In 1860 What Percentage of Southern White Families Were in the Slaveowning Class
What do you recall when y'all hear "half dozen%"?
Chances are, if you're interested in the Civil War or Ceremonious War retentiveness, you may recognize 6% as the number of white Southerners who endemic slaves in 1860 (some say 5%. Whatever). In many apologetic texts, this number magically morphs into six% of Confederate soldiers (or fewer!). Nevermind that recent scholarship puts the number of Amalgamated soldiers who lived in slaveowning families at well over a third.
This statistic is always dragged out to "prove" that the average Confederate soldier was admittedly not fighting to preserve slavery. It's not merely the crazies who argue that very few Confederate soldiers were slaveowners — this stat is pretty well accepted past people who are not inveterate Lost Causers. "[T]he vast bulk of Amalgamated soldiers did not ain a unmarried slave," writes Robert Mackey of the Huffington Post "and many from the well-nigh rural areas had never even seen a blackness homo or adult female in their lives."
Where did everybody get this number?
It seems that the statement that minuscule numbers of Southerners were slave owners come from sophisticated mathematical formulas that carve up the number of slaveowners on the 1860 Census (316,632 in the xi Confederate states) past the total population of white Southerners (5,447,220 in the CSA). That gets you lot 5.8%.
I am no math genius, but there seems to be a trouble here. The 1860 Slave Schedule lists slaves under the name of the legal owner, who is generally a man and the head of a household. The women and children living in the household were not legal slaveowners, but their inclusion in the data dilutes the percent of white Southerners who owned slaves to the point of applesauce. Using similar logic, y'all could "show" that fewer than half of Americans own cars.
I spent some time looking over the 1860 census data at UVA'due south wonderful demography website and on the library edition of Ancestry.com. Here are some of my preliminary findings:
1. Over half of all white Southerners were under the age of 20.
Of the five.4 meg white Southerners in 1860, 30% were under the age of ten and another 23% were between 10 and nineteen years of age. Very few of these children owned slaves. Those who did were by and large nether the protection of a guardian who would have been listed in the census as the slave owner.
2. Over 30% of Southern households had slaves.*
*Maybe. I came up with these percentages past dividing the number of slaveowners by the number of households in each land. It is entirely possible that a household could have more than than one slaveowner listed in the Slave Schedule, just my preliminary readings of that certificate bespeak that that's pretty rare. These percentages should not be interpreted as a random sample of households, but as rough numbers. My real point here is not that these numbers are perfect, but that 6% is way, fashion off.
3. The 1860 slave census both overcounts and undercounts slave owners.
The 1860 Slave Schedule overcounts some slaveowners (those with many slaves in more than ane county). However, it also undercounts slaveowners and those living in slaveowning households. For case, a woman who brings personal attendants with her to her husband's abode at marriage is a slaveowner, but she is unlikely to be listed as i on the census. Similarly, the guardians of slaveowning minors (or unrelated women) are often listed every bit the owners on the census, as in the example of William G. Allen of Clarke Co., Alabama:
When the people indexing the census counted this entry, did they count it as i slaveowner? Ii? Three?
4. The 6% effigy obscures the number of white Southerners who lived in slaveowning families. Duh.
Let's accept the instance of William C. Riddle of Washington Co., Georgia. Riddle owned 92 slaves. On the 1860 Slave Schedule, he is the only member of his household listed as an "owner." This household also included Riddle's wife, their five children, and 2 26-yr-old male tutors.
It may be technically true that only 11% of the whites in the Riddle household were slaveowners, simply that number does not reflect the historical reality. Lilliputian John Riddle, historic period 10, owned no slaves, but he expected to inherit them when he grew up, as did his 4 sisters. Thomas Evans and James Griffen, the two tutors, endemic no slaves, only their jobs depended on the Riddle family's continued prosperity. I dubiety that they fabricated their own beds or saddled their own horses. Should they be counted as people who did non take a direct connection to slavery? What about David Clark, the 21-year-old who owned no slaves, but whose occupation is listed as "overseer" in the household of Rufus Rex of Haywood, Tennessee? What most Robert Martin'southward 5 non-slaveowning sons (ages 17, 15, xiii, 10, and viii) of Abbeville, Southward Carolina?
In 1901, Samuel French wrote, "allow information technology be known that the Confederate regular army was not an army of slave owners." Confederate apologists nigh and far take taken that tidbit and run with it. It turns out non to be entirely true. Some will say that the 37% quoted by Joseph Glatthaar in General Lee's Army is nevertheless pocket-size, only I would point out to them that Glatthaar is only talking about soldiers who "either owned slaves themselves, or the parents or family unit members with whom they resided in 1860 owned slaves" (Glatthaar, 468). I'm not certain whether he includes those tutors and overseers, who were not family members in their 1860 households. In whatsoever event, information technology is a logical fallacy to conclude that just because someone didn't ain slaves he neither aspired to buying nor supported the slave system. For more on that, see Masters of Modest Worlds on the importance of white male mastery over the private household and dependents. The slave organisation upheld the independence of all white men, whether they endemic slaves or not, and all had a vested interest in keeping it up and running.
P.S. Too, I know that this is going to come up up, so I'll nip it in the bud. Aye, some women and some free African-Americans owned slaves. Their numbers don't alter my conclusions. Since women who are listed every bit slaveowners are likely to be heads of households, their inclusion doesn't change the percentages listed in function 2. The number of black slaveowners is very small, certainly besides pocket-sized for it to make sense that 2 of the offset iv Google hits for "Confederate slave owner" are defended to the subject. From these preliminary forays into the records, I'd say women make up fewer than 10% of slaveowners (that'due south an educated guess, not a quote-worthy number) and the largest estimate of blackness slaveowners I've ever seen is 5,000. Maybe for my adjacent project I'll investigate those numbers. After all, in that location were fewer than 150 black slaveowners in Charleston in 1860. I've seen the number 3,000 quoted for Louisiana, but the slave schedule makes me a little skeptical.
Wait at this page from Bernard Co., Louisiana (click to enlarge). There are two names in the "Name of Slave Possessor" column that belong to black men — "Big James slave" and "Charles slave." They are both listed as being 100+-year-old fugitives who are listed on the terminal line along with the total number of slave houses on the plantation. I don't call back they were really slaveowners, but that'southward how they're listed. How were these two men counted by the indexers? It's obvious that there were some blackness slaveowners, but I wonder well-nigh the numbers when the census contains ambiguous entries such every bit these.
Source: http://www.vastpublicindifference.com/2008/07/six-percent.html
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