sorry.}

Here is an in-depth, cited refutation of everything that this commenter wrote. The historians rely pretty heavily on WPA interviews with former slaves from the 1930s, which are excerpted and described in selections here.

Also, if you check this guy's comment history, you'll find a lot of crazy-ass racist stuff, which another commenter pointed out below. Just because someone sounds reasonable and knowledgeable doesn't mean they are.

It's also wild that they say that slavery wasn't 12 Years a Slave, considering that that film is based on Solomon Northup's memoirs (which were corroborated with primary documents that he collected - letters and such), which actually depicted more cruelty and beatings than the film did. So it is really rich of him to claim that 12 Years a Slave is fiction! Either he's lying, or ignorant. I suspect both.

I quote from a few of the historians below:

There was a reason why masters beat slaves much more severely than they beat animals--slaves were a lot smarter. Tie an animal to a post and the animal won't and can't run away. Not so with people. If you read the book upon which 12 Years a Slave was based, you'll learn that 24/7 policing was necessary to prevent slaves from running away. You'll also note that in 12 Years a Slave, the cruelty and torture to which Northup was subjected, was not limited to just one person--it was a large number of different people in different circumstances and different states who committed it. As the WPA interviews, and other slave narratives, demonstrate, such cruelty was indeed widespread. Some slaves were lucky enough to avoid some of it. But most could not. White men could basically rape their enslaved women any time they felt like it, with no punishment or even acknowledgement that anything was wrong. In the delicate language of the 19th century, this is described in all the literature. Every slave was subject to being parted from their loved ones at any time, forever. In short, yes, things were as bad for the average slave as were depicted in the film. Not for every slave, but for a very large percentage of them. And actually, if you read the book, you'll see that things were quite a bit WORSE than were depicted in the movie. But if they had depicted it accurately, it would have become redundant and the audience would have been desensitized to the violence and degradation.

Here's another:

I think that you err in assuming that these slave owners' infliction of violence on their slaves was irrational. Your comparison between them and "Hitler/Satan" and your example of people not beating their horses suggests this, at least to me. Rather, slave owners' violence was often quite calculated and strategic. As someone else noted in this thread, slaves were much smarter than horses. They saw that they could be beaten or killed for any act of defiance. In the antebellum South, many slave owners maintained a constant atmosphere of violence and fear, in order to keep slaves under control. Slave owners were not simply cruel for no reason. Admittedly, in the film, Epps seemed to be motivated by simple malice. Fassbender's portrayal didn't allow for much nuance. However, slave owners would have known precisely why they were attacking or beating their slaves. A final point I'll make tonight is that if we look beyond the antebellum South, prior to the abolition of the slave trade, it was not uncommon for slave owners to beat or work their "property" to death, knowing that they could cheaply replace them. Admittedly, this changed to an extent after the slave trade was abolished, but I would argue that the logic was not really that much different in the mid-nineteenth century United States. Slaves were replaceable, and a slave that resisted his/her master's tyranny in any way might seem to be more trouble than he or she was worth. This logic certainly holds for other kinds of property - horses, in your example.

Then there is this contrasting argument, which still makes the point that rape was commonplace (DNA tests usually reveal a large amount of European DNA in African-Americans, typically dating back to the time of slavery, when consent between the two parties would have been impossible):

In the Virginia Piedmont, by contrast, slaveowners like Madison and Jefferson were the resident governors of their little communities, where the enslaved were often intact families, themselves third or fourth generation Virginians, and interrelated by blood to their white masters. Annette Gordon-Reed in her most recent book, The Hemmingses of Virginia, tries to evoke the reality of mixed-race house slaves, who often were educated and were skilled artisans. James Madison late in life compared that regime to European serfdom. Field slaves often suffered manual punishment, but more severe abuse was unlawful and was sometimes punished. The more common abuses were the rapes of enslaved women, so common as hardly to be recorded.

People who've responded by saying that the thread originator is racist have gotten a lot of responses saying "so?" A lot of people on reddit seem to cling very closely to the ad hominem/poisoning-the-well thing - "that's a fallacy!". But here's the thing: If someone demonstrates that they are an unreliable source, you need to press them to corroborate their argument. It's just stupid to respond to a well-poisoner with "so?". If someone demonstrates that they are wildly irrational when it comes to the topic in question, it throws their entire argument into question and the burden of proof rests on them.

This is the trouble with relying on logical fallacies to debunk stuff: Yes, in principle, a virulent racist who believes that black people are apes can have an excellent argument about something race-related, or lots of knowledge. But in practice, that person is probably going to be totally wrong and totally misinformed, and their racist agenda casts a big shadow over their argument. The burden of proof as always goes to the person making the original argument, not the person saying "hey, don't listen to this guy, he's a sack of shit and here's why." Dismissing fallacies on principle only goes so far; you wouldn't loan your money to a person who defaulted on all their debts without some sort of collateral, so why would you give credit to a shitty racist without vetted sources on their information?

You're giving karma and credence to a virulent racist who is ignorant of history and willfully spreading lies. Good job guys.

Edited for clarity, and to remove some redundancies