Yes, this is true. Before history texts were revised by victimology revisionists, they did portray slavery as less awful than we think of it today. And backed it up with facts and figures. I purchased a terrific old textbook at eBay and this is what it said:
A History of the South
Fourth Edition, Alfred A. Knopf 1947, 1953, 1963, 1972
by Francis Butler Simkins and Charles Pierce Roland
P. 125-126
BEGIN QUOTE: Abolitionist assertions that the bondsmen were frequently inadequately clothed, underfed, and driven to death are economically unreasonable. Masters wished to preserve the health and life of their slaves because a sick Negro was a liability and a dead Negro was worth nothing. A rough plenty prevailed on the average plantation. “The best preventive of theft is plenty of pork,” was the advice of a Virginian.
Slaves probably fared as well in the enjoyment of the necessities of life as did most of the free laborers of the country. One of the most respected of all Northern critics of slavery, Frederick Law Olmsted, wrote that the Southern bondsmen lived in quarters quite as adequate as those of most mill or mine workers elsewhere, and that the slaves were perhaps the best fed “proletarian class” in the world. He also testified that they worked less than did free laborers.
Incomplete statistics reveal that the slaves averaged somewhat higher sickness and death rates per thousand than did Southern whites as a whole. But the slaves were from all indications as healthy and long-lived as white common laborers in the United States before the Civil War. It was general knowledge at the time in Louisiana that the slaves were better off in these respects than were the thousands of Irish immigrant laborers engaged in clearing land and digging drainage canals on the sugar plantations. The planters were reluctant to commit their expensive chattels to this dangerous work, but preferred to hire free laborers, whose loss by death, sickness, or injury cost nothing. A careful study of the figures on a group of 875 plantation slaves whose records are preserved indicates their average life expectancy at the time of birth to have been longer than that of the general population of such cities as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia during the same period. An authority on urban slavery concludes that the medical care, health, and welfare of slaves in Southern cities were superior to the care, health, and welfare of the free Negroes; and the outstanding work on the life of Negroes in the North at this time shows that they fared no better in such matters than did free blacks in the land of slavery. END QUOTE
Well, we can't have that kind of information circulating now, can we?
But those texts you praise were also written by "revisionists" who strove to make slavery look like less of a problem than it was taken to be by the Civil War generation. It shouldn't be assumed that early 20th century Southern historians gave a true, "unrevised" view of slavery or that distortion or bias only came later.
as to the author's assertion about the movie, he missed the most important aspect.....that in reality few white Southerners had slaves period....most people were poor and couldn't afford them so in that respect GWTW was truly just pulp....
Circulate it as you will but you cannot understand what it says without some analysis. There is nothing there which can contradict the FACT that slaves were kept in a state of terror and watched at all times for fear they would escape North. Yes, escape to that hell hole your quote describes. Now why would that be the greatest threat to the Slavers if they treated their chattel so well? Surely they wouldn't leave such a paradise.
Southern society was geared to control of the slaves and to that end it repressed the slave's ability to educate himself and become a full man. This was a TOTALLY different form of slavery than that described earlier in ancient Greece and Rome where the slave was often more educated than the master.
Uncles Tom's Cabin brought the reality of slavery home to millions in the North but was too explosive for the Southern states to allow it to circulate freely. While the character of Simon Legree may not have been an accurate representation of overseers even GWTW has characters like him in it.
This was a degenerate economic system which created a social and cultural anchor on the USA and was in complete contradiction to the meaning of America. Had it not been destroyed the Nation would have been.