Your Point. Americans owned 4.2 million slaves in the United States according to the 1860 census. The vast majority of slave owners were white and Christian.
As a black man who minored in African American history, I don’t find this topic difficult!
The majority of black slave owners were members of the mulatto class, and in some cases were the sons and daughters of white slave masters. Many of the mulatto slave owners separated themselves from the masses of black people and attempted to establish a caste system based on color, wealth, and free status. According to Martin Delany, the colored community of Charleston City clung to the assumptions of the superiority of white blood and brown skin complexion.
These mulattoes of the old free Black elite did not attend church with the dark-skinned blacks of Charleston City. They not only formed congregations which excluded freedmen of dark complexion, but they only married among other mulattoes to “keep the color in the family.”
Large numbers of free Blacks owned black slaves in numbers disproportionate to their representation in society. According to the federal census of 1830, free blacks owned more than 10,000 slaves in Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia. The majority of black slave-owners lived in Louisiana and planted sugar cane.
Slave holding among the mulatto class in South Carolina was widespread according to the first census of 1790, which revealed that 36 out of 102, or 35.2 percent of the free Black heads of family held slaves in Charleston City. By 1800 one out of every three free black recorded owning slave property. Between 1820 and 1840 the percentage of slaveholding heads of family ranged from 72.1 to 77.7 percent, however, by 1850 the percentage felt to 42.3 percent.
According to the U.S. Census report in 1860 only a small minority of whites owned slaves. Out of a population of 27 million whites only eight million lived in the South, and out of this population fewer than 385,000 owned slaves. In short, the total white population own about 1.4, while the southern white population own about 4.8 enslaved Africans.
On the other hand the black population in 1860 was 4.5 million, with about 500,000 living in the South. Of the blacks residing in the South, 261,988 were not slaves. Of this number, 10,689 lived in New Orleans. In New Orleans over 3,000 free blacks owned slaves, about 28 percent of the free Black population in the city.
The majority of urban black slave owners were women. In 1820, free black women represented 68 percent of heads of households in the North and 70 percent of slaveholding heads of colored households in the South. The large percentage of black women slave owners is explained by manumission by their white fathers, or inheritance from their white fathers or husbands. Black women were the majority of slaves emancipated by white slave owning men with whom they had sexual relations. Thirty-three percent of all the recorded colonial manumissions were mulatto children and 75 percent of all adult manumissions were females.
(I credit this information to one of my early professors in AA history ... Dr. Joseph E. Holloway)