Not really accurate.
Here's a link to the percentage of slaveowning families in southern states per the 1860 census. MS was 49% and SC 46%.
http://civilwarcauses.org/stat.htm
The claim that only 6% (or whatever) of southerners owned slaves is technically accurate, in that title was usually vested in the head of the house, thus wife and children were not technically slaveowners. The problem with this is that by this definition Scarlett O'Hara would not be considered a slaveowner, since her father probably had title to the slaves in his name. But that certainly isn't how Scarlett would have thought of herself.
Here's another link to a discussion of slave owning among CSA soldiers. Slaveowners (in their own name) were in a decided majority among officers.
Fewer enlisted men, being on average considerably less prosperous, owned slaves in their own name, but more than one in three came from slaveowning families.
http://deadconfederates.com/2011/04/28/ninety-eight-percent-of-texas-confederate-soldiers-never-owned-a-slave/
I don't know what you classify as "very few," but to my mind more than one in three to more than one in two doesn't qualify.
BTW, this correction aside, I agree with your post.
In many of those poorer families, it was more akin to buying an extra son to help work the farm, than in owning a “Slave”.
And many became sharecroppers, later in life.
If their cousin owned slaves, I presume that they were from a slave owning family?
I would have to question the stats you presented based on the fact taht if 6% (individuals) is technically correct and 49% (families) is also correct, then the term family is being used to refer to entire clans.
Given that ~40% of the southern population were slaves, slavery was common, yet not as broad based as you suggest. Slaves were expensive and you had to have significant land/work for it to make any financial sense.
I look at it this way. How many people employ someone, compared to how many people have someone in their extended family that employs someone.
Of southern white families (momma, papa, and chill’n:
1% owned 100 or more slaves
17% owned 3-10 slaves
4% owned 1-2 slaves
77% owned no slaves
(99% total due to rounding)
You realize there were thousands of slave owning blacks. Over 3,000 blacks in New Orleans alone who were slave owners. There were black slave breeders too.
What you have is a link to a knuggle-dragger's best groping, pawing attempt to seize upon statistical data cloaked behind the impenetrable veil of basic illiteracy. The information is supposedly extracted from census records, but the problems are; one, there is no such thing as familial slave ownership (as evidenced by probate and inheritance records in which slaves are treated in the same fashion as the usual sort of individual property) and no such thing as a "slave-owning family" to be counted; two, it was not the purpose of the census to ascertain who owned whom but rather, for the purpose of proportioning representation, to determine how many whites (counted as a whole person) and blacks (counted as three-fifths a person) resided at an address; three, the census was not conducted on a family-to-family basis, but rather door-to-door.
According to the author of the cited material, a collection of white tenant farmers, if they happen, according to the arrangement of their landlord, to cohabitate and having been surveyed by census-taker, not only have all been drafted into a family unit, but have all become the joint owners of any blacks their employer may have quartered among them. I would suppose that this misinterpretation of raw data was deliberate, if I were generous enough to credit the writer for having sufficient intelligence to construct a purposeful deception.
By the way, the UVA database referenced by the cited website actually gives the free population of Mississippi in 1860 as 354,674, and the number of slave-owners as 30,943, which would support a claim that nearly 9% of the free population held slaves. For South Carolina, it's 301,302 to 26,701 for just about 9%, again.
Brass Lamp to Sherman Logan: "The information is supposedly extracted from census records, but the problems are; one, there is no such thing as familial slave ownership (as evidenced by probate and inheritance records in which slaves are treated in the same fashion as the usual sort of individual property) and no such thing as a "slave-owning family" to be counted..."
Link to slave-owning family statistics.
Understanding the reality behind this issue is key to understanding why the Confederacy first started and then lost the Civil War.
Most important to understand is the difference in slave-owning families in Border States (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky & Missouri) = circa 15%, versus Upper South (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas) = circa 25%, versus Deep South (South Carolina through Texas) = circa 40%.
These numbers are based on average family sizes of only four members = husband (owner), wife and two children -- clearly an overly restricted estimate of Southern families.
These numbers alone help explain why the Deep South (40%) was eager to secede and go to war to defend slavery, while Upper South states (25%) required that war's forcing them to chose sides, and Border States (15%) all refused to join the rebellion.
The absence of slave ownership also explains why large sections of some Confederate States -- western Virginia, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina -- remained hot-beds of Union loyalists throughout the war.
Bottom line: any claim that only a small percentage of whites owned slaves is totally bogus for the Deep South, somewhat true for the Upper South and totally true for Border States.