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25% of Marshall families & voters owned slaves -- that is much closer to the truth than 4.42%.

4.42% is the individuals in the White population who owned slaves.

Your 4.42% of the free citizens holding slaves is 36,844 (from the 1860 census) which is ~25% of all families & voters = 36,844 of ~127,000 voters on February 9 and ~155,000 voters in the June 8, 1861, elections.

The calculation was 19.9% of families rather than 25%

Now, if you subtract those pro-slavery, pro-secession 36,844 from the total pro-secession votes, you see that ~77% of non-slaveholders voted against secession on February 9 and 60% of non-slaveholders voted for secession on June 8, 1861.

You are ASSUMING every slave owner voted for secession. You have no evidence they did. I can cite numerous examples of pro union slave owners.....like the Grants for example.

White male heads of families voted, so the total number of families (149,000) approximates the total number of voters (127,000 & 155,000).

Once again, you are ASSUMING every adult White male had a family. While most would have, certainly not all of them would have. Also, you don't know if the people who voted were the heads of families.

What's true is that women slaveholders could reach 40% of all slaveholders in big cities like New Orleans and Charleston. However, in rural plantation regions like South-Central Tennessee, things were very different. There, women or children slaveholders amounted to only 5% of all slaveholders, with 95% of slaveholders being white male heads of households. And even with the 5% women slaveholders, nearly every woman represented a family with adult male voters whose economic-social-political interests supported the dominant slave-culture.

Where are you getting this from? I'll need to see some evidence that only 5% of slaveowners were women. Also, female slave owners would likely belong to families in which there were also male slave owners, which means that the number of families that owned slaves would be smaller because there were multiple slave owners in some single families.

Nearly 100% of Tennessee's 36,844 slaveholders (or male relatives) voted for secession on both February 9 and June 8, 1861.

You know how everyone voted? How? That's just an assumption on your part.

Non-slaveholders voted ~68% against secession on February 9, but flipped to vote 60% for secession on June 8. That's why the overall came to 70% for secession on June 8.

While there is no way of knowing how individuals voted, The flip in the vote after Feb 9 must have happened mostly among non slaveowners because they were a large majority of all voters and the vote did flip pretty significantly from 45% to 70%.

I'm certain you know better than that. Your 4.42% (36,844) is not the percentage of white male voters who owned slaves, it's the percentage of the entire white population (834,082), including women & children. Your 4.42% represents overall about 25% of Tennessee's adult male voters.

The Source you cited earlier said 19.9%

Are you still confused about this? Do you understand yet that the total number of voters (~150,000) roughly equaled the total number of heads of households (~149,000) and that roughly 25% (~37,000) of those were slaveholders ?

You seem to be. 4.42% of the Total White population owned slaves. 19.9% of White families owned slaves. 45% voted for secession the first time and 70% the second time. Ergo even if ever slave owner voted for secession - which is something that nobody has shown - slave owners could not have been the majority of votes for secession in either referendum.

Even where a small number of those were women or children, they still represent families whose adult men voted in the best interests of the Southern slave culture.

You don't know how anybody voted and slavery was just fine within the union. So I do not buy the argument that a vote for secession was a vote in favor of Slavery. The best way of protecting slavery would have been to stay in the union.

There is no surviving work from Johnson which claims "38,000 illegal arrests", and no evidence he ever studied or counted the historical records. All of the sources claiming Johnson said "38,000" are secondary and do not quote him directly. Nobody except Neely has ever actually counted the Civil War related arrest records of both Union and Confederacy.

I disagree with that. I've cited others who researched it as well and I've cited two that said 38,000. Most sources say that most historians who have examined the record in this period think its 25,000 to 30,000.

FLT-bird: "The calculation was 19.9% of families rather than 25%"

FLT-bird: "4.42% of the Total White population owned slaves.
19.9% of White families owned slaves.
45% voted for secession the first time and 70% the second time.
Ergo even if ever slave owner voted for secession - which is something that nobody has shown - slave owners could not have been the majority of votes for secession in either referendum."

The difference between your 19.9% any my 24.7% is in the methodology and assumptions.
Both numbers have been proposed and defended:
From the 1860 census:

834,082 = total free population (from the census)
149,335 = total free families (counted from the census)
36,844 = total slaveholders (adjusted for multiple slaveholders per family)
= 24.7% of TN families owned slaves in 1860.

25% slaveholding families is supported by scholars:
"Gary Edwards, speaking at the Stones River symposium, similarly states that about 25% of Tennessee families owned slaves"

But so is your 19.9%:
Tennessee State University materials state:

“The slaves were owned by 36,894 persons, less than twenty percent of Tennessee’s white families.”

But regardless of the overall average, what matters is that in regions with fewer slaveholders, voters rejected secession on both February 9 and June 8 while the opposite is true in regions with higher percentages of slaveholders.

That should be "case closed" on whether slavery was a determining factor in Tennessee's votes on secession.

FLT-bird: "You are ASSUMING every slave owner voted for secession.
You have no evidence they did.
I can cite numerous examples of pro union slave owners.....like the Grants for example."

Julia Dent Grant's father, Frederick, owned a 30-slave plantation of 850 acres just west of St. Louis, Missouri.
Dent did not grow export-oriented crops like cotton, tobacco or rice, instead he grew wheat, corn, potatoes and other produce for sale in St. Louis produce markets.
St. Louis was the locus of Missouri Unionism so Dent, like other slaveholding Unionists recognized his own best interests lay with the Union.

Pro-Union slaveholders like Frederick Dent were a small minority, ~10%, among slaveholders, even in Union slave-states like Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland & Delaware.
Such men were rare to non-existent in the Deep Cotton South and export-cotton growing regions of Upper South states like Tennessee.

We can see this in such high slavery counties as Marshall and Giles, Tennessee, where ~70% voted for secession on February 9 and nearly 100% on June 8, 1861.

FLT-bird: "Once again, you are ASSUMING every adult White male had a family.
While most would have, certainly not all of them would have.
Also, you don't know if the people who voted were the heads of families."

Different methodologies for counting families and slaveholders produce results which range from your ~20% to my ~25% of families holding slaves.
I doubt if we'll ever get more precise than those two numbers -- 20% to 25% of Tennessee families & voters owned slaves.

FLT-bird: "Where are you getting this from? I'll need to see some evidence that only 5% of slaveowners were women. "

Here is a good source.
Here is another.
And here is a third.

What these show is that:

Census‑based analyses and county‑level slave schedules indicate that in rural cotton‑producing counties of Middle Tennessee, slaveholding was overwhelmingly concentrated among white male household heads, with women comprising only a very small minority of recorded slaveholders—typically widows or estate representatives.
This contrasts sharply with major slave‑market cities such as New Orleans and Charleston, where women constituted roughly 30–40 percent of documented slave owners.

From this, I put women slaveholder in rural plantation counties like Giles & Marshall, TN, as in the range of 5% rather than the up to 40% in large port cities like New Orleans or Charleston.

FLT-bird: "While there is no way of knowing how individuals voted, The flip in the vote after Feb 9 must have happened mostly among non slaveowners because they were a large majority of all voters and the vote did flip pretty significantly from 45% to 70%."

That is correct, but we can easily see that the higher percentage of slaveholders, the higher the percentage voting for secession -- on both February 9 and June 8, 1861.
Regions with low % slaveholders voted against secession both times, while those with high % slaveholders (like Giles & Marshall) voted for secession both times.

FLT-bird: "I do not buy the argument that a vote for secession was a vote in favor of Slavery.
The best way of protecting slavery would have been to stay in the union."

That was the opinion of Grant's father-in-law, Frederick Dent of St. Louis, Missouri.
But Dent's views were a small (~10%) minority even among Border State slaveholders and were almost unknown in the Deep Cotton South in 1861.

FLT-bird: "I've cited others who researched it as well and I've cited two that said 38,000.
Most sources say that most historians who have examined the record in this period think its 25,000 to 30,000."

In fact, the only name you cited was Alexander Johnson from the 1880s, and for him there is no proof he actually said that, since no surviving work of Johnson's repeats the 38,000 number -- look that up if you don't believe me.

The truth is, no recognized historian has put a total number on either Union or Confederate "illegal arrests", and only one, Mark Neely, has taken the time to actually count all the actual records available for what Neely calls "arbitrary arrests" (not "illegal arrests").
Neely does not claim his numbers (~14,400 Union, ~4,000 Confederate) are the actual totals, only that they are the totals of surviving records.