36 “Only 1% of whites owned slaves” ... Is that true? I’ve heard it was about a third of southern states.
51 It was about 1.5% of the population, with about 8% of US families having a slave in the household. However, about 5,000 people owned 33% of the slaves - by 1860 slavery had become very concentrated. One guy in South Carolina alone owned 1100 people.
83 Roughly 5% of southern families owned salves. It wasn’t as prolific as it seems. Slaves were expensive to purchase. You had to be a person of means to own slaves.
Much confusion remains today on the historical truth.
History of Alabama, 1934, by Albert Burton Moore
The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War, 1960, by Bruce Catton
Broadly speaking, at most, 45% of all households in the southern states in 1860 held slaves. Of these households the vast majority owned 1-20 slaves.
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-57644003.html?key=01-42160D517E1D136F170E021F05224E263C4D3C437779710F720E0B61651A617F137155
The Last Ship That Brought Slaves From Africa to America: The Landing of the Clotilde at Mobile in the Autumn of 1859.
http://www.amren.com/features/2012/09/is-brazil-a-racial-democracy/
Is Brazil a “Racial Democracy”?
by Joe Webb
September 5, 2012
Edward Telles, a professor of sociology at Princeton, has written a useful book (Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil, Princeton University Press, 2005) that blows the whistle on Brazil’s “racial democracy” and the claim that the country has somehow solved problems that baffle the rest of us. Prof. Telles calls for greater honesty in describing the race question, but his proposed solution—quotas—would only light the fuse for greater conflict. His basic position is that genetic explanations for race differences have been refuted and that inequality is a product of culture. His descriptions of Brazilian society thoroughly debunk the image of harmony. ...
... Brazilian history is, indeed, very different from US history. The Portuguese came without women and brought about seven times as many black slaves as were imported to the United States. Slavery was not ended until 1888. Because there were so many blacks in Brazil, in the 1880s the government actively recruited white immigrants. This led to a literal “whitening” of the country, and whites argued that sustained miscegenation would improve the black racial stock. This notion of improvement-through-whitening remained in force for at least a century and is still commonly believed, much to Prof. Telles’s dismay. ...
The census figures from 1860 show that there were:
31,183,582 people living in America.
Of whom 3,950,528 were slaves and
393,975 were slaveholders.
There were 5,155,608 families in the US.
That works out to 1.5% of Americans being slaveholders, 13% of Americans being slaves, and about 8% of families with slaveholders.
If you look at just the undisputed Confederate states (excluding MO, KY, TN, MD, DE), then it is 6% of Confederates as slaveholders, 40% of Confederates as slaves and 32% of Confederate families.