Here is a relevant quote:
In 1850 there were in all the Southern States only 170,000 men owning more than five slaves each, and they owned 2,800,000 out of 3,300,000. These men by their system rendered labor degrading -- they have driven out their non-slaveholding neighbors by hundreds of thousands to find homes and self-respect in the free air of the West.
-- Edward Atkinson, "Is Cotton Our King?" The Continental Monthly, Volume I, No. 3, March, 1862, pp. 247-256.
Fehrenbach quotes the figure of 182,000 black slaves in Texas in 1860, worth over $106,000,000 or 20% more than the value of all developed real estate in the State. He adds,
If the farmer class in Texas had absorbed different ideas and ideals of society from the planters, they also differed from Middle Western farmers in another striking way. The slave system created a terrible sense of insecurity in Texas and the South. The institution of Negro slavery was not really popular with the more than 400,000 white Texans -- 95% of the population -- who owned none, although they had grown up with it and considered it normal. What was sometimes not understood fully in the North was that the average white Texan feared a Negro insurrection as much as the slavemaster [or, as we have seen elsewhere, more -- LG], because a slave revolt threw all whites in danger. Also, the white farmers supported the institution of slavery vehemently, because virtually all of them were adamantly opposed to Negro equality......no Western farm states had much regard for the Negro as a man -- even after the conclusion of the Civil War many Northern states denied the franchise to freedmen. But the Wisconsin farmer did not feel insecure toward the Negro, because he did not live up against the slave horde......
....This was not unusual in any historical sense. It was a characteristic of all societies based on the subordination of one differentiated group to another, from Norman Sicily in the Middle Ages to Hispanic America. The Negro lived in another country from the white farmer; he was a faceless mass; he was hardly thought of as human. The men who owned, and even abused, slaves tended to think of them in more personal terms, as human beings, than those who watched and feared them from a short distance.
-- T. R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star, p. 328f.
I would add that your proportions appear to be sourced from an AOL Members website previously cited on FR threads on the subject, whose owner relies on McPherson and Foner, among other Unionists. I have to object to relying on those two Marxist agitators for any sort of summary or freighted statement, inasmuch as both of them have been guilty of playing politics by scraping up as much mud as possible to throw on white Southerners, which is the Clintonista Left's enemy class of voters, at whom they constantly point their crooked fingers and croak, "eeeeeevilll!!" for purely political purposes, Clinton himself engaging both of them to rewrite the National Park Service educational materials handed out to the public at Gettysburg with the desired political spin.
It is, as I review the AOL website owner's data, evidently the goal of the compilers to broaden as much as possible, among Southern whites, an attachment to "the slaveowning class", i.e. the enemy class of American history, insofar as the numbers will permit. How they arrived at a number for "families" that supposedly owned slaves, I don't know, but the intention to broaden ownership is evident from the language and categories used. The numbers might be different if we were to (somehow) count instead the number of suffragans who owned slaves, or simply the number of individuals who owned them. But one detects a tendency in the compilation that, given the sources cited, merits a cautionary note.
That said, and going by no better authority than my own recall of a lecture on slavery in Texas (which I heard assuming the lecturer was on the level with her audience -- which would change if I found out she were affiliated with a Left NGO, for example, like McPherson, and like another lecturer active in Texas archaeological circles who stated explicitly in her lecture that her thrust in researching slave life in Texas was political: to affirm black lives in the past and politics in the present [and presumably, then, to inculpate and denigrate whites qua whites betimes, n/w/s she is a white Leftist herself]), I think the numbers were slightly different than Fehrenbach's 95% proportion of whites not owning slaves, as he said. Rather, I recall that the proportion was more like 85/15% nonowners to owners, and it is a little fuzzy now whether that 15% was owners, or owners of more than one slave, which was a category which I believe was discussed.
There was demographic significance to that threshhold, by the way, insofar as a single slave, or two slaves, tended to live with the family in the house and work side by side with family members, whereas larger numbers were associated with institutionalized arrangements (quarters, factories, workshops, etc.). Which implies further that there was a middle ground not discussed by any of our sources, in which some whites lived with slaves in a far more personalizing situation that would tend to inoculate them against the kind of group anxiety and hysteria about slave revolts that were common in the rest of society; but these slaveholders of "family slaves" were a splinter group.
One last point. I think I've made and adequately supported my overarching point that support for secession was not sprung entirely from peculiar interest, contrary the munching Red termites who have advanced that politically loaded argument.
There were reasons of politics, reasons of race and pride, reasons of fear of both peaceful labor competition and armed violence, that impelled Southerners who did not own slaves to take up arms in defense of their States against Northern armies pouring into them, and the Abolitionist and sectionalist destroyers who stood behind those armies, ordering them into the South.
I suspect that x does what I do, goes to the source. Specifically the 1860 census data available from the University of Virginia here. Coming up with x's figures is easy, since the census gives totals of slaves, slave owners, families, etc. Looking at the number of slave owners in each state, and assuming that virtually all of them had wives and children, the dividing the number of slave owners by the number of families gives a good indication of how widespread slave ownership was.
Here is a relevant quote:
By 1860 that total had risen slightly. According to the 1860 census only 216,276 slave owners owned 5 or fewer. That would mean about 178,000 owned more than 5 slaves. Regardless, what that shows is that slave ownership was very much a middle-class institution and not something restricted to the very wealthy. That would support the idea that the average Southerner either owned a slave, lived in family supported by slaves, or who's economic well-being was dependent on slave owners. Give the widespread dependency on slavery then why is it so surprising to you that they would rebel in order to protect it?
That said, and going by no better authority than my own recall of a lecture on slavery in Texas...
Well now there's a source we can take to the bank.
I think I've made and adequately supported my overarching point that support for secession was not sprung entirely from peculiar interest, contrary the munching Red termites who have advanced that politically loaded argument.
If you say so.
Thanks, non. I don't know anything about an AOL site. I simply rely on figures which are common knowledge. If you want to recalculate them from the data (available at the UVA census site), lentulus, go ahead.
The numbers might be different if we were to (somehow) count instead the number of suffragans who owned slaves, or simply the number of individuals who owned them.
You do realize, lentulus, that you get very different figures if you use individuals (men, woman, and children) or voters as the numerator (or is it the denominator? I was never that good at math).
The percentage of slave owning individuals is always going to be watered down by large numbers of dependent wives children who would in the normal course of things own few slaves or other property.
The figure for voters might be closer to that for families. But if there were serious restrictions on the suffrage, it could end up being a higher figure than that for families.
The figure for families or households may have problems, but it's a better bet than the others, because it can indicate people who were intimately tied into the slave owning system without owning a slave themselves: dependent wives and children, younger sons, older relatives who lived together with their niece's or nephew's family.
So far as I can make out a "suffragan" is a "a "bishop who assists another bishop." If there's some relevance in the number of auxiliary bishops who owned slaves out of the total number of auxiliary bishops, now's the time to make the case.
There was demographic significance to that threshold, by the way, insofar as a single slave, or two slaves, tended to live with the family in the house and work side by side with family members, whereas larger numbers were associated with institutionalized arrangements (quarters, factories, workshops, etc.). Which implies further that there was a middle ground not discussed by any of our sources, in which some whites lived with slaves in a far more personalizing situation that would tend to inoculate them against the kind of group anxiety and hysteria about slave revolts that were common in the rest of society; but these slaveholders of "family slaves" were a splinter group.
That is an interesting hypothesis, and something you might want to explore. Geography probably played an important role.
The farmer or tradesman who had one slave and lived in the highlands where there were few slaves or slave owners would have a different view than another owner of a single slave who lived among the plantation slaves and planters of fertile lowlands.
The aspirational hypothesis comes into play. The highlander might see his future prospects tied to the development of handicrafts or manufactures and the prosperity of small farmers, while the lowlander would inevitably attach his hopes to cotton exports and slavery, to buying bottom land and field hands.
Both our highland and our lowland slave owner might have little fear from their own slaves. But the lowlander might worry about the neighbors' many slaves and the highlander might not have as much to fear.
There were reasons of politics, reasons of race and pride, reasons of fear of both peaceful labor competition and armed violence, that impelled Southerners who did not own slaves to take up arms in defense of their States against Northern armies pouring into them, and the Abolitionist and sectionalist destroyers who stood behind those armies, ordering them into the South.
If you just want to make a case for your thesis, you stop there and make the Northerners the aggressors in the conflict. If you really want to understand and do justice to all concerned that's hardly the last word. You'd have to take Northern fears into account as well. But I suspect you just want to see one side of the story.