Percentage Question

[cblodg]

I have been going through my college notes to try and figure out the percentage of Confederate soldiers who owned slaves.

I've even pulled out my copy of White Over Black by Winthrop Jordan, in trying to find the answer.

Does any one have it off had?

Thanks;

Chris

[RJSamp]

Well something like less than 5% of the Free population owned slaves.....including whites, Indians, free blacks, Creoles, etc. Don't know if any slaves owned slaves (kind of doubt it).

Your % number has got to be a lot smaller than that.....especially because the numbers would exclude CSA Soldiers whose Daddy owned the slaves.....not the soldier themself....and I would imagine some women owned slaves (maybe their husband was killed in the war.....) and of course they wouldn't have been 'known' soldiers.....

What percentage of CSA soldiers were officers? That might be a good place to start looking for a percentage of soldiers who were slaveowners....

[MStuart]

What percentage of CSA soldiers were officers? That might be a good place to start looking for a percentage of soldiers who were slaveowners....

I'd think that was the key. Although hardly a scientific theory, I'd bet $$ that the vast majority of soldiers that brought servants with them were officers. Money and pre-war social standing having a good deal to do with it.

Mark

[madisontigers]

I can remember hearing something like % 90 didn't own slaves, but then again, that's likely to be a reenactor fable.I'd like to conduct research and get an approximate figure though.

[indguard]

Well, it is easy enough to find out how many people in thw whole country owned slaves by going to the 1860 census on line...

http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-l...en.pl?year=860


That is a searchable database and you can find the per state slave ownership. From there it would be an interesting thing to note that the army could HARDLY be any higher than the national average, and since many slave owners never went to war, its a good bet that the percentage if far less.

In any case, this would be a starting point.

[tompritchett]

Well, it is easy enough to find out how many people in thw whole country owned slaves by going to the 1860 census on line...

Several years ago I did just that and loaded the data into a spreadsheet. Basically I found that 30.8% percentage of the families in the Confederate states owned slaves. In addition, 52% of those families owned 5 slaves or less. I posted the results per state several years ago on the forum, but that data is no longer available. Tomorrow I will regenerate that table.

[ewtaylor]

As you read you will notice the author state more than once it is mostly "guess work".

http://members.aol.com/jfepperson/estimate.html

ew taylor

[Bill_Cross]

52% of those families owned 5 slaves or less.

I have always marveled at the citing of that figure. It's sorta like saying "the majority of child molesters have molested fewer than five victims."

I have slave-owning ancestors. They lived in Virginia's tobacco country, and gradually worked-out the land. They apparently took several of their house servants to Missouri when they relocated there in the 1830s. When the war broke out, three of them fought for the Confederacy (none for the Union, it was not a "brothers war" in my family).

Slaves were a part of their social and economic order, and the fact that they didn't own "a lot" of them made no real difference from what I can see.

Educators do us a disservice by trying to imply that the South was fighting to perpetuate plantation slavery. Of course, the life of a field hand on a maleria-infested sugar plantation in the deep South was much, much worse than the lot of a "house ######" in Maryland or Delaware. But that doesn't change the fact that it was slavery.

It's perfectly understandable why Southern men would fight for the continuation of a system they aspired to enjoy. After all, many of us play the lottery today because we hope to get rich. And to use another modern example, the widespread, grass roots support for abolishing the Federal estate tax (the so-called "death tax") comes from people who would not be touched by its reach. The result is that it has helped the very rich, yet that support comes from the fact that most of us aspire to be rich, and want to keep as much of our money once we get there as Rockefeller or Mellon or Vanderbilt or Trump.

Southerners had numerous reasons for wanting to keep slavery beside personal aspirations, including a belief that a free society would mean the end of white supremacy, the intermingling of the races, and the decline in wages for free white workers because of black competition.

But to say that most Rebs didn't own slaves tells us something about the cause of the war (the usual reason for the citation) is plain wrong in my opinion.

[Rob Weaver]

I usually don't wade into the highly heated waters of a discussion on slavery, and I don't think I'm going to say anything inflamatory herein. I believe that you will find the majority of slave-owning Confederate soldiers in the officer ranks, just as in the educated, officer ranks one will find the perpetuation of slavery (or its expansion into the territories) cited as the reason for armed conflict.
Story I found amusing: I was visiting a farm/plantation museum in Virginia a few years ago. During his talk, the docent leading the group talked about how unprofitable the farm was for so many years after the war. It was not my home, so I wisely held my tongue, but inwardly I bet that rising labor costs had to have had some effect on the profit margin.

Sgt. Rob Weaver
Pine River Boys
Co I, 7th Wisconsin Volunteers

[tompritchett]

It was not my home, so I wisely held my tongue, but inwardly I bet that rising labor costs had to have had some effect on the profit margin.

Labor costs associated with sharecropping probably was a major factor but I also wonder about the effect of taxes on land owners that arose during the Reconconstruction.