Edited sentence: During the period of slavery blacks and whites mingled together not in terms of social equality, but in very extended and constant social discourse.George T.In the historiographic tradition that began with Ulrich Bonnell Phillip's American Negro slavery (1918) slavery is described as a lenient institution in which harsh corporal punishment of slaves was rare.It was good business practice to care for and seek to make most profitable use of the slaves particularly because abusive treatment would have caused expenses to the shareholders themselves.The Nobel economist Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman argue in their 1974 book that the material conditions under which the slaves lived and worked compared favorably to those of free workers in the agriculture and industry of the time.This is in stark contrast to the Reconstruction era.Thus, slavery was not a physically harsh, labor-degrading system.Treatment of slaves is a matter of dispute.Winston tells that in almost every household the children of the two races played and frolicked together, or hunted, fished or swam together in the fields, streams and forest