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By Jove, you’ve cracked the case Kalamata. Or maybe not.

State Total-Pop. Slaves %of slave owning families
Georgia 82,548 29,264 34.5
North Carolina 395,005 100,783 25.5
South Carolina 249,073 107,094 43.0
Virginia 747,550 292,627 39.1

This also doesn’t account for all the people involved in the slave business that might not of owned slaves. Overseers, auctioneers, etc.

It appears that slavery was deeply entrenched in the southern states.

Don't be fooled by numbers from big-government-progressive Soros-bots. This is from a book by John Franklin Hope:

"The work of slaves was primarily agricultural. It is estimated that in 1850 only 400,000 slaves lived in towns and cities, whereas approximately 2.8 million worked on farms and plantations. Nor does the large slave population mean that the majority of southern whites owned slaves. In 1860 there were only 384,884 slave owners, out of a total white population of 8 million. Fully three-fourths of the white people of the South had neither slaves nor an immediate economic interest in the maintenance of slavery or the plantation system. Most slaveholders in 1860 were small farmers with five slaves or less. Fully 338,000 owners, or 88 percent of all masters of slaves in 1860, held less than twenty slaves. However, most slaves tended to be on farm units with larger holdings. This concentration of wealth in slaves in the hands of a small percentage of white southerners meant that more than 50 percent of all slaves lived on plantations with holdings in excess of twenty slaves, and at least 25 percent of slaves lived on plantations with holdings in excess of fifty in 1860."
"This concentration of slaves in the hands of the relatively few inevitably resulted in the bulk of staple crops being produced on the large plantations, the owners of which also dominated the political and economic thinking of the entire South. The tremendous labor productivity of the large plantations provided the slave-owning gentry with wealth and influence out of proportion to their number. In 1860 the southern states produced 5,387,000 bales of cotton. Of that total, more than 3.5 million bales were produced in just four states – Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia. It is no accident that these same states were also at the top of the list in the number of large slaveholders. Of the states with individual holdings of more than twenty slaves, Mississippi led (just as it did in the productivity of cotton), followed by Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia. The great majority of agricultural slaves grew cotton, while the remainder grew such staple crops as tobacco, rice, and sugarcane. The cotton farm or plantation was, therefore, the typical locale of the slave."
[Franklin & Higginbotham, "From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans." McGraw-Hill, 2011, p.140]

No matter how you squeeze the numbers, only a small percentage in the South benefitted from slavery, according to both Franklin and Fleming.

So, why did the Southerners hate the Yankees? The same reason they despise the Yankees of today: Yankees are, as a rule, sanctimonious busybodies (my wife and I excepted :)

I didn't understand the significance of the term "Damn Yankees" until my wife and I retired to the South. It was then I learned that, to a Southerner, a "Yankee comes to visit; a Damn Yankee stays."

Mr. Kalamata

It appears that slavery was deeply entrenched in the southern states.

Which it would have remained had these states continued being part of the Union.

OIFVeteran: "It appears that slavery was deeply entrenched in the southern states."

In some, not so much in others.
For starters, there were large regions of every southern state with few to no slaves.
These regions first voted against secession then later supplied thousands of troops to the Union army.

Second, both slaves and slave ownership was highest in the Deep South -- around 50% of families in South Carolina and Mississippi -- then fell in further North states.
Upper South states like Virginia & Tennessee averaged about 1/4 slaveholding families and Border States like Maryland & Missouri about 1/8.

Bottom line: there was a critical mass of slaveholding families needed in 1861 for a state to vote on secession.
Before Fort Sumter that was roughly 1/3 of families.
After Fort Sumter it fell to about 1/4 of families.

The given statistics are from J.F. Epperson on his site here. It is listed as Selected Statistics on Slavery at this link.

Methodology was "The figures given here are the percentage of slave-owning families as a fraction of total free households in the state." This is much like measuring velocity in furlongs per fortnight.

The data was taken from a now-inactive census archive site at the University of Virginia, but equivalent data may be found here.

The new link is:

http://www.civil-war.net/pages/1860_census.html?fref=gc

which redirects to

https://thegunzone.com/gun-reviews/

For actual 1860 census statistics see:

https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1864/dec/1860a.html

At the link are available, each as a seperate publication:

1860 Census: Population of the United States

1860 Census: Agriculture of the United States

1860 Census: Manufactures of the United States

1860 Census: Statistics of the United States

In the 1860 Agriculture Report, Slave Statistics appears a section entitled Recapitulation.

In the 1860 Population Report, appears a section entiled Recapitulation of the Tables of Population, Nativity, and Occupation. No slave statistics.

SLAVEHOLDER STATISTICS - 1860 CENSUS DATA

STATE	TOTAL POPULATION	# SLAVEHOLDERS	Families	% SLAVEHOLDERS	Fam size
AL	964,201	33,730	96,603	3.50%	8.86
AR	435,450	11,481	57,244	2.64%	7.61
FL	140,424	5,152	15,090	3.67%	9.31
GA	1,057,286	41,084	109,919	3.89%	9.62
LA	708,002	22,003	74,725	3.11%	9.47
MS	791,305	30,943	63,015	3.91%	12.56
NC	992,622	34,658	125090	3.49%	7.94
SC	703,708	26,701	58,642	3.79%	12.00
TN	1,109,801	36,844	149,335	3.32%	7.43
TX	604,215	21,878	76,781	3.62%	7.92
VA	1,596,318	52,128	201,523	3.27%	7.92

TOTAL:	9,103,332	316,602	1,027,967	3.31%	8.86

STATE	TOTAL POPULATION	# SLAVEHOLDERS	Families	% SLAVEHOLDERS	Fam size
DE	112,216	587	18,966	0.52%	5.92
KY	1,155,684	38,645	166,321	3.34%	6.95
MD	687,049	13,783	110,278	2.01%	6.23
MO	1,182,012	24,320	192,073	2.06%	6.15

TOTAL:	3,136,961	77,335	487,638	2.47%	6.43