About which percentage of Southerners owned slaves in 1860?

Answer 1

Absolutely not. Well under fifty per cent of southerners owned slaves. Even in the Rebel armies, well under fifty per cent of the soldiers were slave owners.

Slaves were expensive. A male slave in his prime might be worth $1000. This was enough money to buy a farm of 500 acres. Only a handful of people throughout the south were wealthy enough to have 200 or more slaves. Most slaves belonged to larger operations, which had over 100 slaves. Some small farmers saved enough that they could buy one slave, and he worked alongside his owner.

It is a myth that southerners were fighting to preserve slavery, or that northerners were fighting to abolish it. Abolition became a northern goal after a year and a half of war, as a military measure, to further gall the Rebels and threaten the position of wealthy southerners. Then, as now, the rich who owned a lot of slaves had disproportionate political power.

Think about it - would you go fight, and fight hard, for years, just so some rich man could keep his slaves?

Smearing the southerners as evil slaveholders is a postwar strategem meant to obscure the fact the legally and Constitutionally the south was correct. The Confederacy did not invent to concept of secession. That was a northern invention, first voiced by the northern Whigs in the 1790s. The northeast was bitterly opposed to the War of 1812 (and many northern merchants grew rich carrying on a treasonable trade with the enemy - the British could not have maintained their Army in America without the supplies purchased from these Yankees). The Yankees were so upset over that war that they called a Convention at Hartford, Connecticut in 1815 to discuss plans for secession of New England. By the time the Convention met, the war had ended, so the idea died for a time. But the fact is, it took a voluntary agreement of the states to become a part of the US. The Constitution says nothing on the question of a state leaving, but EVERYBODY knew that of COURSE a state could leave the Union if it wanted to. They knew this right up until Lincoln changed the rules, at gunpoint.

Answer 2

Approximately 52.7% in the scientific way there are to be about 6000841 slaves in Rome but in Georgia about 2300782 including newborns and children (do not call me a nerd) :~( I didn't look into it. What I did look into was a comparison of "African/black/afro-American/African-American" slaves to world population at the height of "black slavery" (1860) and all slaves to world population at some other time, I chose 1500.

In 1860 there were approx. 3.5 mil "black/etc" slaves equalling around 0.28% of the world population where in 1500 the world population was around 500 mil and the percentage of people enslaved then was around 3%!

Answer 3

1,900,000 southerners owned slaves, of which:

1,400,000 owned from 1 to 10 slaves;

300,000 owned more than 10 to 20 slaves;

200,000 owned more than 20 slaves.

Answer 4

Approximately 21%.

Answer 5

Twenty percent