The culture of slavery and the culture of freedom

I’m getting tired of the assertion that slave owners “were ignorant” of the humanity of their slaves. I feel like I have heard it a lot more lately. But I know that that’s probably not true, and that it just rings in my ears a little wronger at this point in the syllabus for History 242.
 First, and most importantly, it is agreed slavery was a violent and coercive institution because the actions required to be a successful slave owner were both of these. Specifically, physical violence was the vehicle of the coercion slaves experienced that kept them enslaved. Through real acts or the promise of acts of violence against resistance, violence was at the root of what kept slaves enslaved.
It is also agreed that slavery as a whole institution was not successful in completely objectifying people, or actually turning them into objects. There was an active tension in the lives of the enslaved between the things that affirmed their humanity and the violence that owners sought to eradicate those things with. Slave owners could not have blissfully ignorant of their slaves’ humanity because their job in the overall commodification of slaves was to suppress that humanity specifically.
Second, this act of suppression was not something that slave owners were ashamed of. In fact, in Soul By Soul, Johnson shows that control over slaves was a form of masculine expression, and the more fully one could dominate the lives of their slaves, the more capable a man they were viewed by other whites to be. To that end, beating slaves in public and other unsightly acts would be considered a failure of masculine control, because a man in control would be able to keep their slaves in order out in public and confine disciplining them to a private setting. In other words, he’d be able to politely hide their humanity better. The a veneer of elegance was a pervasive ideal in the slave-owning south probably because the reality of a society built on slaves is unpleasant enough that nobody wanted to bring it up or be reminded of it.
Freedom, as Americans in the antebellum south imagined it, was not contradicted by slavery; slavery was its core. Slavery provided the free labor by which such prosperous freedom was made possible in the first place, and it was not hidden in popular culture but rather embraced by it, appropriated into it. Slave owners thought they could improve their very selves through the ownership of slaves. It was obvious to American whites in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that the freedom in their country relied on slavery remaining an institution.
The third verse of the Star-Spangled Banner disparages slaves joining the British not only for fighting against the colonists, but because joining the British was an action that affirmed their humanity. Enslaved blacks only joined the British to try and win their freedom, which was an affront to their objectification, which was the foundation of white American freedom.
If we look at that verse in the national anthem with the lens that African-American History offers us, we can understand how racially unjust our country is. That lens can also illuminate how African-Americans have influenced our modern understanding of freedom. I think it’s fair to say that our understanding of freedom being all-encompassing and racially-just exists today only because of the challenges the enslaved made on the “freedom” America was founded on.