When I was growing up we had one car titled in my father's name. So legally speaking only 25% of the family had a car. But all the people in the family received benefit from his car ownership.
Same with slavery. Maybe 4.8% of the people in the South owned slaves. But those people had spouses and children who all gained from that person owning the slave. So the better statistic for determining how important slavery was is to compare the total number of slave owners with the total number of families shown in the census. And if you look at it that way then throughout the South somewhere between one-quarter and one-fifth of all families were slaveowners. In states like Mississippi it approached 50%.
Yours is a very good counter argument for what he has to say. My opinion is that slave owners were more often thought as slave owning families. Even extended families. Such as the (imaginary) Smith family with the large cotton plantation. With 12 Smiths living on the property along with 200 slaves, many with families themselves
How many saw all of that had gained and more wiped out by the Civil War, along with those who had never owned slaves?
“Same with slavery. Maybe 4.8% of the people in the South owned slaves. But those people had spouses and children who all gained from that person owning the slave.”
No, they didn’t. Ridiculous conclusion.
“Same with slavery. Maybe 4.8% of the people in the South owned slaves. But those people had spouses and children who all gained from that person owning the slave.”
We don’t benefit from illegal aliens or foreigners holding job in the US today no more than anyone other than the slave holder benefitted from a slave.
Same with slavery. Maybe 4.8% of the people in the South owned slaves. But those people had spouses and children who all gained from that person owning the slave.
And what percentage of the Clothes wearing North benefited from purchasing products from the South?
What percentage of the North sold their own slaves in the South rather than take the loss when their state went Abolitionist?
What was the profits to the North Eastern Ship Building Industry which built the slave ships? How much value did the 13 Colonists get out of their slaves when they declared Independence?
You leave out a lot of calculations in your simplistic analysis.
I don’t know about each state but:
in Massachusetts, a woman didn’t become a legal heir of her husband until around 1904. Before that a man’s children inherited his property when he died.