Even a lot of more liberal historians like The Cynical Historian and Atun-Shei Films on Youtube admit that the bad treatment of slaves in media depicting the slavery era South is highly exaggerated. There were actually laws against gratuitous slave abuse, on top of it being really dumb to put your workforce out of commission for days on end or permanently handicap them.
Which makes sense when you look at the past few thousand years of slavery and see how the basic logic of "dont cripple your workforce and dont give them the motivation to murder you in your sleep" is reflected in pretty much every legal system of the ancient-early modern world regarding slavery and systems equivalent to slavery.
Even the cruellest and most sadistic and uncaring of slave owners has a very obvious and extremely tangible motivation to keep his workforce halfway healthy and halfway happy enough to ensure they wind up turning a profit and that vast amounts of money and blood dont have to be spent in keeping them from snapping and trying to kill your whole family. They couldnt just murder their entire workforce every few months, even if they could get away with it, since they would have to buy a new rota of slaves to replace them which would quickly bankrupt even the richest plantation owner.
Anne-frankly given how the Southern leadership/myth makers among the planter class had a major boner for the romanticised medieval aesthetics of "aristocracy and noble knights" it would have been an expected part of the package for any true gentleman wanting a seat at the ultimate proverbial country club to treat his proverbial peasants with chivalry and noblesse oblige.
The problem the southern slaver aristocracy faced was that while this mindset of a divinely ordained and unchangeable blood-bondage hierarchy had been the norm for all of human history until recently and was still the norm in much of the world, it had been decidedly out of fashion in the anglosphere for quite some time now due to the general viewpoint of it being both entirely unnecessary and due to it being too much of a religious and philosophical contradiction even for 19th century morality among nations which prided themselves on liberty and breaking old orders through reform and revolution, though obviously this had a hefty truckload of hypocrisy given the policies of imperialism/expansionism and the extremely poor state of workers rights and protections at the time.
Honestly though, the only difference between the confederacy and the countless other cultures/subcultures that had the crap kicked out of them during the anti-slavery crusades during the mid 1800s was that it was the only one that both aggressively and militarily attempted to maintain explicit slavery and was also white and english speaking, wheras the myriad of African and Arab kingdoms and other American nations like Brazil and various Native tribes which also attempted to violently resist abolition are not particularly helpful for any modern "MUH SLAVERHOLOCAUST" narrative.
I'm not saying that slavery was sunshine and daisies, but if I had the choice between being a slave in the Antebellum South or a Jew in Nazi Germany, it would be a no brainer. Hell, I'd take being a slave in the South over being a Kulak in the Soviet Union from 1929-32 too, but of course the Soviet Union always gets a pass for the shit it did. To say nothing of Turkey, Rwanda, etc.
Yeah, as much criticism the ultra-reactionary ultra-traditionalist social orders of states like southern burgerland/imperial russia/imperial china/imperial germany deservedly get for, among
many things, their long-standing instituted bigotry and traditionally punitive policies on minority groups, these unfair societal codes atleast gave their victims a chance at continuing to eke out an existence indefinitely so long as they toed the line, despite existing in societies whose leadership, academia, and media, not to mention anyone they influence, see them as unwanted and subhuman and inherently dangerous.
When you introduce a self proclaimed revolutionary leadership that goes out of its way to burn away all these old social contracts and traditional rules and codes of conduct, then these minority groups have absolutely zero protection from a population and leadership that despises them, and it wont take long before elements of the leadership decide to get maximum goodboypoints by orchestrating shit a thousand times worse than anything that came before, as they are no longer restrained by the laws and social niceties of the past
