How can you say that? The one guy set her up for the foreseeable future with a home and light work. If we offer foster parents and a sheltered workshop for a disabled 14-year-old today, are our emotions called into question? Isn't that the right thing? If someone does it with no government subsidies, isn't he doing even better?
That's why I bring up "crippled by a guy." We're not told what happened to the overseer and if the law was used against him as much as possible or if he was praised and kept on. There's no way to judge without that information.
Are people assuming overseers were never punished? You can bet they were, when they were unnecessarily losing value for their employers. The law was set up for that, and it was also set up for compassion in the worst cases. Maybe not as strict as modern laws, but I wonder if there's a basic misunderstanding about slave era laws?
The bottom line is we have no way of knowing if the available laws were used against the overseer or not. There was a famous (infamous) trial geographically close and probably within 20 years, where an overseer named Sledd whipped a slave to death. He only got two years in the penitentiary, but he did get two years. Edited to add:
http://rootdig.blogspot.com/2012/09/which-sledd-killed-slave-in-1811.html
I guess he didn't notice all those slave owners in New York and Massachusetts, and what they did? James Birney? The Quakers who quietly got rid of their slaves, then finally moved out of slave states for their safety? Seems a tautalogy: if a slave owner is heartless, then that proves slave owners were heartless. If a slave owner feels guilty and goes outside the system to become anti-slavery, then that shows anti-slavery people were compassionate.