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Have you ever heard of the Black Belt? That’s not named for the slaves, but rather the soil.

There were YUGE plantations were the slave to owner population was 10,000 to one.

Macon county, the county next to mine in Alabama, is 93 percent black. It’s in the black belt. My county is where the Appalachians ended. It’s 23 percent black.

Basically, my county only had 2 big plantations, and the rest were piney woods white folks with no slaves. The counties to the North of me had even less, as they’re even more mountainous. The population of these counties are 85-90% white. But Macon and Bullock counties to the South had all the slaves because of the enormous plantations. Not many whites lived there then, or even today.

You look at the demographics today, and things haven’t really changed much from 1860.

Have you ever heard of the Black Belt? That’s not named for the slaves, but rather the soil.

Those would be the counties where over 50% of the inhabitants were slaves - sometimes well over 50%. There would have been large plantations and slave owners with many slaves in those counties, but other whites living there would have slaves as well. The best cotton growing counties were very rich and if you did business with the major slave masters, you could probably afford a slave or two yourself.

The Appalachian counties had few slaves. But notice the counties where slaves were 30% to 50% of the population. There were also counties where the percentage of slaves approached 30%. Taking those other counties into account, you can see that there must have been many slaveowning families in Alabama. The Appalachian counties were out of the ordinary, but so were the Appalachian counties.