What is your source for this statistic? I think it's high.
What is your source for this statistic? I think it's high.
From Jim Epperson's website:
"J.E.B. DeBow was the publisher/editor of DeBow's Review, a leading antebellum monthly magazine, published in New Orleans. DeBow was a committed pro-slavery Southerner who felt that the North was oppressing the South. He also, contrary to the beliefs of most white Southerners, passionately wanted the South to move away from agriculture and develop an industrial base. He was fascinated by numbers and had served as director of the 1850 United States census and had argued that the collection and distribution of statistics was an important task which required a professional staff, serving not just every ten years but all the time. DeBow was concerned about the claims of people like Helper that the average Southerner, being a non-slaveholder, had no stake in the success of the Confederacy. It is an interesting turn around from those late twentieth century Confederate supporters who argue that the Peculiar Institution had nothing to do with the Civil War. DeBow disagreed with that philosophy and the January 1861 issue of the Review carried an article by him refuting the claims that the average Southerner did not have a stake in the survival and expansion of slavery.
Reprinted below is his analysis of the 1850 census and what it showed about the actual percentages of Southerners who were part of slave holding families, not just the more limited numbers counting only the actual (usually the senior male member) owner.
[The] non-slaveholding class ... 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. ? 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. It will thus appear that the slaveholders of the South, so far from constituting, numerically, an insignificant portion of its people, as has been malignantly alleged, make up an aggregate greater in relative proportion than the holders of any other species of property whatever, in any part of the world; and that of no other property can it be said, with equal truthfulness, that it is an interest of the whole community. While every other family in the States I have specially referred to are slaveholders, but one family in every three and a half families in Maine, New-Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, are holders of agricultural land; and in European states the proportion is almost indefinitely less. The proportion which the slaveholders of the South bear to the entire population is greater than that of the owners of land or houses, agricultural stock, State, bank, or other corporation securities anywhere else. No political economist will deny this. Nor is that all. Even in the States which are among the largest slaveholding, South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee, the land proprietors outnumber nearly two to one, in relative proportion, the owners of the same property in Maine, Massachusetts, and Connecticut; and if the average number of slaves held by each family throughout the South be but nine, and if one half of the whole number of slaveholders own under five slaves, it will be seen how preposterous is the allegation of our enemies, that the slaveholding class is an organized wealthy aristocracy.
The poor men of the South are the holders of one to five slaves, and it would be equally consistent with truth and justice to say that they represent, in reality, its slaveholding interest.
The fact being conceded, that there is a very large class of persons in the slaveholding States who have no direct ownership in slaves, it may be well asked, upon what principle a greater antagonism can be presumed between them and their fellow-citizens, than exists among the larger class of non-landholders in the free States and the landed interests there? If a conflict of interest exists in one instance, it does in the other; and if patriotism and public spirit are to be measured upon so low a standard, the social fabric at the North is in far greater danger of dissolution than it is here. Though I protest against the false and degrading standard to which Northern orators and statesmen have reduced the measure of patriotism, which is to be expected from a free and enlightened people, and in the name of the non-slaveholders of the South, fling back the insolent charge that they are only bound to their country by the consideration of its "loaves and fishes," and would be found derelict in honor and principle, and public virtue, in proportion as they were needy in circumstances, I think it but easy to show that the interest of the poorest non-slaveholder among us is to make common cause with, and die in the last trenches, in defence of the slave property of his more favored neighbor."
In fact, the poor whites were fighting for slavery also.
Sorry if the record of the day seems to conflict with the myth that some perpetrate today.
Walt