Replies

FLT-bird: "How odd that your numbers say the exact opposite of what Northern Newspapers were saying...and what Southern political leaders were saying...and what Southern commentators had been saying...and what tax expert Charles Adams said.
How convenient your numbers are for your argument.
Almost as if they were complete and utter BS."

And so you've claimed, but where are actual data to support your claims?
I've never seen them.

The source of my numbers is here: John van Deusen’s 1928 book, Economic bases of Disunion in South Carolina.
Van Deusen's numbers were reported here.

FLT-bird: "Ah so even when a political leader was from the North and was elected by Northern voters, if he in any way cooperated or compromised with Southerners he was of course a "doughface" and was "controlled" by Southerners. ROTF!
You actually seem to believe this crap."

And still, typical of your Democrat mind-set, which values narrative over everything else, when presented with actual facts, all you can do is handwave them away.

The truth about "Doughfaces" is that the term was coined by Virginia Senator John Randolph, circa 1820, as a sign of disrespect for Northerners eager to do what Randolph wanted them to do.
At that time, it was the Missouri Compromise, which passed due to the support of Northern Democratic "Doughfaces".
The term caught-on and was used up until 1861 to describe Northerners like Democrat Presidents Pierce and Buchanan.

Over the years from 1820 to 1861 there were hundreds of Northern Democrat Doughfaces in Congress who helped Southerners pass their major agenda items.

So handwave away and ignore all you want, it's still a fact.

FLT-bird: "Where someone is born is pretty much meaningless.
Hell, Woodrow Wilson was born in Virginia.
Its where a politician was raised and where he worked and where he was elected that matters.
Clay was from a border state.
Davis was a Southerner.
Lincoln was a Northerner."

There were many Southerners.

Wilson was born and raised in the South, as was Clay.
Wilson's family owned slaves, Clay was himself a slaveholder.
Lincoln's family was originally from Massachusetts and did not own slaves, so far as I know.
Another Southern slaveholder who supported protective tariffs and even some internal improvements was Democrat Andrew Jackson.
Even South Carolina's John C. Calhoun, when he was a Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican (until 1828), supported protective tariffs, internal improvements and the National Bank.
Plus, Whig Presidents Harrison, Tyler and Taylor were all Southern Virginia born slaveholders.

And yet again, my point is simply this: your suggestions that every Southerner before 1860 was a anti-American Neanderthal Democrat is simply false.
In fact, many Southerners were as patriotic and pro-American as our Southern Founders like Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe.

It's inconceivable to me why anyone would want to deny that.

FLT-bird: "and yet and yet, Southerners as a whole were staunchly opposed to the Tariff of Abominations once they saw how destructive it was to their economy.
Also, the Nullification Crisis was ended by a compromise.
The tariff was done away with and tariff rates were lowered dramatically.
South Carolina got what it wanted."

No, not all Southerners.
In Southern states the House vote was 17 for and 65 against the 1828 Tariff.
In Northern states the vote was 88 for and 29 against.
So, there were more Northerners opposed than there were Southerners for the tariff.
In 1828 the "Solid South" was not 100% solid.

And no, the rates were not immediately lowered dramatically and South Carolina did not soon get what it wanted.
Instead, five years later the 1833 Compromise Tariff began to reduce tariffs gradually back to their 1820 levels of around 20%.

What South Carolina wanted in 1830 was to secede and that couldn't happen because no other states were willing to join South Carolina over just the issue of tariffs.
What South Carolinians realized then was that in order to secede, they needed an issue strong enough to outrage all Southerners, and there was only one such issue -- slavery.

FLT-bird: "Of course they did not have the political power to stop the passage of the Morrill Tariff which they knew from experience was going to devastate their economy."

Southerners absolutely did stop Morrill in 1860, and could have stopped it in 1861, or at least forced a compromise, had not their election strategy been to split their majority Democrat party, making them two minority parties.
Yes, it's true, that as minorities, Southern Democrats would lose much of their power over Congress, but that was their choice.
Nobody forced Southern Democrats to split their majority party, and they had nobody but themselves to blame for the results.

FLT-bird: "The original Morrill tariff DOUBLED tariff rates.
It went on to more than TRIPLE tariff rates eventually."

That's a lie, and you need to stop lying, it's not that hard, you can easily look it up yourself.
The average rate under the Democrats' 1857 tariff was a low 17%.
The originial Morrill proposal returned those to the 1846 Walker Tariff rates of circa 26%.
That's a 50% increase, not double, much less triple.
And within those numbers, our largest imports -- wool, sugar, cotton & iron -- those increases were only 20% on average.

So there's no need for you to keep lying about this, just look the numbers up yourself.

Of course, the later war-time tariffs are totally irrelevant to this discussion.
Those rates were caused by the Confederacy and no Confederate ever paid those higher tariffs.

FLT-bird: "Lincoln orchestrated passage of the Corwin Amendment."

You have no evidence that Lincoln "orchestrated" anything.
The evidence we have clearly shows that New York Senator Seward led the Republican efforts, and that he was generally acting as a loose cannon, on his own.
In his 1st Inaugural, Lincoln said he'd not even seen the proposed amendment.

FLT-bird: "REPUBLICAN Senator Thomas Corwin wrote it.
REPUBLICAN William Seward supported it.
Lots of other REPUBLICANS supported it too."

Sure, but the majority of Republicans opposed Corwin, even with Seward's support for it.
100% of Democrats supported Corwin and it was signed by Democrat President Buchanan, not Lincoln.

FLT-bird: "Lincoln endorsed it in his all important first inaugural address.
That's the truth."

That's not the truth, and you can easily see this yourself if you simply imagine, today, some Republican politician saying in an interview, "I am not opposed to Donald Trump as our Presidential nominee".
Would you consider that a real endorsement??
Really??
I don't, but that's what Lincoln said about Corwin's Amendment.

FLT-bird: "Pure lie on your part as usual.
The protections of slavery in the Confederate Constitution were not more than those that existed in the US at the time with the sole provision that the Confederate government itself could not outlaw slavery.....ie the same thing the Corwin Amendment would have done in the US Constitution."

And yet again, you've seen the truth, but look the other way.
So here, yet again, is the list of explicit new protections for slavery in the new Confederate constitution (from post #170):

Article I Section 9(4): "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.[13]
The Confederate constitution explicitly says, "no... law impairing the right of property in negro slaves..."
Article IV Section 2(1) "The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired."[31]
The Confederate constitution explicitly claims a "right of transit and soujourn" with slaves.
Such purported "rights" are not found in the US Constitution, regardless of what Crazy Roger Tanney may have fantasized.
Article IV Section 3(3) "In all such [Confederate] territory, the institution of negro slavery as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress, and by the territorial government: and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories, shall have the right to take to such territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the states or territories of the Confederate states."[32]
The Confederate constitution explicitly makes slavery lawful in every Confederate territory.
The US Constitution did no such thing.
Article I Section 9(1): "The importation of Negroes of the African race from any foreign country, other than the slave-holding States or Territories of the United States of America, is hereby forbidden..."
The Confederate constitution made importing slaves from the United States lawful.
United States law, as directed by the Constitution, forbade importing slaves, period.

Given these significant increases in protection for slavery in the Confederate constitution, there is no way Confederate states could seriously contemplate returning to the Union.

FLT-bird: "He said it passed and he had no objections.
Of course in reality ole Abe was lying.
He had not only seen it, he had orchestrated it."

Or so you claim, and yet without a scrap of evidence to support your claims, here or elsewhere.

FLT-bird on slavery: "And yet of the 4 states that issued declarations of causes only one listed exclusively that even though none of the other grievances listed were unconstitutional while the Northern states' violation of the fugitive slave clause of the US Constitution actually was unconstitutional."

So here again is the breakdown of "Reasons for secession" documents:

"Reasons for Secession*" Documents before Fort Sumter

Reasons for Secession*	S. Carolina	Mississippi	Georgia	Texas	Rbt. Rhett	A. Stephens	AVERAGE OF 6
Historical context	41%	20%	23%	21%	20%	20%	24%
Slavery	20%	73%	56%	54%	35%	50%	48%
States' Rights	37%	3%	4%	15%	15%	10%	14%
Lincoln's election	2%	4%	4%	4%	5%	0%	3%
Economic issues**	0	0	15%	0%	25%	20%	10%
Military protection	0	0	0	6%	0%	0%	1%

* Alabama listed only slavery in its "whereas" reasons for secession.

** Economic issues include tariffs, "fishing smacks" and other alleged favoritism to Northerners in Federal spending.
(I've included Rhett's letter and Stephens' speech because they were highly influential in convincing other Southerners to vote for secession.)

On the Fugitive Slave Clause, all of the first four "Reasons for Secession" documents mention it, along with other slavery related issues, but, curiously, neither Rhett nor Stephens brought it up, though both did discuss slavery at length.

But most (not all) ignored the key fact about Fugitive Slaves -- at Southerners' insistence, the 1850 Compromise made Fugitive Slaves a matter of national, not states' responsibility.
The 1850 Compromise tasked Washington, not the states, to enforce its Fugitive Slave laws -- so any complaints about Fugitive Slaves in "Reasons for Secession" documents were totally misdirected and bogus.

FLT-bird (is it false that 94.33% were not slaveholders?): "No its not.
Its directly from the 1860 US Census....
...Your estimates are WAY too high and are based on the faulty assumption that there could only be one slave owner per family.
We know numerous examples of that not being true."

Noooo... the 1860 census says there were 393,975 slaveholders, which is 1.26% of the total population of 31,183,582.
That implies that 98.7% of Americans were not slaveholders.

Of course, virtually 100% of Northerners were not slaveholders, so if we just look at the Southern white population, it was 8,289,782, making non-slaveholders ~95%.

However, in 1860, according to the US census, the average family was about 5 people, meaning there were roughly 1,660,000 Southern white families.
If we assume only one slaveholder per family, then about 24% of families "owned" slaves -- and that number corresponds to reports from the time that about 1/4 of Confederate soldiers owned slaves.

Now you wish to argue that maybe some families had more than one slaveholder, even though typically, "the man of the house" owned everything.
So, only in a few elite families were women high-status enough to legally own slaves.
How many? Maybe 10% at most.
Therefore, instead of there being 393,975 slaveholding families, there were only around 355,000 families who "owned" slaves, or 21% of all Southern families.

But that's all Southern families.
If we only look at the Confederacy, we find the white population was 5,582,222 CSA individuals, which means roughly 1,116,000 CSA white families.
Of those, 316,632 individuals owned slaves, and if we apply the 90% factor, we have 284,969 CSA slaveholding families, or 26% of all CSA families.

But that's just the CSA average.
If we look at high-slave states like South Carolina and Mississippi, and again allow for 10% multiple slaveholders in one family, we see South Carolina had 41% and Mississippi 44% of families owning slaves.

And just to make the point clear, for every such family who did not own slaves, there were other family members -- brothers, uncles, cousins, in-laws and close neighbors -- who did.
And that is why the entire culture -- the "Southern Way of Life" -- was built around their "peculiar institution".

Those are facts, deny them as much as you wish.

FLT-bird: "Except they didn't.
Slave ownership was rare and of those who did own slaves, over half of them owned 5 or less.
The big slave owners were a tiny minority."

Not as rare as you pretend.
First of all, 393,975 slaveholders means the average slaveholder owned ~10 slaves.
Second, I have no reason to doubt your number that "half of them owned 5 or less," suggesting an average for them of 2.5 slaves, or roughly 500,000 slaves "owned" by about 200,000 slaveholders.
That means the other approx. 3,500,000 slaves were "owned" by just 300,000 slaveholders or 13 per slaveholder.
Those were large operations and suggest their families were also larger than average -- instead of just five members, they were 7 or 8 -- suggesting that 23% of Confederates belonged to large families which "owned" slaves.

FLT-bird: "No, I was taught the standard lies, propaganda and BS you constantly spew.
I was absolutely shocked when I read more for myself and discovered the truth.
It was an eye opening experience that made me start to question a lot of other things....ie the media, academia, the government, etc"

Except that you never read a single word of truth on your own.
What you discovered was a pack of lies that you were too ignorant and innocent to distinguish from real facts and way too eager to believe as opposed to the harsh and unchanging truth.

FLT-bird: "Laughable BS to say Republicans weren't part of the Establishment back then.
Lincoln was the chief counsel and lobbyist for the Illinois Central Railroad - then the largest corporation on earth.
If that's not Establishment, nothing is."

Naw... Lincoln was a small-time independent country lawyer who defended all kinds of people, both innocent and guilty, rich and poor.
The "Establishment" figure you're thinking of, was a Democrat, a very high-level corporate executive in charge of vast railroad operations, including in Illinois, politically connected to the Democrat administration in Washington, DC.
You might even remember his name, because he represented the Confederacy's last-best hope for Civil War political victory.
He was George McClellan.

FLT-bird: "The Democrats of the JFK era were not nearly as corrupt as they are now.
Even now there are some like RFK Jr who are not corrupt."

Truthfully, I never paid much attention to RFK Jr until very recently, and I do admit to being kind of impressed with him now.
The poor fellow has one ton of courage, that's for sure.

So, maybe you can tell me, what elected offices has RFK Jr held?
What positions of high responsibility, in business or government or some other enterprise, has he managed?

And based on that, are we to conclude that some number less than 100% of Democrats are corrupt?

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, for examples, I think the world of Democrat Andrew Jackson; Harry Truman was my kind of Democrat and I do grudgingly admire the Kennedy brothers, despite some hanky-panky which could make Slick William Clinton blush.
But in general, I think it's safe to say that virtually all Democrats were and are corrupt liars and deceivers, and only people predisposed to love their lies can be convinced to believe even one word of them.

And those sad people apparently include FLT-bird and DiogenesLamp here on Free Republic.

Sad {sigh}

And so you've claimed, but where are actual data to support your claims? I've never seen them.

I'm sure there are. I haven't noted them. What I have noted are the comments of everybody at the time saying exactly what I've said which is that the Southern states were responsible for about 75% of the exports and imports and thus were paying about 75% of the tariff. You of course, claim miraculously to have never seen them even though I've posted them multiple times every time this subject has come up.

And still, typical of your Democrat mind-set, which values narrative over everything else, when presented with actual facts, all you can do is handwave them away. The truth about "Doughfaces" is that the term was coined by Virginia Senator John Randolph, circa 1820, as a sign of disrespect for Northerners eager to do what Randolph wanted them to do.

This is what shrinks call "projection". You accuse me of exactly that which you yourself are guilty of. Northern politicians elected by Northern voters were controlled by....wait for it....Northerners. Duh. I guess the dishonest claims otherwise are part of your Democrat mindset. LOL!

So handwave away and ignore all you want, it's still a fact.

What is a fact is that these were Northerners elected by Northern voters in Northern states.

4. Even South Carolina's John C. Calhoun, when he was a Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican (until 1828), supported protective tariffs, internal improvements and the National Bank.

He did at the time until he saw how destructive high tariffs were to the Southern economy. He also noted that Northern states got the lion's share of the federal budget. "The north has adopted a system of revenue and disbursements, in which an undue proportion of the burden of taxation has been imposed on the South, and an undue proportion of its proceeds appropriated to the north ... The South as the great exporting portion of the Union has, in reality, paid vastly more than her due proportion of the revenue," John C Calhoun March 4, 1850

You will doubtless squeal that this can't possibly be true and gosh, that Calhoun guy is an evil, wicked, nasty, horrible guy and must be lying and slavery slavery slavery, blah blah blah. I will note that what Calhoun said here is no different from what numerous other political leaders and newspapers were saying.

your suggestions that every Southerner before 1860 was a anti-American Neanderthal Democrat is simply false. In fact, many Southerners were as patriotic and pro-American as our Southern Founders like Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe.

Strawman alert. I never suggested any such thing.

In Southern states the House vote was 17 for and 65 against the 1828 Tariff. In Northern states the vote was 88 for and 29 against. So, there were more Northerners opposed than there were Southerners for the tariff. In 1828 the "Solid South" was not 100% solid. And no, the rates were not immediately lowered dramatically and South Carolina did not soon get what it wanted. Instead, five years later the 1833 Compromise Tariff began to reduce tariffs gradually back to their 1820 levels of around 20%.

As I said, Southerners became far more anti Tariff once they saw how destructive the Tariff of Abominations was to their states economically. Note the use of the word "became"...as in they weren't as opposed initially.

Also, I said the compromise reached to end the Nullification Crisis was that tariff rates were lowered. They were. I did not say "immediately".

What South Carolina wanted in 1830 was to secede and that couldn't happen because no other states were willing to join South Carolina over just the issue of tariffs.What South Carolina wanted was the tariffs to be lowered. That's what they got. Note they nullified the tariff. They did not secede. Had they wanted to secede, presumably, they would have seceded. They were still willing to compromise because they believed compromise possible.

What South Carolinians realized then was that in order to secede, they needed an issue strong enough to outrage all Southerners, and there was only one such issue -- slavery.

that was Andrew Jackson's view but it is debatable. Had they wanted to secede they would presumably have done so. After all, Massachusetts and Connecticut had threatened to secede over the Embargo Act about 15 years earlier during the Hartford Convention so the idea that each state could unilaterally secede was not limited to Southern states.

by the way, notice how secession is often what states threaten or resort to when their economy is crushed by blocking or impinging on foreign trade?

No they didn't stop it in 1860. It passed the House. The process of log rolling to pick up one or two more votes in the Senate was underway. It was a certainty that some Senator could be induced to flip for the right payoff for his constituents. Everybody knew this.

That's a lie, and you need to stop lying, it's not that hard, you can easily look it up yourself.,/p>

Your denial is a lie. You need to stop lying. Rates were 17% before the Morrill Tariff. "The bill immediately raised the average tariff rate from about 15 percent (according to Frank Taussig in Tariff History of the United States) to 37.5 percent, but with a greatly expanded list of covered items. The tax burden would about triple. Soon thereafter, a second tariff increase would increase the average rate to 47.06 percent, Taussig writes."

"At the time, Taussig says, the import-dependent South was paying as much as 80 percent of the tariff, while complaining bitterly that most of the revenues were being spent in the North. The South was being plundered by the tax system and wanted no more of it. Then along comes Lincoln and the Republicans, tripling (!) the rate of tariff taxation." https://mises.org/library/lincolns-tariff-war

Go ahead and emote about the source. We all know that's your go to response whenever you see information you don't like. LOL!

You have no evidence that Lincoln "orchestrated" anything. The evidence we have clearly shows that New York Senator Seward led the Republican efforts, and that he was generally acting as a loose cannon, on his own. In his 1st Inaugural, Lincoln said he'd not even seen the proposed amendment.

Lincoln orchestrated it.

"At this point the historical meaning of the amendment takes an intriguing turn. While Seward presented the measure before the committee in late December 1860, the circumstances of its introduction are enveloped in his own communications with the president-elect. Seward drafted the measure after conferring with his political ally and newspaperman Thurlow Weed on a train ride across New York. Weed had just come from Springfield, Illinois and carried both verbal and written instructions from Abraham Lincoln to his allies in Congress. Crofts reassembles the steps of each figure’s journey to make a cautious case that Lincoln had fingerprints on the Corwin amendment from the beginning.

The main challenge here, and the one that led Potter astray, is that Lincoln’s written instructions to Seward made no reference to a proslavery concession, though he did suggest elements of other parallel compromises that Seward submitted on the Fugitive Slave Act and a commitment to preserving the union. Seward’s subsequent letters to Lincoln intimate that the future Corwin amendment was part of the verbal instruction that Lincoln provided to Weed."

"Though not a part of his direct communications with Seward about the actions on the Committee of Thirteen, Lincoln drafted a parallel affirmation of ‘the right of each state to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively’ a few days after he met with Weed. The amendment showed signs of stirring in the House almost immediately after Lincoln’s arrival."

"Lincoln apparently did much of the lifting to bring a sufficient number of Republican votes into the fold to secure the requisite two-thirds majorities. In other instances, antislavery legislators who could not countenance the measure were likely induced to intentionally abstain. Aside from a few direct witness attestations (Charles Francis Adams’ famous historian son Henry, then a young congressional staffer, provided one of them), Lincoln’s influence must be gleaned from sporadic reports of his private meetings with Corwin and other congressional leaders or, in one example teased out by Crofts, patterns in the patronage appointments he likely offered to a crucial congressional block from Maine."

Go ahead and attack this source too. LOL! https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/2063

Sure, but the majority of Republicans opposed Corwin, even with Seward's support for it. 100% of Democrats supported Corwin and it was signed by Democrat President Buchanan, not Lincoln.

Sure, but a supermajority of Northerners supported it.

That's not the truth, and you can easily see this yourself if you simply imagine, today, some Republican politician saying in an interview, "I am not opposed to Donald Trump as our Presidential nominee". Would you consider that a real endorsement?? Really?? I don't, but that's what Lincoln said about Corwin's Amendment.

That is the truth and Lincoln's fingerprints were all over the Corwin Amendment right from the start - see above.

So here, yet again, is the list of explicit new protections for slavery in the new Confederate constitution (from post #170):

Here again is me telling you that the protections of slavery in the Confederate Constitution were no more than existed in the US Constitution plus the Corwin Amendment. ie slave owners could travel with their slaves through states or territories that did not have slavery. See Dred Scott. Importing slaves from Africa or indeed any place that it was no longer legal to import slaves from was barred....ie it was only legal to bring in slaves from other states just as the law was in the US.

Given these significant increases in protection for slavery in the Confederate constitution, there is no way Confederate states could seriously contemplate returning to the Union.

Given slavery had no significant increases in protection in the Confederate Constitution, accepting the Corwin Amendment would have offered the exact same protections in the US Constitution as existed in the Confederate Constitution. Yet the original 7 seceding states refused to return. They must have been motivated by something other than slavery.

Or so you claim, and yet without a scrap of evidence to support your claims, here or elsewhere.

See above. I provided ample evidence. His own hagiographer Doris Kearns-Goodwin also admitted Lincoln orchestrated its passage.

Here again is the breakdown of the reasons for secession" documents:here again is me telling you only 4 states issued declarations of causes and only one of those states listed slavery as the exclusive cause. 3 of the 4 states went on at length about the economic grievances even though these were not unconstitutional while the Northern states' refusal to enforce the fugitive slave clause of the US Constitution was unconstitutional.

Noooo... the 1860 census says there were 393,975 slaveholders, which is 1.26% of the total population of 31,183,582. That implies that 98.7% of Americans were not slaveholders. Of course, virtually 100% of Northerners were not slaveholders, so if we just look at the Southern white population, it was 8,289,782, making non-slaveholders ~95%. However, in 1860, according to the US census, the average family was about 5 people, meaning there were roughly 1,660,000 Southern white families. If we assume only one slaveholder per family, then about 24% of families "owned" slaves -- and that number corresponds to reports from the time that about 1/4 of Confederate soldiers owned slaves. Now you wish to argue that maybe some families had more than one slaveholder, even though typically, "the man of the house" owned everything..

No. That was not typical. Look at Grant's wife. Look at Lee's wife. THEY owned the slaves - not Grant or Lee personally. This happened all the time. Ever heard of wills? Kids of large slaveholding families would also often be gifted slaves during the parents' lifetimes.

So, only in a few elite families were women high-status enough to legally own slaves. How many? Maybe 10% at most. Therefore, instead of there being 393,975 slaveholding families, there were only around 355,000 families who "owned" slaves, or 21% of all Southern families. But that's all Southern families. If we only look at the Confederacy, we find the white population was 5,582,222 CSA individuals, which means roughly 1,116,000 CSA white families. Of those, 316,632 individuals owned slaves, and if we apply the 90% factor, we have 284,969 CSA slaveholding families, or 26% of all CSA families. But that's just the CSA average. If we look at high-slave states like South Carolina and Mississippi, and again allow for 10% multiple slaveholders in one family, we see South Carolina had 41% and Mississippi 44% of families owning slaves. And just to make the point clear, for every such family who did not own slaves, there were other family members -- brothers, uncles, cousins, in-laws and close neighbors -- who did.

Just because one household owned slaves, that does not mean the rest of the extended family did. That's another bad assumption on your part.

And that is why the entire culture -- the "Southern Way of Life" -- was built around their "peculiar institution".

No it wasn't. That was a small minority.

here are the results of the 1860 US census by state:

Alabama Total Free Population 529121 Total # of Slaveowners 33730 % of Free population owning slaves 6.37%

Arkansas Total Free Population 324335 Total # of Slaveowners 11481 % of Free population owning slaves 3.54%

Florida Total Free Population 78679 Total # of Slaveowners 5152 % of Free population owning slaves 6.55%

Georgia Total Free Population 595088 Total # of Slaveowners 41084 % of Free population owning slaves 6.90%

Louisiana Total Free Population 376276 Total # of Slaveowners 22033 % of Free population owning slaves 5.86%

Mississippi Total Free Population 354674 Total # of Slaveowners 30943 % of Free population owning slaves 8.72%

North Carolina Total Free Population 661583 Total # of Slaveowners 34658 % of Free population owning slaves 5.24%

South Carolina Total Free Population 301302 Total # of Slaveowners 26701 % of Free population owning slaves 8.86%

Tennessee Total Free Population 834082 Total # of Slaveowners 36844 % of Free population owning slaves 4.42%

Texas Total Free Population 421649 Total # of Slaveowners 21878 % of Free population owning slaves 5.19%

Virginia Total Free Population 1105453 Total # of Slaveowners 52128 % of Free population owning slaves 4.72%

Total Total Free Population 5582242 Total # of Slaveowners 316632 % of Free population owning slaves 5.67%

Note this is total free population, not total White population. ie this includes Black slaveowners....and yes, there definitely were Blacks who owned slaves. We can see that even in the two states with the highest percentage of Blacks as a share of the population (South Carolina and Mississippi) the percentage of the total free population that owned slaves did not exceed 9%. As a whole, fewer than 6% of the total free population owned slaves. What percent of families did depends on your guesstimate of average family size and how many slaveowners there were per family. Thus, one family in which the rich husband owned slaves, the wife who was also from money inherited slaves from her family - or was gifted some slaves of her own as for example, a wedding gift, and the kids were gifted slaves could easily account for 4-5 slaveowners in just that one family. For the big plantations that had hundreds of slaves, this kind of pattern was not unusual.

Of that 5.67% of the total free population which owned slaves, half of them owned 5 or fewer. These often tended to be domestic servants (cooks, nannies, butlers, etc). Occasionally, there would be a yeoman farmer who owned 2-3 to help out on the farm but that was not common. Slaves were expensive. The vast vast majority of people were family farmers who did not own any slaves. Most family farmers had lots and lots of kids who served as farm labor.

Not as rare as you pretend.

Large plantations were not as common as you pretend. They were rather rare. Most people were nowhere near rich enough for that.

First of all, 393,975 slaveholders means the average slaveholder owned ~10 slaves. Second, I have no reason to doubt your number that "half of them owned 5 or less," suggesting an average for them of 2.5 slaves, or roughly 500,000 slaves "owned" by about 200,000 slaveholders. That means the other approx. 3,500,000 slaves were "owned" by just 300,000 slaveholders or 13 per slaveholder. Those were large operations and suggest their families were also larger than average -- instead of just five members, they were 7 or 8 -- suggesting that 23% of Confederates belonged to large families which "owned" slaves.

LOL! No. You seriously want to try to convince us that 23% of White Southerners came from rich families? Get out of here with that laughable BS. There were roughly 5.5 million White Southerners. Add in 3 or 4 hundred thousand free Blacks and you have a little less than 6 million people. There were about 3 million slaves. There were 316,632 slave owners. About half or 150,000 of those people owned less than 5 slaves. To that's 300-450,000 slaves total. Meaning 160,000 slave owners owned 2.6 or 2.7 million slaves. The really big slave owners were 160,000 out of 6 million. That's a tiny minority.

Except that you never read a single word of truth on your own. What you discovered was a pack of lies that you were too ignorant and innocent to distinguish from real facts and way too eager to believe as opposed to the harsh and unchanging truth.

Except that this is a complete lie. Sorry to do something I normally hate which is to toot my own horn, but I have 2 grad degrees, speak 3 languages, have lived in 8 states and 4 foreign countries. I am neither ignorant nor innocent. Quite the opposite. I've been exposed to vastly vastly more than most people ever will be. I learned through lots and lots of reading that what we are taught about this subject in the government schools, what is shown on PBS and the so-called history channel, etc are lies and BS. Of course, once you see how corrupted the media and a lot of government institutions are...how ready and willing they are to lie to suit their agenda, their lies about history become a whole lot less shocking. Its a pattern with them.

If that's not Establishment, nothing is." Naw... Lincoln was a small-time independent country lawyer who defended all kinds of people, both innocent and guilty, rich and poor.

early on in his career maybe. That was certainly not the case by the time he started his career in politics. He was a consummate insider by then.

The "Establishment" figure you're thinking of, was a Democrat, a very high-level corporate executive in charge of vast railroad operations, including in Illinois, politically connected to the Democrat administration in Washington, DC. You might even remember his name, because he represented the Confederacy's last-best hope for Civil War political victory. He was George McClellan.

There certainly were Democrats who were Establishment insiders. There were also lots of Republicans who were insiders. Lincoln and McClellan knew each other quite well and worked together on the Illinois Central Railroad long before the war.