Slaves were indeed "property" by law, but to reduce the human element of daily pre-Emancipation black-white relations to "owner and property" is a reduction to the absurd.

Most Southerners, by the way, couldn't afford to buy or maintain even one slave.

The stereotypical plantation with a "big house" and fifty or a hundred slaves was not terribly common, though Wade Hampton of South Carolina, believed to be the richest man in America in 1861, had hundreds of slaves.