How well or badly were slaves treated in the American South?

I have stumbled on a reference to the Slave Narratives, the cumulative result of two years of in depth interviews surveying over 2,000 former slaves by the Works Project Administration under Franklin D Roosevelt. The historian Robert Fogel said that between 60 to 80 percent of the interviewees had only positive things to say about their masters and their life during slave days. I'd like to know much more about the subject. 

I remember my surprise, studying US history in my first term at university in 1980 (sooo recently), expecting historians to write about slavery in something like the spirit of 'Gone With The Wind', and finding that, though 1930s US historians did so, (I read and learnt much from Ulrich Phillips) 1970s historians compared slavery to Auschwitz and blamed slavery for black criminality and broken families more than a century later. 

Historians always write about their own age when they try to understand the past.
There were strong zeitgeist reasons for emphasising the ugliness of slavery in the 1970s, as nowadays, and strong zeitgeist reasons in the 1930s for doing the opposite. Those who espouse the spirit of the age are eventually widowed, but for Americans (and not only them) the time when they can be dispassionate about race is a long way off.

I am reading War and Peace at the moment and seeing that Russian serfs were apt to be beaten and punished (although not sold) as much as American slaves. Over a third of Russians were serfs until Tsar Alexander II liberated them in 1861. Yet we hear little of the Russian serfs or other European serfs. We hear little of the serfs and gypsy slaves in what is now Romania or of the vast numbers of slaves in the Muslim world. Slavery in America and the European colonies are at the forefront of our attention because of the colour issue, which so concerns everyone in our age.

I wrote in this post about how the former Governor-General of Jamaica, Sir Howard Cooke, who died last year, a black man, was thankful that slavery rescued Jamaicans from

Africa's black night

and gave them the benefits of British civilisation. My post links to a very interesting interview with Sir Howard Cooke, who was a truer British patriot than many or most British people, including the BNP and the fascists.

Here are some quotations from the WPA interviews with (very elderly) former slaves:

“I liked being a slave, our white folks . . . were good to us. . . . I had rather be a slave. . . . . I wish I wuz still in slavery.” 

“When I was three or four years old my mother was whipped to death by the mistress with a cowhide whip.”

“I’s heard dat some white folks wuz mean to der niggers, but our Old Masta and Miss wasn’t.”

“Give me freedom, or give me death.”

“I seed slavery from all sides. I’se seed ’em git sick and die an’ buried. I’se seed ’em sole [sold] away from der loved ones. I’se seed ’em whipped by de overseers, an’ brung in by de patrol riders. I’se seed ’em cared fo’ well wid plenty ter eat an’ clo’se ter keep ’em warm, an’ wid good cabins ter live in.”

“My white folks was good to me. I had a heep better time when I growed up than folks does now. . . . Shucks I was a heep better off.”

“Our white folks wuz rich folks. Dey live in a big white house wid roun’ posts in front. Dey give us plenty to eat and wear but dey beat on us a plenty. . . . Den one day . . . dem Yankee mens tole us de guvment would give us some land and a mule or some hosses to work wid, but we never did git nothing from dem. We wuked hard for whut we got. We wuz mighty proud of our freedom – but times is a lot harder now dan it wuz in dem times. Now we can’t git ’nough to eat and dere’s nobody to look atter us, but de white folks whut takes pity on us, and heps us sometimes. Times is gittin’ harder it seems to me.”

“After the white folks eat in the dining room, all us cullud folks eat in the kitchen, allus a plenty, which is more than we has now. Times was good then, I members back to it sometimes now, when I is glad jes’ to get a piece of bread. . . . Oh the sweet taters we did have! . . . great big winter cabbages. . . . [and] so many sides an’ hams of meat.”

Asking how well or badly slaves were treated touches a raw nerve with modern Americans. Most Europeans were serfs in the middle ages and long after in many countries. But for Americans slavery is a very emotional issue.

This is because of the collective American nervous breakdown over race and Americans' collective need to see their country as a shining city on a hill. This Protestant sense of being a chosen people, which derives from 18th century English ideas about England, is tiresome but admirable and a great source of America's moral strength - along with religiosity, patriotism, lack of irony and the American inability to be embarrassed. Slavery and the elimination of the indigenous Americans is a problem for people who believe in America's divine mission to purify the world. (So is the invasion of Mexico and a few other things, come to that.)

I am not an apologist for slavery and am proud that Great Britain abolished it in 1833. I think Dr Johnson was the greatest Englishman after Shakespeare and I love him for saying, before the American rebellion,

How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

Quite so. But slavery and things as bad as slavery unfortunately still exist.

What things do we accept for which our descendants will condemn us? 

Abortion? I hope so.

Falling birth-rates in European countries?

Child labour?

In the last fifty years blacks have largely stopped working in farms in the American South and Hispanic immigrants have taken their places. Children as young as twelve work legally and children as young as seven work illegally on farms, including the tobacco farms of North Carolina and Virginia, where they endanger their health picking tobacco that ends up in the factories of Philip Morris, British American Tobacco, Lorillard, Reynolds and other big producers.

Children work in tobacco farms in Malawi picking tobacco for wages of less than $10 a month. The more you look into things you find slavery and things fairly close to slavery are easily to be found, hidden in full sight.