Brass Lamp to Sherman Logan: "The information is supposedly extracted from census records, but the problems are; one, there is no such thing as familial slave ownership (as evidenced by probate and inheritance records in which slaves are treated in the same fashion as the usual sort of individual property) and no such thing as a "slave-owning family" to be counted..."
Link to slave-owning family statistics.
Understanding the reality behind this issue is key to understanding why the Confederacy first started and then lost the Civil War.
Most important to understand is the difference in slave-owning families in Border States (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky & Missouri) = circa 15%, versus Upper South (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas) = circa 25%, versus Deep South (South Carolina through Texas) = circa 40%.
These numbers are based on average family sizes of only four members = husband (owner), wife and two children -- clearly an overly restricted estimate of Southern families.
These numbers alone help explain why the Deep South (40%) was eager to secede and go to war to defend slavery, while Upper South states (25%) required that war's forcing them to chose sides, and Border States (15%) all refused to join the rebellion.
The absence of slave ownership also explains why large sections of some Confederate States -- western Virginia, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina -- remained hot-beds of Union loyalists throughout the war.
Bottom line: any claim that only a small percentage of whites owned slaves is totally bogus for the Deep South, somewhat true for the Upper South and totally true for Border States.
Oh, I agree, obviously.
I just get tired of arguing the history with those who refuse to accept it. Even claiming that the “families” in question are extended families or clans.
I believe the census actually did not inquire into blood relationships, so the “families” in these statistics are actually households.
The 1860 census shows 32M individuals in USA and 5.2M households, giving an average household size of 6 people.
This obviously gets seriously screwed up by whatever definition of household they may have used. For instance, in the South was a 200 slave plantation considered a single household? Or was each slave cabin counted as one? I’ve been unable to locate any definitions.
But the 6 person per household doesn’t seem unreasonable as an average, and when multiplied out it eliminates the discrepancy between the 6% or whatever for slaveowners claimed by prosoutherners and the numbers you link to.
In modern parlance, we generally refer to a family as owning its home. In the patriarchal society of the time, title to land and slaves was generally held by the head of the family. The sons of a slaveowning family obviously benefited from the institution and thought of themselves as slaveowners, even though they may not have held legal title individually.
It's a nonsense term, linguistically, which refers to more acts of enslavement (as an grammatical transitive verb issuing from a subject) than incidents of enslavement (as a transitive verb directed toward a grammatical object). It's also a nonsense unit of measure from a method which detaches the performance of the act from the occurrence of the same act and which, mathematically, is not even a function of the number of people being held in slavery, as demonstrated by the fact that it creates varying numbers of slavers while the slaves remain the same in numbers and situation. The "slave-owning family" is a useless gauge of measure which is only being used to conflate the participation rate to some more desirable figure.
If I really had it out for Washington state residents and wanted to shame them with their depravity, I could cheaply quadruple the frequency of cannibalism by denouncing them in terms of "cannibal bridge clubs".