Posted on 04/05/2024 4:36:06 AM PDT by where's_the_Outrage?
On April 2, 2024, the claim that "only 1.6% of US citizens owned slaves in 1860" went viral on X (formerly Twitter):
Though the 3.3 million people who viewed this statement (at the time of this reporting) may not be aware, this claim is part of an long-standing genre of online memes that use a misleading statistic to minimize the importance of slavery to antebellum America.
The actual percentage reported in these memes varies, Snopes has observed, from 1.3 percent to the present 1.6 percent. As Snopes reported in August 2019, the statistic to which these memes refer is most accurately conveyed as 1.4 percent.......
The year 1860 was a census year. Officials collected detailed information on slave ownership and distribution in the Southern states, and this data, while far from perfect, is likely the most reliable source of information for the state of slavery directly preceding the Civil War......
Adam Rothman, a historian at Georgetown University and an expert in the history of slavery who spoke to us via email, told us that the percentage of slaveholding families is "the better measure of the extent of slaveholding." One reason this is true, according to historian Adam Goodheart in an interview with Politifact in August 2017, is that a person could be (and often was) a "slave master" but not technically a "slave owner":
"Many non-slaveholding whites in the South rented slaves from wealthier slaveholders ... so it was very common for a white Southerner to be a 'slave master' but not technically a 'slave owner.'"
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Case on point. Slavery in the "America'" can be focused on the 10% of African slaves that were received by the United States.
The other 90% were received in the Caribbean, Central and South America. With 90% settling in other regions, shouldn't
those other regions be 90% wealthier than the US?
“snopes should be banned from FR ... snopes is a super-hard-core leftist propaganda organ ...”
I have been saying the same about CNN for years. But that does not stop Freepers from posting links to CNN.
Simply not true. There was much commerce in America carried on that didn’t involve slaves. Most of the wealth of the south was spent fighting the civil war. Northern inventions and industry wasn’t based n slavery. The West ward expansion profited freed blacks as well as whites.
Jefferson Davis had plantations and his business manager, and dare I say it, overseer was a black man. This man had been educated to read, write and do the necessary accounting. IIRC he was still a “slave”. But as a valuable asset, for some reason, he was NOT horsewhipped just for fun. I doubt he horsewhipped any of the other slaves. I guess he was an “Uncle Tom” though.
Those self-deprecating wokeists know nothing about history or anything else for that matter.
I don’t care if 100% of the free population owned slaves. Over 160 years ago, our ancestors fought a bloody war that ended slavery in the United States, and we have paid trillions of dollars in reparations to the descendants of slaves since the advent of the “Great Society” in 1964. Time to move on.
Here’s an interesting fact, nearly every slave master, slave holder, and slave owner, were DEMOCRATS.
Anthony Johnson
The first documented slave owner in the colonies was a black man that owned a white man.
We need the names so they can pay their respects in the form of a major cash award.
Anthony Johnson and Castor. First slave owner in the British American colonies. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/horrible-fate-john-casor-180962352/
“a misleading statistic to minimize the importance of slavery to antebellum America.”
Like all good communists, Snopes removes responsibility from individual actors, and then imposes it upon arbitrarily defined groups.
Yup. Some Irish immigrant fresh off the boat building a railroad by hauling ties by hand? The coin they paid him was from SLAVE money!
Delaware was a split state when it came to Slavery. It was only legal in the southern counties, not Newcastle County. Also IIRC Slave ownership was allowed at the time of the Civil War, but not Slave trading.
Did they mention, almost all of slaveowners were Democrats?
How many owned *multiple* slaves? Or were a ‘slave master’ of *multiple* slaves?
Averages don’t paint the correct picture either.
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
I read the article and nowhere did they mention that 600,000 whites died that fought whites to free slaves....I believe the families of the 600,000 or at least 300,000 is due reparations and special treatment.
Also, I didn’t see in the article that the KKK, Democrat paramilitary arm, hanged white people as well...at least 1/3 of them were white.
The point, these memes argue, is that the number is small, and therefore Black people should not hold animus toward White people for the crimes of their ancestors.
See how this just glides past assuming that (a) it's okay to "hold animus" toward someone because of the "crimes of their ancestors" (as if you would even know what their ancestors did!), and (b) all "White people" [sic] have slaveholding ancestors?
(I'm white. I live in a state of the old Confederacy, but I grew up in the North. All my ancestors emigrated from Europe to northern states, about half of them after the Civil War. How many slaves do you think my ancestors had in Wisconsin and Dakota Territory in 1870? Uhh, that number is ZERO.)
Endorsing racism and racist assumptions is not cool, and that's what this article does.
Owning a slave was tremendously expensive so 1.4% of Americans (or 6% of southerners) owning slaves sounds realistic to me. Slaves were mostly owned by large plantations, not the poor dirt farmers that made up most of the South’s population. Corrected for inflation the price of a male slave in his prime was about the price of a new car today. Most southerners did well to afford a milk cow and a pig, buying a slave was out of the question.
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