The Myth of the Benevolent Slave Owner

8 min readMay 2, 2021

For years, I’ve had some people tell me that not all slave owners were evil and that some were even acting in the best interests of their slaves. Others admitted that their ancestors did own slaves, but that they treated them like family.

Here’s a quote from my documentary “In God We Trust?” where I interviewed a woman wearing a confederate flag necklace:

Woman: “Some of those people that were brought into slavery were treated better than they were in their home country. Not everybody was mean to their slaves . . . There were more good slave owners than bad.”

Me — “So they should’ve been thankful?”

Woman — “In some instances yes. The good landowners, the good Southerners that did have slaves, for the most part, were better to them than what they had in Africa or what they had at home. But you always hear the bad side of it. You never hear the good side of it. I don’t know. Slavery was abolished, however, most of the slaves stayed South. Not all of them went up North . . .”

Me — “So you’re saying the fact that they stayed meant they were happy?”

Woman (nodding) — “Happy.”

Here’s a response I got on Facebook a couple of days ago after posting my recent story about Jefferson and Sally Hemmings.

FB comment: “As a white descendant of North Carolinian land owners who probably owned slaves, I feel for all those who suffer injustice today. I do have one question though, in response to your interesting and brilliantly-written story: Due to the times in which Jefferson lived, why are some slave-owners not seen as benevolent — giving needed homes to those who, by reason of their color of skin, were not “allowed” by society-at-large to gain other ways to living? How does one man change an entire system? It’s easy to judge his motives from outward appearances and the perspective of time, but I seriously doubt we understand all the facets of what really was going on. Scientists and historians can only surmise, and some do it with a very one-sided “agenda” or perspective, which is generally negative toward one side and positive toward another. Human interaction is more complex than this, in my humble opinion. I say these things as someone who has experienced life-long discrimination for a decision I made a long time ago, and onto which I am still holding.”

Here’s my response to this idea of the benevolent slave owner:

The reason I don’t feel any slave owner can be seen as benevolent no matter how well they treated their slaves is because of the simple fact that the slave had no choice in the matter.

Jefferson, for example, could have freed all his slaves and offered them the choice to stay in their jobs under exactly the same conditions as they already had. If he’d truly been doing them a favor, they would have stayed.

After all, it wasn’t against the law to free one’s slaves. Some slave-owners did free their slaves and paid them a wage or split profits with them, etc. Jefferson, and the vast majority of slave owners, did not do this. So, they lose the right to say they were benevolent because of the very fact of remaining slave-owners and denying their “property” the right to decide if they were being treated benevolently or not.

Not to mention the fact that Jefferson was known to be particularly harsh with ordering physical punishment in the form of whippings to slaves that weren’t working as hard as he thought they should. Even if he hadn’t done this, just the fact that he had the right to whip or even kill any slave he owned without any legal sanction means that a slave knew this was a possibility if they stepped out of line.

Charles Darwin wrote this on his famed voyage around the world in the HMS Beagle

in 1832 about an exchange with Captain FitzRoy while off the coast of Brazil:

“[Fitzroy] defended and praised slavery, which I abominated, and told me that he had just visited a great slave-owner, who had called up many of his slaves and asked them whether they were happy, and whether they wished to be free, and all answered ‘No.’ I then asked him, perhaps with a sneer, whether he thought that the answers of slaves, in the presence of their master was worth anything. This made him excessively angry … I thought that I should have been compelled to leave the ship … But after a few hours Fitz-Roy showed his usual magnanimity … with an apology and a request that I would continue to live with him.”

Darwin and FitzRoy’s relationship remained strained for the rest of the voyage.

This highlights the fact that some slave owners may have convinced themselves of their own benevolence because their slaves wouldn’t dare tell them they were unhappy. Would you tell someone who could have you legally whipped or even killed that they were less-than-great dudes?

However, George Washington couldn’t fall back on even this self-delusional defense. He was the richest man in America at the time of the Revolution, so certainly could have freed all his slaves at any time and offered them wages to remain in their jobs. But the clearest example of Washington’s immorality is the fact that Washington hunted one of his wife’s escaped slave named Ona Judge for decades, even to the point of hiring bounty hunters to abduct her from a free state where slavery had been outlawed.

Ona Judge just barely escaped time and again by moving from city to city and lived for decades in terror of being captured and returned to his bondage.

Did Jefferson ever speak against the laws allowing slaves to be hunted down and brought back to their “owners”? Not that I know of, and I’ve read a lot about him. You might say that it would have been politically impossible to pass such a law if he did speak out against the practice, but is that a moral defense to not even say that it was wrong? If slaves were allowed to simply walk away from their owners without consequence, slavery would have ended instantly, by definition, since the legal force to keep someone from walking away from their owner is what slavery means.

The best you can say is that Jefferson was a white supremacist who looked at blacks as so inferior that they were like a wild beast that needed to be on a leash or in a cage for their own good and the good of more responsible creatures. This is very likely what Jefferson did believe, as illustrated by his journal writings and his actions.

But even that is no real defense, since there was plenty of evidence by that time to show this was false. Many white abolitionists offered examples of escaped blacks that had been educated and become upstanding and even brilliant citizens. The reason why Jefferson ignored this (even if subconsciously) is because it would have destroyed the entire foundation of his wealth and standard of high living.

Though it would only become officially illegal to teach slaves in most Southern states to read after the 1831 slave revolt led by Nat Turner, it had long been frowned upon for an owner to allow such a thing. Which shows that slaveholders were aware that a slave could learn to read and write, but chose not to educate them because it increased the danger of them running away.

By not freeing their slaves and making them paid workers on their farms or in their homes, the slave children automatically become their master’s property with a monetary value from the moment of their birth, which made it even harder to free them if their master accrued debts later in their lives — as Jefferson did.

When a bankrupt master died, the slaves would be auctioned off to pay the debts — resulting in black families being torn asunder and scattered — as happened when Jefferson died. Had Jefferson freed his slaves in the beginning before his mismanagement and profligate spending reddened his finances, the black children would have been born free by default and ineligible to be sold back into slavery to creditors of their “benevolent” dead employer.

Did Jefferson not care what evil new master these people might end up with after his death? Apparently not. The only slaves he freed in his Will were his own children with Sally Hemmings, though he denied any of them were his children, of course. What a stand-up Founding Father!

The idea that some slave owners were doing a slave a favor by owning them and treating them “benevolently” is one of those long-repeated falsehoods that slave holders and their descendants use to rationalize away the true evil of owning another human being. It’s one of those things I hear over and over and over by people who tell me that their ancestors owned slaves, but were very good to their slaves.

Since my ancestor Robert Burdick was one of the early founders of Rhode Island, I have no doubt that in that long line of my own ancestors there are several who owned slaves, and I feel the same about them as I do about all slave owners. I inherited my white privilege without any effort at birth and have benefited from the wealth slaves created in this nation — as did some of my immigrant ancestors from Italy who came here even after the Civil War. I admit this, and I accept that I have a responsibility to help those who suffer now because of this legacy of racism that continued long after slavery ended, and still continues to this day.

I know it’s hard for us to admit that people are complex and may be good in one aspect and tragically ignorant and immoral in another aspect, but that’s what it means to be human. As Getie says in my “Jefferson was a Slave-F…ker” story, it’s a lot easier to think that people are either all good or all evil, but that’s just not the case. But pretending that slavery was anything but evil, even if some of the people doing it were less evil than others, will only keep us as a society from facing this fact and moving forward to help those who still suffer from the generational inheritance of this evil.

So that’s why Jefferson — or any slave-owner — cannot be seen as benevolent. Period.