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i>Sure, by definition. And, by definition, a slaveholder's spouse, children, parents and other relations belong to the family of a slaveholder, and benefit from slavery.

But you don't get from 1.6% to one third of all soldiers, mathematically, just by implicating the nuclear family. That would require tainting everyone who ever showed up at Johnny Reb's for Thanksgiving, including second cousins and step nephews.

Also, slaveholders often hired overseers and other white workers who benefitted directly or indirectly from slavery.

So, NOT owners. But we would never accept such a sloppy claim in any other area of economic history. Let me demonstrate:

There are employers and employees. Some employers directly manage their people, but sometimes employers hire managers to oversee front-line employees. Now, suppose you are tasked with producing an economic report for the made-up town of Plainsburgington and its surrounding area and you, through very thorough and exacting census, determine that the whole region's population (suspiciously numbering exactly 10,000) strangely enjoys 100% employment or self-employment and that, further, there are (all too conveniently) exactly one hundred self-reporting employers (as determined through taxes and licensing), that is, one hundred who are not themselves employed by another person. When you compile the census data according to JOB TITLE, you find that exactly one hundred people report that they hold the position of "Manager". However, when you cross compare the job title study with the tax records, you find that fifty of the managers are, themselves, salaried and employed by fifty of the previously determined one hundred regional employers. How many employers will you claim for this economic zone in your report?

For McPherson, it wouldn't be the obvious answer. He would have to decide if employment was a moral good or not, and he would have to decide how he FELT about it. He would have think about how he FELT about Plainsburington and whether the historical narrative, as a morality tale, should lionize or demonize the town. If employment is virtuous industry, and if he likes Plainsburgingtonians, he might claim that there are two hundred employers. If employment is the blight of exploitation, he might claim that one hundred reduced the remaining 9,900 to labor. If he hates Plainsburgingtonians, and wants to cast them as shiftless lowlifes, he may claim that only fifty ever rose above the dregs. If he wants to write about the rise of the Plainsburginton middle-class, he might claim one hundred and fifty. He would have to choose his pre-concluded conclusion before settling upon a half-assed rationalization from the breech end of the argument.

And beyond the immediate slaveholding community, the broader US economy, indeed the global economy, benefitted hugely from Southern slave labor.

And if we trace the fungible liquidity of wealth generated by the SLAVE TRADE, we can determine that most major institutions of the North East are likewise tainted. All principled people, even having different principles, nevertheless demand consistency.

I think that helps explain why so many Northern Democrats were willing to tolerate slavery even when they themselves owned no slaves.

Or, perhaps, they were eye witness to the horrors of industrial child labor and also had a sense of proportion.

No, of course not, but clearly family members of slaveholders, as well as their wider communities, benefitted from slavery, and supported it.

As a rule, I don't like to contest a statement on the matter of its generality, regardless of purpose, saving that the base claim be generally untrue, itself. I have doubts about this. I don't deny that generational wealth-building, slave (property) holding included, could benefit an heir as easily as a coin purse, a tract of land, or a good stable of horses; Washington's estate, slaves included, did pass through the Custises into Lee's hands, though he did not purchase slaves and, on the balance, he was increased. However, consider the I-just-made-it-up-right-now parable of the two sons who split their father's property inheritance BEFORE slaves are purchased. If one brother then buys slaves to work his cash crop, the other brother and his wage laborers must economically compete in a market affected by any eventual cost-saving the first brother might enjoy. But even if the second son also turns to slave-labor, he can never more than match his brother (assuming perfectly equal apportionment of land), and then nether can risk the potential economic harm to their own immediate heirs in being the first to disentangle their business lest the grandsons economically be overmatched and financially consumed by their cousins. If the second son is a sincere abolitionist and refuses to resort to slave labor, he is just as well painted by the whole "familys own 'em" brush. It's easy to see how, as the slave population began to age out, the maintenance of slavery came to be seen by the upper-class as a noblesse oblige of the landed gentry, a burden to many estates.

what is "Continental methodology" and what "peers" or "dissenters" are you talking about?

The two prevailing schools of discourse are the so-called Continental and Analytical, loosely associated with left- and right-wing philosophies, respectively. Whereas Analytical dialectic is concerned with the construction of categorical language and its argumentation more logical, the Continental approach (which should probably be called the "Commentary" approach) is more wholly rhetorical and relies upon building up outweighing bodies of commentary, usually not subject to analysis. If you've ever watched a Young Republican trying to explain to a SDS student that Christianity can't be fascist, given history and the actually definition of "fascism", only be called a Nazi, then you've seen how the two methods compliment each other./s

A hallmark of the Analytical method is that it enjoys critical thinking, that is, a line of thought which entertains the potential to falsify one its own principles, for truth-finding purposes.

The Analytical is traditionally associated with the inherited intellectual culture of British higher education, whereas the Continental is usually associated with, well, Continental Europe and arises from the pretensions of newly literate, self-styled middle-class intellectuals who haunt coffee houses and LARP as underdog revolutionaries. My old professorate liked to contrast the two with readings from the Spanish Civil War, with "Oxbridge" classicists expressing the last gasp of original English conservatism in journalistic debate with Spanish Communists and their orbiters who thought the the height of intellectualism was be seen reading over a pair of fake reading glasses.

Now, seriously, you're just babbling nonsense, and why?

Back in the 90s, there was a fierce debate over the utility and morality of objectivity. McPherson decidedly came down on the anti-objectivity side. He believes that history is a political narrative and that historians should be politically dutiful storytellers. He has the same relationship with the scholarly study of history that Anthony Fauci has with the scientific integrity of medical research.

Brass Lamp: "But you don't get from 1.6% to one third of all soldiers, mathematically, just by implicating the nuclear family.
That would require tainting everyone who ever showed up at Johnny Reb's for Thanksgiving, including second cousins and step nephews."

Seriously?!
You don't know any more about this subject than that?
You think 1.6% somehow compares to how many Confederate soldiers owned slaves?
How can you possibly be so confused?

So here are the basic facts, and you can chose whether to call them Analytical or Continental:

According to the 1860 census, the total US free population was 27,467,604 -- that's all non-slaves, North, South, East & West.
The total number of slaves was 3,955,617 -- of which all but a handful lived south of the Mason Dixon line.
The total number of slaveholders was 393,967 which is 1.4% of all free people.
The total number of free Southerners was 8,339,782 meaning that slaves represented 32% of the total Southern population and slaveholders were roughly 5% of all Southerners.
However, the median age in 1860 was only 19, meaning only half of the South's 8,339,782 people were adults, and of those roughly half were men, meaning the number of adult men potential to be slaveholders was only about 2 million.
Of the circa 2 million Southern free adult men, roughly 400,000 were slaveholders, or about 20%.
Of course, you can argue that not all slaveholders were adult men, but what evidence is there to suggest significant numbers were not?
These numbers cover the entire South, and we also know the number of slaves was much higher in the Deep South than in Border States, so the 20% average ranged from about 50% in the Deep South to less than 15% in Border States.
Bottom line is that: 10% of Confederate soldiers owning slaves, and 20% came from slaveholding families, overall, those numbers make perfectly good sense, based on what we know.
That these numbers would vary from 50% in the Deep South to less than 15% in Border States also sounds right to me.

Brass Lamp: "So, NOT owners.
But we would never accept such a sloppy claim in any other area of economic history.
Let me demonstrate:..."

I'm sorry, but your hypothetical makes no sense to me and seems to miss entirely the point of this discussion.

Of course, I'm no expert on James McPherson, but these are his words:

"There are all kinds of myths that a people has about itself, some positive, some negative, some healthy and some not healthy.
I think that one job of the historian is to try to cut through some of those myths and get closer to some kind of reality.
So that people can face their current situation realistically, rather than mythically.
I guess that's my sense of what a historian ought to do."

To me, he doesn't sound like the man you've portrayed him to be.

Brass Lamp: "And if we trace the fungible liquidity of wealth generated by the SLAVE TRADE, we can determine that most major institutions of the North East are likewise tainted.
All principled people, even having different principles, nevertheless demand consistency."

Of course, and it's all because of a key fact which our pro-Confederates 100% refuse under all circumstances to admit -- that until 1861 Southern Democrats more-or-less ruled over the USA through their alliance with Northern "Dough Faced" Democrats, and what made their alliance so powerful was the fact that everyone benefitted from it, except the slaves, of course.

So far as I can tell, nobody is debating the numbers themselves.
The issue is what interpretations should we put on them.

Brass Lamp: "Or, perhaps, they were eye witness to the horrors of industrial child labor and also had a sense of proportion."

In those days most industries were the size of a family farm where children were expected to work from very young ages.
Also, there were many indentured servants, forced to work wherever they were told to.
So everybody understood that some could be and were forced to do things.
Still, chattel slavery was in a class by itself as being not only permanent, but inherited, and so the obvious worst of the worst conditions of human beings.

Brass Lamp: "...the Continental is usually associated with, well, Continental Europe and arises from the pretensions of newly literate, self-styled middle-class intellectuals who haunt coffee houses and LARP as underdog revolutionaries."

The Continental tradition includes the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory, which hopefully we will not need to discuss here...

Brass Lamp: "Back in the 90s, there was a fierce debate over the utility and morality of objectivity.
McPherson decidedly came down on the anti-objectivity side.
He believes that history is a political narrative and that historians should be politically dutiful storytellers.
He has the same relationship with the scholarly study of history that Anthony Fauci has with the scientific integrity of medical research."

So, you allege, but I've seen no evidence to support such claims.
What little I have seen of McPherson seems to make perfectly good sense.
And, for purposes of this particular discussion, McPherson was only one of three sources I quoted on the percentages of slaveholders among Confederate soldiers.
So your assaults on him are pointless.