It's Claimed that Only 1.6% of US Citizens Owned Slaves In 1860. We Ran the Numbers

Snopes ^ | April 4, 2024 | Alex Kasprak

[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.'"

[MichaelRDanger]

Nathaniel Butler and William Ellison were two of the largest slave merchants of the early to mid-19th Century. The first person to legally own another person in the English Colonies was Anthony Johnson. Prior to Johnson vs Casor all blacks brought to the colonies were treated as indentured servants and set free after a specified period of time. Johnson himself was freed and prospered. He could not bring himself to free, as was required by law, John Casor who left on his own. Johnson sued for his return and eventually won his case.

[discostu]

I don’t really think the percentage is that important. The important part is it was allowed. The country went through all the trouble of making a foundational document that said all men are created equal, and then said “except in some states, where you can be property”.

[Chewbarkah]

Then we would be no better than the left, banning instead of out-reasoning our opponents. Better to know thine enemy in a free market of ideas, so we can surveille what lurks over the horizon.

[BroJoeK]

tophat9000: "Now fact check that 95% of us citizens slave owners were Democrat. And 0% Republicans
How is slavery America orginal sin... but not Democrat Party orginal sin? ..."

Somewhere I saw it alleged that in 1860 some Delaware slaveholders voted for Republican Lincoln, but I can't confirm it, and if true, they were certainly the only slaveholders ever to do so.
And they would not be, strictly speaking, Republicans, since they voted for People's Party anti-Democrat candidates, who included only one Republican, Lincoln, on their ballots.

In 1860, throughout the South, the choice was basically, Breckenridge's Southern Democrats or John Bell's Constitutional Unionists, and both of those were slaveholders, the difference being Bell opposed secession and his supporters were able to keep eight Southern states from seceding before Fort Sumter, with four of those remaining in the Union even after Fort Sumter.

During the Civil War the Confederacy was ruled by the single-party Southern Democrats, which then remained in control of the "Solid South" for the next ~100 years.

Arguably, beginning in late December 1860, the Democrat Party officially declared secession and then war, against the United States, and I can find no historical record of where Democrats ever officially surrendered.

So far as I can tell, Democrats are still at war against the United States to this very day.

Democrats have always been deadly serious about their political goals.
Republicans, not always so much:

[Bull Snipe]

The country went through all the trouble of making a foundational document that said all men are created equal, and then said “except in some states, where you can be property”.

At the time the Constitution of the United States was ratified and became our instrument of Government, slavery was legal in all 13 states.

[discostu]

More hypocritical doesn’t make it better.

[Georgia Girl 2]

The wealth of the West was built on mining and ranching. The wealth of the East was built on industrialism. Only the South relied on slavery because it was largely agrarian and suited to slave labor.

You can’t put a slave to work in a factory and get any meaningful production out of them and they will sabotage your machinery whenever they can. That’s why slavery died out early in the east not because of any humanitarian reasons.

Picking cotton and tobacco and loading and unloading bales of the stuff onto ships is ideal work for slaves. Most slaves were owned by the big southern plantations. Hence the low percentage of people who owned slaves. They were expensive, you had to feed them, clothe them, doctor them, coerce them out of every hour of work you got out of them and then worry if they were going to slit your throat at night while you slept. Most people simply couldn’t afford to pay for slaves or didn’t want the hassle of it or didn’t believe in it.

[Chewbarkah]

It’s interesting to look at Snopes’ methodology. This article does not “fact-check” the subject meme, it hi-jacks it to push its alternative narrative. Snopes demonstrates that the cited statistic is mathematically correct within an insignificant margin of error (only 1.4% of Americans owned slaves in 1860, not 1.6%).

We can probably all agree that people should consume internet content critically: even mathematically true statistics yield different implications depending on context, and are often manipulative. Whodathunkit?

But the meme being true does not tie whitey to the whippin’ post and justify reparations, so Snopes changes the frame of reference. It’s not “percentage of slaveowners in the US” that matters; it’s “percentage of people owned, borrowed, rented, etc., slaves in the states with the most slaves”. Why, Mississippi and South Carolina score 50%! I guess we are supposed to get emotionally caught up in the higher number and forget that most Americans were never part of that world.

[Retain Mike]

The fact checkers should first be known as spin meisters.

Winston Churchill put slavery into perspective in volume three of his History of the English Speaking People, when he began discussion of the subject by saying,” An aristocracy of planters living in rural magnificence and almost feudal state, and a multitude of smallholders, grew cotton for the world by slave labour. Of the six million white inhabitants of the so-called ‘southern states’ less than three hundred and fifty thousand owned slaves, and only forty thousand controlled plantations requiring a working unit of more than twenty field hands. But the three or four thousand principal slave-owners generally ruled the politics of the South as effectively as the medieval baronage had ruled England.”

After the Convention, the growing of cotton and invention of the cotton gin in 1794 revived slavery and made it appear lucrative. Only appearance was possible, because Southern planters provided the basic needs for all slaves even though only a little more than half labored meaningfully on a plantation and they without incentive to be productive.

Slavery disappeared from the Northern states, because indentured servitude and European hardships, such as the Irish Potato Famine and Scottish Clearances, had provided cheap sources of labor for factories and farms. It should have disappeared from the South as planters moved to indentured servitude and/or became tobacco and textile barons through vertical monopolies.

Essentially, the Industrial Revolution made slavery obsolete. The wealth of the country was developed by exploiting machines. Slaves and slave holders became of ever more minimal importance as the 19th century progressed and we changed from an agricultural to a manufacturing country.

[Bull Snipe]

another way to look at it is, based on the 1860 Census, 49% of free families in Mississippi owned one or more slaves.
In South Carolina the number free families, owning at least one slave, was 45%. In Maryland, 12% and Delaware 3%

[carcraft]

Thanks, I knew Johnson was the first in the British American colonies to own a slave, and that he was black. sorry I screwed up. Thanks for the correction. Whites were brought to America against their will as indentured servants as well. . Basically the ships captain auctioned the people for a length of time then they were supposed to be freed. The first slave rebellion that occurred in the British American colonies involved both white and black indentured servants

[ifinnegan]

“ Many non-slaveholding whites in the South rented slaves from wealthier slaveholders…”

Which helped them be able to save money to buy their freedom.

[Paal Gulli]

A Ouija board is more likely to come up with the correct answer than Snopes.

[carcraft]

Yes it was allowed but from the start slavery was never universally popular. Most of Americas first 90 years was spent limiting slavery. American Quakers provided the religious under pinning for Wilberforce’s fight against slavery in England.. The Anti slavery movement culminated in the civil war.

[BroJoeK]

From the article: "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......."

Like anything else, the percentages depend on how you measure them.
For example, numbers for the Deep South are vastly different from those of Border States.
It also makes a big difference if we count only the numbers of slaveholders, or also the numbers of people who lived in slaveholding families.

We can see this, for example, in estimates of Confederate soldier slaveholders.
If we only look at soldiers themselves, historians estimate between 10% and 20% owned slaves.
But if we ask, how many of their fathers owned slaves, then the estimates are between 25% and 33%.

"Historian Joseph Glatthaar’s statistical analysis of the 1861 volunteers in what would become the Army of Northern Virginia reveals that one in 10 owned a slave and that one in four lived with parents who were slave-owners."

"...about one-third of all Confederate soldiers belonged to slaveholding families..."
 James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1997), p. ix.

"While it is true that most Confederate soldiers did not own slaves, erroneous single digit percentages are often used to reinforce this myth.
The truth is that closer to 20-25% of all Southern soldiers either owned slaves or their fathers did.
Some studies have concluded the number was over 30%.
Additionally, just because an individual did not own slaves, it cannot be assumed that they were opposed to the institution."

I think all of these numbers are correct, depending on which Confederate units are considered and which states they were from.

If we compare slaveholders in each state to the numbers of free families, we see slaveholders in nearly 50%, in Deep South states like Mississippi, but fewer than 15% in Border States like Missouri.
Yes, this methodology is disputed, since it's claimed that on large plantations, there might have been multiple slaveholders in the same family.
However, it's also true that a large slaveholding plantation had many other white families who depended on it economically, so the direct benefits of slaveholding spread far and wide beyond just the individual slaveholder.

And, of course, it's long been argued that the entire US economy benefitted from slave-produced products and exports like cotton, tobacco, sugar, hemp and rice.
But that is an entirely different conversation, I'd think.

"Negroes Driven South [from Pennsylvania] by the Rebel Officers
Harper's Weekly Magazine, November 8, 1862, pp. 712-713., p. 16.."

[mewzilla]

Well, I’m not.

My family’s been here almost 400 years.

Nobody ever owned slaves.

Gee, maybe I should run for office...?

Bwah hah hah hah hah!

[discostu]

There’s tons of excuses. But I think that’s one of the big reasons America gets so much crap for slavery. We put these great ideals on paper, and then right off the bat chose not to live up to them. Add in the fact that by the time the Revolution happened a lot of Europe was already moving away from slavery and we kept it around for almost 100 years. We’re the country with the worst “look” for our slavery period.

[cgbg]

Most whites in the US today had ancestors who came over to the US during the heavy immigration period from the 1880s to 1920s or so.

Obviously they had nothing to do with slavery.

[cgbg]

There is no “we”.

Once you get over that the “slavery” guilt is seen as stupid.

[HamiltonJay]

Yes, Slavery was dying, at least in the western world, and the Cotton Gin did indeed give it a reprieve at least temporarily... but even without the Civil War, slavery as a viable economic model, was doomed. No this doesn’t make it any less inhumane, but it is the truth.

The insanity that these “fact checkers” engage in is just flat out ludicrous. Slaves were not cheap, and very very few people owned them (rich).. and those rich folks like rich folks do, tended to be the folks who had the most influence. The idea of owning a slave was beyond the means of 98% of the southern population, and while I have little doubt that slave owners would certainly would be willing to rent out their slaves at times, especially during after harvest and before spring planting. The idea that close to 10% of the southern population were bossing slaves around is just ludicrous on its face.

In 1860 the average price of a slave was 1500-2000 women were a little less. The average income in 1860, was < 18.20 per month, or less than $220 per year. Only the exceedingly wealthy, or those that had inherited them could remotely think of owning a slave. Folks making $220 a year didn’t have the means to buy a $1500 item or even finance one... and that’s just the actual purchase price, slaves need fed and clothed and housed etc etc etc.

I don’t have any doubt that you could work out arrangements with a slave owner to rent one of their slaves for labor, much like day labor today) when they weren’t busy with the needs of their masters plantation, but the idea that this represented 8% or 10% of the population having a slave at their becking call regularly is just flat out ridiculous.

Slavery is wrong, but lying about it, doesn’t help anything or anyone. Snopes or whoever it is that published this claptrap should be ashamed of themsevles. This is just flat out lies, just like that moronic professor who got famous lying about the US giving smallpox infected blankets to the indians... IT NEVER HAPPENED! Yet that lie is still out there being repeated.. This kind of crap needs to be called for the BS it is.