Slave ownership devolved on 50% of whites in LA, MS and SC, and on @ 33% in the other so-called seceded states.
"My Dear Sir:
"While in Charleston recently I adverted, in conversation with you, to some considerations affecting the question of slavery in its application to the several classes of population at the South, and especially to the non-slaveholding class who, I maintained, were even more deeply interested than any other in the maintenance of our institutions, and in the success of the movement now inaugurated for the entire social, industrial, and political independence of the South. At your request, I promised to elaborate and commit to writing the points of that conversation, which I now proceed to do, in the hope that I may thus be enabled to give some feeble aid to a cause which is worthy of the Sidneys, Hampdens, and Patrick Henrys, of earlier times.
When in charge of the national census office, several years since, I found that it had been stated by an abolition senator from his seat, that the number of slaveholders at the South did not exceed 150,000. Convinced that, it was a gross misrepresentation of facts, I caused a careful examination of the returns to be made, which fixed the actual number at 347,255, and communicated the information, by note, to Senator Cass, who read it in the Senate. I first called attention to the fact that the number embraced slaveholding families, and that to arrive at the actual number of slaveholders, it would be necessary to multiply by the proportion of persons which the census showed to a family. When this was done, the number was swelled to about two millions.
Since these results were made public, I have had reason to think that the separation of the schedules of the slave and the free was calculated to lead to omissions of the single properties, and that on this account, it would be safe to put the number of families at 375,000, and the number of actual slaveholders at about two millions and a quarter.
Assuming the published returns, however, to be correct, it will appear that one half of the population of South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana, excluding the cities, are slaveholders, and that one third of the population of the entire South are similarly circumstanced. The average number of slaves is nine to each slaveholding family, and one half of the whole number of such holders are in possession of less than five slaves."
-- J.E.B. DeBow, 1860
DeBow was the head of the 1850 census.
Walt
Wow, that runs contrary to everything I had been taught about slavery. 50% seems rather impossible since it required a modicum of wealth and property to maintain slaves. That would mean that half of all southerners were of sufficient wealth to own slaves, which seems somewhat of a stretch.
I'll admit that I am no means an expert on the subject, merely subject to enecdotal claims ... but I probably should educate myself more on the matter.
I'm still not convinced that the confederate flag = a love of slavery (there were other quibbles between the north and south), and even then ... the freed slaves were somewhat segregated even when the fled north. They weren't exactly welcomed with open arms by the Yankees. Even in the Union-Succeeded state of West Virginia, my collegue's grandmother told me stories of how black folks were not allowed in their towns, unless they wanted rocks thrown at their heads.
And this was a state that succedded from the Confederacy.
I don't believe that the war was all about love for Black folks.