>Depends on your color, of course.
>How many slaves would you own?
What about slave-holders who were, themselves, black?
See:
http://www.uwec.edu/Geography/Ivogeler/w188/south/charles/charles3.htm
http://americancivilwar.com/authors/black_slaveowners.htm
http://www.blackinformant.com/uncategorized/more-buried-history-black-slave-owners-in-the-us
Same question then, how many would they own?
According to federal census reports, on June 1, 1860 there were nearly 4.5 million Negroes in the United States, with fewer than four million of them living in the southern slaveholding states. Of the blacks residing in the South, 261,988 were not slaves. Of this number, 10,689 lived in New Orleans. The country's leading African American historian, Duke University professor John Hope Franklin, records that in New Orleans over 3,000 free Negroes owned slaves, or 28 percent of the free Negroes in that city.
The 1860 census available on line shows 10,940 free blacks in Orleans Parish in 1860. According to your story, 3000 of them owned slaves. Now 4700 of those 10,000 were under 19 so the chances of them owning slaves was nil. That means that of the 6000 remaining, 3000 of them were slave owners. But it's likely that most of those remaining free black men and women were married so that would mean that of about 3000 married black couples in New Orleans all of them owned slaves. Does that make any sense at all to you?
The census also states that there were only 4187 slave owners in Orleans Parish out of a total free population of 160,00. So out of 6000 free black adults we're supposed to believe half owned slaves. But out of approximately 100,000 free white adults only 1187 owned slaves. Again, does that make the slightest bit of sense to you?
Feel free to check my math. Link