“Excessive toil occurred only where the masters or overseers were feeble witted as well as brutal. A persistent rumor among abolitionists was that sugar planters followed a policy of working slaves to death in seven years as a matter of economy. The persons spreading such reports were as ignorant of Negro nature as they were of conditions in the sugar mills. Furthermore, they overrated the ability of the masters to know how to kill a slave in the given time instead of leaving him a broken-down burden to the plantation. When they set out to prove the accusation they returned with no evidence, but convinced that the practice existed in some obscure region which they had not succeeded in ferreting out. Harriet Martineau, after watching slaves go through the motions of work without tiring themselves, considered the planters as models of patience and observed that new slave owners from Europe or the North were prone to be the most severe. Numerous observers, of various shades of opinion on slavery, agreed that brutality was no more common in the black belt than among free labor elsewhere, and that the slave owners were the worst victims of the system.”

—  W. Cleon Skousen

The Making of America (1986)

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“Much was made by abolitionists that the King James version of the Bible didn't use the word slaves, but, instead, servants. This meant, in their minds, that God didn't really approve of slavery. But that argument was linguistic at best. Slavery was codified and even sanctified in the tenth commandment, throwing slaves (and wives) in with other property belonging to one's neighbor that one must not covet. The Bible even regulated--as opposed to banning outright--the killing of slaves, stating that if a slave were beaten to death, the slave owner should be punished (though not killed himself, as would be his fate were he to kill a freeman), but if the slave didn't die until a day or two after the beating, the slave owner "shall not be punished, for he [the slave] is his money."”

Derrick Jensen book The Culture of Make Believe

Source: The Culture of Make Believe (2003), p. 56

“The population of Athens and ns, imported from the coasts of the Propontis…. They were employed for domestic purposes, or were let out for hire in gangs as labourers, or were allowed to work by themselves paying a yearly royalty to their masters.
… hardly any Athenian citizen can have been without two or three. The family of Aeschines (consisting of 6 persons) was considered very poor because it possessed only 7 slaves. On the other hand, Plutarch says that let out 1,000 and Hipponicus 600 slaves to work the gold mines in Thrace. The state possessed some slaves of its own, who were employed chiefly as policemen and clerks.
Slaves enjoyed considerable liberties in Athens, and had some rights, even against their masters. They did not serve as soldiers, or sailors, except when the city was in great straits, as at the battle of Arginussae… The worst prospect in store for them was that their masters might be engaged in a lawsuit, for the evidence of a slave (except in a few cases) was not admitted in a court of justice unless he had been put to torture.
Slaves were sometimes freed by their masters, with some sort of public ceremony, or (for great services) by the state which paid their value to their masters.”

James Gow (scholar) (1854–1923) scholar

p, 125
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Abraham Lincoln photo

“So long as we call Slavery wrong, whenever a slave runs away they will overlook the obvious fact that he ran because he was oppressed, and declare he was stolen off. Whenever a master cuts his slaves with the lash, and they cry out under it, he will overlook the obvious fact that the negroes cry out because they are hurt, and insist that they were put up to it by some rascally abolitionist.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Allow the humblest man an equal chance (1860)
Context: These natural and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only; cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated — we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Douglas's new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that Slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State Constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected of all taint of opposition to Slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us. So long as we call Slavery wrong, whenever a slave runs away they will overlook the obvious fact that he ran because he was oppressed, and declare he was stolen off. Whenever a master cuts his slaves with the lash, and they cry out under it, he will overlook the obvious fact that the negroes cry out because they are hurt, and insist that they were put up to it by some rascally abolitionist.

“John Brown knew the masters secretly feared their slaves might revolt, even as they assured abolitionists that slaves really liked slavery. One reason his Harpers Ferry raid prompted such an outcry in the South was that slave owners feared their slaves might join him.”

James W. Loewen book Lies My Teacher Told Me

As quoted in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong https://books.google.com/books?id=5m2_xeJ4VdwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=lies+my+teacher+told+me&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dV39VNWyPMmWgwTN14JQ&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA#v=snippet&q=maltreated&f=false (2008), p. 193
2000s, 2007, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (2007)
Context: Ideas made the opposite impact in the Confederacy. Ideological contradictions afflicted the slave system even before the war began. John Brown knew the masters secretly feared their slaves might revolt, even as they assured abolitionists that slaves really liked slavery. One reason his Harpers Ferry raid prompted such an outcry in the South was that slave owners feared their slaves might join him. Yet their condemnations of Brown and the 'Black Republicans' who financed him did not persuade Northern moderates but only pushed them toward the abolitionist camp. After all, if Brown was truly dangerous, as slave owners claimed, then slavery was truly unjust. Happy slaves would never revolt... White Southerners founded the Confederacy on the ideology of white supremacy. Confederate soldiers on their way to Antietam and Gettysburg, their two main forays into Union states, put this ideology into practice: they seized scores of free black people in Maryland and Pennsylvania and sold them south into slavery. Confederates maltreated black Union troops when they captured them.

Thomas Jefferson photo

“Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior…. The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life. We know that among the Romans, about the Augustan age especially, the condition of their slaves was much more deplorable than that of the blacks on the continent of America…Yet notwithstanding these and other discouraging circumstances among the Romans, their slaves were often their rarest artists. They excelled too in science, insomuch as to be usually employed as tutors to their master’s children. Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus, were slaves. But they were of the race of whites. It is not their condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction.”

Thomas Jefferson book Notes on the State of Virginia

Query XIV
1780s, Notes on the State of Virginia

Bell Hooks photo

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Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

“The worst offenses of slaves against the white men's code were rebellion and running away. Drunkenness, stealing, hiding out from work, personal filthiness, carelessness of property, fighting, and general brutality had various positions in the scale of misdemeanors. Negro preachers often bred discontent by their unnecessary restraint upon pleasure, and, if itinerants, had to be watched closely for abolitionist or seditious doctrines.”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

The Making of America (1986)

W.E.B. Du Bois photo

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W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) American sociologist, historian, activist and writer

Source: The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois (2003), p. 104

Harry V. Jaffa photo

“The paradox of calling the same human beings persons and property brings the cause of the Civil War into the sharpest focus. A person by definition is a being possessed of a rational will. A chattel by equal definition is a piece of movable property without a rational will. Because a horse or a dog lacks a rational will, its owner is responsible for any damage or injury it may cause. But slaves were held as responsible for their own actions, as were their masters, under the criminal codes of the slave states. The slave owners, in seeking to have the slaves counted as five-fifths, were asserting that they were full human beings. At the same time, by claiming the right to their labor as chattels, they were asserting them to be sub-human. How the slaves could be both was something that Jefferson Davis and his friends never explained.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

Source: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 212

Rebecca Latimer Felton photo

“There were abuses, many of them. I do not pretend to defend these abuses. There were kind masters and cruel masters. There were violations of the moral law that made mulattoes as common as blackberries. In this one particular slavery doomed itself. When white men were willing to put their own offspring in the kitchen and corn field and allowed them to be sold into bondage as slaves and degraded as another man's slave, the retribution of wrath was hanging over this country and the South paid penance in four bloody years of war.”

Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930) American politician

On slavery, in her 1919 autobiography Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth Felton, p.79 http://www.google.com/books?id=gHsLIvQ_BN0C&dq=rebecca+latimer+felton&printsec=frontcover&source=in#PPA79,M1.

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