Historians and the extent of slave ownership in the Southern United States. By Otto H. Olsen

Historians and the extent of slave ownership in the Southern United States. By Otto H. Olsen

Civil War History,  Dec. 2004   

In a recent brief and thoughtful volume, David Brion Davis has directed attention to what he calls a "paranoid style" affecting the antebellum debate over slavery in the United States. (1) Encouraged by insecurities as well as convictions, this style has remained a lasting as well as distorting force in American thought, and its influence o­n the posture of the victorious "free" society has had enduring consequences. Then and since, slavery has served as a convenient and perfect enemy. It epitomized evil and became a symbol that has been used to define and justify the social conditions and history of a capitalist, free labor society. A symbol of such convenience obviously would invite distortion; that it has, in fact, done so is suggested by the persistence of certain questionable assumptions about the nature of slave ownership in the antebellum South.

For generations historians have been almost unanimous in emphasizing that black slaves were owned by a surprisingly small minority of whites. Allan Nevins states in his distinguished history of the Civil War era that "from the terms used in the angry discussion of slavery, it might have been supposed that almost the whole Southern population had a direct interest in it. Actually, of the 6,184,477 white folk in the slave States, o­nly 347,525 were listed by the census of 1850 as owners, and even this number gave an exaggerated impression of the facts." Adding members of slave owning families and other involved individuals, Nevins increases the figure but retains the emphasis, concluding that the number of whites directly involved in slavery probably "did not exceed 2,000,000. If so, not o­ne-third of the population of the South and border States had any direct interest in slavery as a form of property. This is a fact of great important [sic] when we attempt to estimate the effect of slaveholding upon the culture and outlook of the Southern people." (2)

Nevins' conclusion is invariably affirmed by prominent commentators. According to the standard account by lames G. Randall and David Donald "the total number of slaveholders in 1850 was o­nly 347,525 out of a total white population of about six million in the slaveholding areas." Donald is even more emphatic elsewhere when he complains that "writers speak of the Southern interest in slavery, even when they perfectly well know that in the 'plantation' South o­nly o­ne fourth of the white families owned any slaves at all." (3) Roy F. Nichols and Elbert B. Smith assume the same stances (4) as do the authors of practically all the outstanding college textbooks o­n the history of the United States. Typically these textbooks include such statements as "only a minority of the whites owned slaves," "at all times nearly three-fourths of the white families in the South as a whole held no slaves"; "only o­ne family in four held any at all"; "slave ownership in the South was not widespread"; "not more than a quarter of the white heads of families were slave-owners, and even in the cotton states the proportion was less than o­ne-third"; "in 1850, o­nly o­ne in three owned any Negroes; o­n the eve of the Civil War, the ratio was o­ne in four"; and slave owners "probably made up less than a third of southern whites." (5)

While o­ne seldom can quarrel with the statistics presented by these many writers, serious questions can be raised respecting the significance of this degree of slave distribution in the South. Although the constant conclusion has been that the number of whites owning slaves was remarkably small and that the South was therefore an unusually oligarchical society, the comparative basis for such a judgment has never been firmly established. Instead, that judgment appears to have rested primarily o­n a moral repugnance toward slavery and an exceedingly simplistic conception of the meaning of slave ownership. But was the slave South really more oligarchic, especially in an economic sense, than, say, the nineteenth-century North or the United States today? And precisely how does o­ne determine this? What should the distribution of slave ownership be compared with in nonslave societies? Without considering such questions it is difficult to see how the extent of slaveholding in the antebellum South can be properly evaluated.

The most apparent origin of the accusation that southern slavery was politically and economically oligarchical was, of course, the antebellum antislavery movement. Popular northern concepts of a "Slave Power," a "Slave Oligarchy," and a "Slave Conspiracy" reflected that attitude, and Frederick Law Olmsted directly related this purported lack of democracy in the South to the extent of slaveholding among whites. Speaking of Virginia slave owners, Olmsted concluded that "they are not, I suppose, o­ne to a hundred of the people," although they were in fact about o­ne to four of the people. In Georgia, utilizing census figures, he reported far more accurately, but with the same emphasis, that "only twenty-seven in a hundred of the white families ... are possessed of slaves." (6) Olmsted also correctly pointed to the concentration of most slaves in the hands of a much smaller number of large planters to bolster the oligarchical thesis.

The crucial political endorsement of this viewpoint was provided by the Republican Party. "There is not a State in the Union in which the slaveholders number o­ne-tenth part of the free white population," stated that party's address to the people of the United States in 1856, neglecting to include in its percentage figure, as it should have, all of the members of slaveholding families. Continuing in a similar distorted fashion the address asserted that nonslaveholders in the South "were reduced to a vassalage little less degrading than that of the slaves themselves, ... although the white population of the slaveholding States is more than six millions, of whom but 347,525, or less than o­ne-seventeenth, are the owners of slaves." (7) The appearance from within the South of Hinton Rowan Helper's The Impending Crisis of the South the following year immeasurably strengthened this conception.

In succeeding years convictions of the concentrated nature of slave ownership obviously encouraged northern Republican leaders to discredit and seriously underestimate the popularity of both secession and the Confederacy. During and after the war the same belief can readily be detected in antislavery glorifications of the Union cause, in the opposition to Lincoln's ten percent plan for Reconstruction, and in the support of plans for confiscation or other forms of federal intervention in the South.

Additional important confirmation of the Republican point of view came from abroad. o­ne lasting voice was added by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, who repeatedly referred to a narrow "oligarchy of the 300,000 slave lords" arrayed "against the 5,000,000 whites." (8) It would appear that in their eagerness to emphasize the importance of the class struggle Marx and Engels utilized statistics as carelessly as Republicans had. The same attitude also pervaded the full-length analysis of slavery by the Irish political economist John Elliott Cairnes that appeared in 1862. After arbitrarily excluding nonslaveholders of substantial condition as not properly a part of slave society, Cairnes depicted the South as composed solely of slaves, a small minority of slave owners, and "an idle and lawless rabble" numbering "about seven-tenths of the whole white population." Elsewhere he used a different figure. "When the whole wealth of a country is monopolized by a thirteenth part of its population," he wrote, apparently referring to slaveholders in general, "the o­nly possible result is that which we find--a despotism, in the last degree unscrupulous and impatient of control, wielded by the wealthy few." (9)

It appears then that the conception of a narrow distribution of slave ownership in the antebellum South, which is sometimes presented as a recent corrective to past distortions, largely originated with the early opponents of slavery. That conception was utilized to promote a negative view of slave society, particularly respecting its oligarchic nature and sometimes respecting the degraded state of the mass of southern whites as well.

For some reason antebellum defenders of slavery displayed little concern with the distribution of slaveholding among whites, although George Fitzhugh and Daniel R. Hundley did reply with some related effectiveness to accusations of general economic injustice within the South. (10) A direct confrontation

with the extent of slave ownership in the South was provided, however, by James D. B. De Bow, the noted publisher and editor from New Orleans and superintendent of the national census of 1850. De Bow was a racist who deigned even to count blacks as part of the population, but he did establish the number of slaveholders more precisely than others and raised a number of pertinent issues that have escaped appropriate consideration ever since.

Assuming the published returns ... to be correct, it will appear that o­ne-half of the [white] 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.

... 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. Whilst 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 slave-holding 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 interest 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. (11)

Of course De Bow's concluding prophecy was dramatically disproven soon thereafter and his general arguments discredited and forgotten by an entirely free labor nation. In the future, although the statistical exaggerations of the antislavery enthusiasts were properly modified, the general conclusion remained the o­ne that they had reached--that a remarkably small minority of southern whites had owned slaves or derived any direct benefit from slavery. Even within the South there was a new reluctance to see any supposed advantages to whites in the discredited institution. In a face saving gesture, cultivators of the myth of the Old South recalled slavery o­nly as a selfless burden rather than means of gain; while such prophets of the New South as Henry W. Grady and Daniel A. Tompkins more accurately characterized abolition itself as a blessing that opened up new and exciting economic opportunities for the former slave states.

During the decades following the conclusion of the Civil War, leading historians continued to insist upon the monopolistic nature of slave ownership. (12) Perhaps Woodrow Wilson best revealed how carelessly such conclusions were drawn, when after expanding the proportion of whites involved with slavery to almost 50 percent, he could still conclude that "less than half the white people of the southern States should be classed among those who determined the tone and methods of southern politics. The ruling class in each State was small, compact, and o­n the whole homogeneous." (13) The o­nly discovered modification of that attitude came, appropriately enough, from a French nobleman, the Comte de Paris, who suggested that although the slaveholders of the South did form "a real caste," they were "too numerous to constitute an aristocracy." (14)

The most influential historical contribution to the standard view was undoubtedly made by James Ford Rhodes' multivolume history of the Civil War era. According to Rhodes, "the political system of the South was an oligarchy under the republican form. The slave-holders were in a disproportionate minority in every State." (15) Rhodes, a very wealthy stockholder, failed to note that similar comments were being made by some social critics about nineteenth-century capitalists. Instead views such as his justified the Civil War to white Americans by identifying the South with oligarchical characteristics that violated a national commitment to political and economic democracy for whites. Nor was that all. Another embarrassment remained--that of reconciling the supposed economic opportunity of the new age of freedom with the manifest poverty of the white as well as black South. Again the heritage of slavery rather than new forms of internal and external exploitation provided a convenient and soothing explanation.

The scholarly profession overwhelmingly continued to endorse the oligarchical thesis expressed by Rhodes. Edward Channing, an historian, and John W. Burgess, a political scientist, soon did so, and in 1896 a journalist and freelance writer, Edward Ingle, focused attention o­n the broader consideration that "the greater part of southern wealth was held by a comparative few." (16) Some years later Albert Bushnell Hart and French Ensor Chadwick added the more original claim that, therefore, the willingness of the southern white population to follow the pro-slavery leadership of the South was "one of the perplexing things in human history." (17) It was not made clear why this should have been more perplexing than the habit of most peoples in the past to follow the leadership of privileged minorities.

The attitude of Hart and Chadwick reflected a growing inclination to disassociate the mass of southern whites from the institution of slavery, a development that undoubtedly reflected the spirit of sectional reconciliation marking the close of the nineteenth century. In 1909 a related attitude was expressed by Ulrich B. Phillips and Walter L. Fleming in a collective twelve volume work appropriately entitled The South in the Building of the Nation. According to Phillips not o­nly did "scarcely o­ne-fourth of the Southern white population" belong to slave owning families, but slavery was actually profitable o­nly for the few large holders among them, therefore "the advantages of the slave labor system were confined to the negroes themselves and to a small proportion of the whites." (18) Phillips was thus disassociating an even larger body of whites from any advantageous connection with slavery, although, largely because of his racist beliefs, he remained sympathetic to slavery and absolved the institution itself of being harmful to the enslaved blacks.

Phillips was also perplexed by the willingness of the white South to support an institution that he had decided was economically unprofitable, and in his well known article of 1928, "The Central Theme of Southern History," he offered as his answer to this dilemma the determination of southern whites to maintain white supremacy. This thesis has become increasingly popular, in part because we have become so aware of the pervasiveness and importance of racism in our history. Without denying the historical importance of white racism in both North and South, it must also be noted that minimizing the number of southerners with an economic stake in slavery encourages an overestimation of the independent force of racism itself.

Throughout the early twentieth century the major works dealing with southern history continued to stress, as did Clement Eaton, that the "overwhelming majority" of southern white farmers did not own slaves." (19) Unusually restrained was Avery Craven's comment that antebellum southerners "were a people close to the soil and some among them held slaves." Some time earlier Craven advised that as an economic interest we could "almost ignore [slavery] in our study of the sectional conflict." (20)

A variety of specialized studies followed the same tradition. Lewis Gray's comprehensive study of southern agriculture concluded that "the proportion of the white population connected with slaveholding was comparatively small." (21) A similar emphasis is found in major studies of slavery o­n the sectional, state, and local level; (22) in economic histories of the United States; (23) in studies of secession and the coming of the Civil War; (24) in studies of southern states; (25) in the works of Marxist historians; (26) and in the works of black historians. (27) o­n occasion there has been exaggeration beyond that committed by the early Republicans. (28)

With such a long tradition of agreement o­n this particular question it is surprising to find the following statement made by John Hope Franklin in 1960:

   Recent studies of the ante-bellum social structure, for example,
   have made it clear that the vast majority of southern whites
   owned no slaves and had no hope of owning slaves. This
   incontrovertible fact has, of course, o­nly slowly made headway
   in popular thinking against the more attractive, exotic view,
   sustained in historical fiction, that slavery provided an idyllic
   existence for all or most southern whites. But as southern whites
   come to understand slavery as an institution that materially
   benefited a very small segment of the southern population, they
   may be freed from personal involvement in the defense not o­nly of
   Old South's defunct peculiar institution but also itssurviving corollary, the doctrine of white superiority. (29)

The truth is that historians, at least, have long agreed with Franklin's conception of slave ownership and in good part precisely because of the ideological prejudices that he endorses. But the value of such ideological motivations or results in historical interpretation is, to say the least, doubtful. What, after all, are we to do if more than "a very small segment of the southern population" did benefit from slavery?

There have been surprisingly few modifications of the conviction that slaveholding was narrowly distributed among whites. o­ne of the most important of these is associated with studies of the "plain folk of the Old South" by Frank L. Owsley and what has been called the Vanderbilt school. An earlier similar statement, also a product of Tennessee, was G. W. Dyer's study, Democracy in the South before the Civil War (1905), which professed that competitive conditions were good and life relatively prosperous for the average southern white of the 1850s. Dyer appears to have been diverted from stressing the extent of slave ownership, however, by his anxiety to emphasize the morality and industriousness of southern whites? (30)

While a strong interest in the antebellum southern yeomanry was maintained by numerous other authors, particularly William B. Hesseltine and Roger W. Shugg, as well as by the members of the Vanderbilt school, there was seldom any real concern with the spread of slaveholding among these yeomen. This was obviously the case for Blanche Henry Clark's study of Tennessee, which admittedly focused o­n that "large group of middle-class and yeomen farmers who did not own any slaves." (31) Owsley, himself, specifically did include small slaveholders among the mass of plain folk in the Old South, although it is a reflection of his reluctance to stress that identification (32) that a recent discussion of the Vanderbilt school appears under the title "Slavery and the Nonslaveholder." David Potter also described the work of this school as "designed to show that plain nonslaveholding farmers occupied an important and respected place in the Southern social structure." (33)

The most infrequent but probably most important modification of the traditional concept of slave ownership concerns the matter of perspective. (34) In 1919 William E. Dodd, while agreeing that the concentration of slave ownership in the South revealed "a dangerous tendency," went o­n to note that "these figures do not show such extreme concentration of wealth in a few hands as the facts of our own day disclose." (35) Again, in 1935 Frederick Jackson Turner briefly questioned Rhodes' identification of an interest in slavery solely with planters and certain professional classes allied with them: "Logically, this would lead to the conclusion that the institution of private property in the United States rests o­n the interest of o­nly the most prosperous, who control the larger portion of the property but constitute o­nly a very small percentage of the population. The great slaveholders of the South represented the concentration of wealth in slaves o­n a scale comparable with the present concentration of holdings of private property, generally, in the United States," Turner also pointed out another neglected fundamental consideration, that "in the regions where slavery flourished, there was a society which depended upon the institution, and this society was dominant throughout the South." (36)

Corresponding closely to the latter point made by Turner is Eugene Genovese's conception of slavery as the fundamental base of the southern social order. Genovese's approach, together with his criticism of other Marxists for glorifying the lower classes and exaggerating the extent of class conflict in the slave South, might well have led him toward reconsidering the extent of slaveholding. Instead, his interest in the southern aristocracy has led Genovese toward a reaffirmation of the conception of concentrated slave ownership. Southern slavery, he states, was "the foundation o­n which rose a powerful and remarkable social class: a class constituting o­nly a tiny portion of the white population." (37) In a subsequent severe judgment of Marxist writings o­n slavery, Genovese nowhere questions Marx's exaggerated conception of a southern oligarchy, and when he directly criticizes Marx for a "gross under-estimation of the slaveholding class," he is obviously speaking in qualitative terms. (38)

It is obvious that the long lasting and almost unanimous interpretation of the slave South has been that a remarkably small percentage of the southern white population owned or directly benefited from the enslavement of blacks. This condition has generally been viewed as, in the words of Louis M. Hacker, "a startling situation," (39) startling in the sense of constituting a departure from the traditions of democracy and opportunity generally associated with the history of the United States. It is the central contention of the remainder of this essay that these traditional conclusions have minimized and misinterpreted the meaning of the extent to which southern whites were economically involved with slavery.

In accordance with the customary emphasis, historians often include all of the slave states in their statistical presentations. If o­ne is interested in the deterministic impact of slavery, however, it would appear more appropriate to consider o­nly the Confederate states, where fully 31 percent of the white families owned slaves in 1860. Thus every third white person in those states had a direct commitment to slavery and, barring occasional dissidents, had cause to be a supporter and propagandist for that system. This appears to be an amazingly large, rather than small base of support for any economic order, and the figures are more impressive when we consider the seven states of the lower South in the precise order of their secession from the Union: South Carolina with 48.7 percent of the white families owning slaves; Mississippi with 48 percent; Florida with 36 percent; Alabama with 35.1 percent; Georgia with 38 percent; Louisiana with 32.2 percent; and Texas with 28.5 percent.

Even more pertinent is the fact that the significance of these percentages has been distorted because of an eagerness to view slaveholding as something that could be equated with, say, voting percentages, or the possession of horses or cows, or the popularity of styles of dress. But while 31 percent may not appear large as a voting or even isolated ownership statistic, it is enormous if, as suggested by Turner and Genovese, slavery is viewed as the economic foundation of an entire social system and the distribution of slaves is compared to analogous factors in a free society.

The problem of determining the appropriate comparisons for such a test is too complex to be thoroughly examined here, but some rough suggestions can be made. First let me emphasize that we are not concerned with general economic comparisons but solely with the beliefs that there was something extremely oligarchical about southern slave ownership and that popular white support for such an economic system was surprising. A comparison with the recent past seems particularly appropriate to testing those conceptions, and dates have been selected arbitrarily to coincide with convenient statistical information. Two criteria that seem unusually appropriate for testing are those of investor and employer, with comparisons made between the percentage of slaveholders in 1860 and the percentage of investors and employers in modern free labor society. In the first instance, taking for the year 1949 the very modest estimate of $5,000 as an investment comparable to the investment in o­ne slave in 1860, we discover that in 1949 o­nly 2 percent of the spending units (families) in the United States held stock worth $5,000 or more. (40) If o­ne is concerned with estimating the extent of a direct personal interest in the profits of a particular labor system it would then seem appropriate to compare this figure of 2 percent with the 31 percent of the white families in the Confederacy who owned slaves. We are excluding, of course, the entire southern black population and the entire question of general welfare, but what we are interested in is the comparative extent to which southern whites directly invested in slavery. In this respect the proportion of whites who invested in and profited from slavery far exceeds the proportion of the total population investing in our own free labor system.

When we compare the opportunity afforded white citizens of the slave South to achieve an employer status with the same opportunity afforded citizens in the twentieth century United States the results are similar. Thus in 1940 the total number of employers in the nation was less than l0 percent of the number of households. For a proper comparison with slaveholding this figure should be reduced, since it includes duplication as well as all business, agricultural, and professional employers. (41) But even the figure of 10 percent hardly equals the 31 percent of white families holding slaves in the Confederate South who may be classed as employers. Again there appears to be less need to wonder at southern white support for slavery than most historians have assumed. While it certainly is true that the moral, historical, and economic limitations of slavery as a social system are overwhelming, nevertheless the enslavement of black people did provide southern whites with a unique opportunity to exploit human labor. Practically every slaveholder sought to tap that opportunity, whatever the actual rate of profit and whatever the special advantages accruing to the planter class; and even if that opportunity was declining in the 1850s it remained remarkably broad. Indeed, considering the white population alone, race slavery in the Americas may have created o­ne of the largest percentage groups of investors in the direct exploitation of labor that the world has ever seen.

White racism was, of course, essential to the existence and preservation of this economic opportunity for whites, and it is important to recognize just how many southern whites had an economic interest in the development, propagation, and acceptance of racism within the South. While it would be a mistake to minimize the independent force of racism or the impact of psychological and other factors in racist development, it is also a mistake not to recognize that white supremacy was fundamental to the material interests of a very large proportion of the southern white population. Furthermore, this connection between white supremacy and economic opportunity extended beyond emancipation. o­ne third of the white population subject to Reconstruction automatically retained a selfish economic interest in perpetuating the suppression of black labor. The advantages of such subordination included a continuation not o­nly of exploitive opportunities but also of all the accompanying privileges and advantages that had accrued to slaveholders, large and small, during the slave era. Such selfish considerations may well have been more central to the intensification of racism during Reconstruction than were the racist convictions of the public at large or competitive clashes between lower class blacks and whites. Probably it has been the erosion of these economic advantages rather than growing convictions of the limited benefits of racism and slavery that ultimately has made the most significant contribution to combating racism.

A widespread investment in slavery may also have been as responsible for the South's racist Herrenvolk democracy as was any calculated effort o­n the part of a planter elite to win the support of nonslaveholding whites. (42) Certainly this would help explain why the spread of Jacksonian democracy in the South was accompanied by an intensification of the regional commitment to slavery, and why it was that a political party famed for its equalitarian leanings became the nation's major defender of racism and slavery. While such an interpretation of slaveholding obviously parallels many of the conclusions of the Owsley school, it does so by viewing slavery as central to the well being of many of the plain white folk of the old South. While recent study indicates that it was primarily whites of middle rather than lower circumstances who were deriving these economic benefits, (43) o­ne might still conclude that the South's vigorous endorsement of slavery was more a reflection of popular white will and ambition than it was the defensive response of a small white aristocracy.

The significance or influence of the large slaveholding minority of the antebellum South was additionally enhanced by a wide variety of factors that usually and mistakenly have been identified o­nly with the interests of the planter elite. For example, slave owners were, o­n the whole, the more successful and influential members of the white population, and in addition their interests were championed by many nonslaveholders who were directly or indirectly involved with the benefits of the slave economy. The geographical concentration of slavery also increased its political power in key regions within the various states, while that power was sometimes further strengthened by slave or property representation at the state level. What is being suggested is that while particular advantages did exist for the slaveholding minority within the South, these advantages were being exploited by a remarkably large proportion of the total white population; and the large size of this minority was crucial to the strength of racism, slavery, and the Confederacy.

Meanwhile, antislavery northerners had difficulty believing that a white Christian population could willingly endorse the evil of slavery, and they found some solution to that paradox, as did many Americans thereafter, by equating slavery with oligarchy. Today it appears particularly ironic that they were not equally disturbed by the evil of racism, for the historical process has reversed itself. Having recently been forced to recognize the existence of American racism, we now seem far more prepared to admit our susceptibility as a people to that evil than our susceptibility to such an extreme economic exploitation as enslavement.

The concept of a popular economic endorsement of slavery is also strongly supported by recent denials that the southern slave economy was either unprosperous or unhealthy. Alfred Conrad and John Meyer have concluded that "slavery was profitable to the whole South," while a study by Richard Easterlin concludes that "the income of the white population in the South exceeded the national average" and that per capita income in the South was probably rising substantially in the 1850s. Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman have come to the same conclusion. (44) If these analyses are correct, the confidence and economic interest in slavery o­n the part of southern whites, slaveholders or not, obviously would remain strong, even if the percentage of slaveholders was declining. In some areas this decline did not even occur. (45) Such economic viability does not, by the way, automatically contradict assumptions that there were internal contradictions and important limitations to the slave system, but it does suggest that it was sufficiently viable in the 1850s to encourage mass southern white support.

A study by Gavin Wright concludes that cotton areas of the slave South were characterized by a more unequal distribution of agricultural wealth than was true of the agricultural North. The social impact of this fact appears minimal, however, and Wright agrees that the distribution of wealth among the free population of the cotton South was not more unequal than the wealth distribution of the nineteenth-century urban North or of the present day. (46)

There are then several important challenges to the traditional assumption that the ownership of slaves and the economic benefits of slavery extended to a remarkably small minority of the southern white population. That assumption largely originated in arguments supporting the antislavery movement and the Civil War; and it has also reflected the presumptions and doubts of a free labor society, the eagerness of scholars to discover class conflict within the South, and a misdirected sympathy for white and black southerners. At various times this tradition has served as a simplistic means of discrediting slave society and, less directly, as a means of bolstering faith in our present political--economic system by exempting the mass of southern whites from economic or political involvement in the slave South and by blaming slavery for many of the ills of the free South. Most obviously this emphasis o­n the supposedly narrow extent of slaveholding has encouraged an exaggerated conception of the oligarchic peculiarities of antebellum slavery, an underestimation of the impact of economic self-interest o­n a large proportion of the southern white population, and an excessively detached conception of the role of racism in southern life. The fact is that the enslavement of black people did provide extensive economic opportunities for whites, and viewed from its own racist context, slavery appears a good bit less oligarchical in several significant economic respects than twentieth-century free labor capitalism. The ownership of slaves was spread among a remarkably broad proportion of the white population, and the extent of this white investment was central to southern white unity before, during, and after the Civil War.

(1.) David Brion Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge, 1969).

(2.) Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union (New York, 1947), I, 415-16. (Italics added.)

(3.) James G. Randall and David Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction (Boston, 1961), 67, (italics added); David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays o­n the Civil War Era (paperback ed., New York, 1961), 214. (Italics added.)

(4.) Roy E Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy (New York, 1948), 32; Elbert B. Smith, The Death of Slavery: The United States, 1837-1865 (Chicago, 1967), 5-6, 21, 26.

(5.) T. Harry Williams and others, A History of the United States to 1877 (3rd. ed., New York, 1969), 484; John M. Blum and others, The National Experience (New York, 1963), 202; John A. Garraty, The American Nation. A History of the United States (New York, 1966), 331; Harry J. Carman and others, A History of the American People (2nd. ed., New York, 1960), I, 587; Henry Bamford Parks, The United States of America: A History (3rd. ed., New York, 1968), 211-12; Richard B. Morris and William Greenleaf, U.S.A. The History of a Nation (Chicago, 1969), I, 592-93; Richard Hofstadter and others, The United States: The History of a Republic (2nd. ed., Englewood Cliffs, 1967), 343. The interpretive impact is suggested by the last work, which finds four of five roots of southern loyalty dependent o­n racial considerations and the fifth o­n "the social ambitions of the small planters. Ibid., 352-53.

(6.) Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey Into the Seaboard Slave States With Remarks o­n Their Economy (New York, 1856), 213-14, 535. Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy, details a variety of the early stereotyped conceptions of the Slave Power.

(7.) "Address to the People of the United States," in Robert W. Johannsen (ed.) The Union in Crisis, 1850-1877 (New York, 1965), 117, 118-19.

(8.) The Civil War in the United States by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (paperback ed., New York, 1961), 68, 79, 227.

(9.) John Elliot Cairnes, The Slave Power: Its Character, Career, and Probable Designs (paperback reprint, New York, 1969), 83, 95-97, 375-76.

(10.) George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South or the Failure of Free Society (reprint ed., New York, n.d.), 254; Daniel R. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States (reprint ed., New York, 1960), 77, 84-85.

(11.) The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Non-Slaveholder. 1860 Association. Tract No. 5 (Charleston, 1860), 3-4. Qualifications must be added to De Bow's utilization of Tennessee, which did have a large absolute number of slaveholders but did not have o­ne of the larger slave populations or larger percentages of slaveholders, and also to his utilization of nonagricultural northern states.

(12.) John W. Draper, History of the American Civil War (New York, 1867-1870), I, 538; II, 98-99; James Schouler, History of the United States of America Under the Constitution (New York, 1880-1913), V, 225; Woodrow Wilson, Division and Reunion, 1829-1909 (New York, 1893), 128-29; Hermann E. Von Hoist, The Constitutional and Political History of the United States, John Lalor and Alfred B. Mason, trs. (Chicago, 1876-1892), I, 342m, 348.

(13.) Wilson, Division and Reunion, 128-29.

(14.) Comte de Paris, History of the Civil War in America (Philadelphia, 1875-1888), I, 87.

(15.) James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Final Restoration of Home Rule at the South in 1877 (New York, 1893-1900), I, 345.

(16.) Edward Channing, The United States of America, 1765-1865 (New York, 1897), 263; John W. Burgess, The Civil War and the Constitution, 1859-1869 (New York, 1901), I, 28; Edward Ingle, Southern Sidelights: A Picture of Social and Economic Life in the South a Generation before the War (New York, 1896), 43. Ingle added an important qualification in viewing the slaveholding and landowning class "as a great middle class, the foundation and wall of conservatism and safety in any land." Ibid., 19.

(17.) Albert Bushnell Hart, Slavery and Abolition, 1831-1841 (New York, 1906), 76; French Ensor Chadwick, Causes of the Civil War, 1859-1861 (New York, 1906), 23-24, 34.

(18.) J. A. C. Chandler and others, The South in the Building of the Nation (Richmond, 19091910), V, 123-24, 118.

(19.) Clement Eaton, A History of the Old South (New York, 1949), 458; Robert S. Cotterill, The Old South (Glendale, Calif., 1937), 265; William Garrott Brown, The Lower South in American History (New York, 1930), 34, 46; John Bach McMaster, A History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York, 1883-1913) VIII, 426-27; William E. Dodd, The Cotton Kingdom: A Chronicle of the Old South (New Haven, 1919), 24; William B. Hesseltine, The South in American History (New York, 1936), 268; Thomas J. Wertenbaker, The Old South: The Founding of American Civilization (New York, 1942), 350; Francis B. Simkins, The South Old and New: A History, 1820-1947 (New York, 1947), 53; James Truslow Adams, America's Tragedy (New York, 1934), 67-68; Charles M. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York, 1930), II, 7; Rollin G. Osterweis, Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South (New Haven, 1949), 18; Avery Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism, 1848-1861 (Baton Rouge, 1953), 9.

(20.) Craven, The Repressible Conflict (Baton Rouge, 1939), 76. A few years later Craven considered it "perfectly clear that slavery played a rather minor part in the life of the South and of the Negro." Craven, The Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1942), 93. A major dissenting view, which emphasized the economic importance of slavery, was Robert Royal Russel, Economic Aspects of Southern Sectionalism, 1840-1861 (Urbana, 1923), 290-91.

(21.) Lewis C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (Washington, 1933), I, 481.

(22.) Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South (New York, 1956), 29; Charles S. Sydnor, Slavery in Mississippi (New York, 1933) 193; Edward W. Phifer, "Slavery in Microcosm: Burke County, North Carolina," Journal of Southern History, XXVIII (May, 1962), 141. For a contrasting emphasis see Orville W. Taylor, Negro Slavery in Arkansas (Durham, 1958), 56.

(23.) Harold U. Faulkner, American Economic History (New York, 1949), 327; Gilbert C. Fite and Jim E. Reese, An Economic History of the United States (2nd ed., Boston, 1965), 171; Edward C. Kirkland, A History of American Economic Life (4th ed., New York, 1969), 123.

(24.) Arthur C. Cole, The Irrepressible Conflict, 1850-1865 (New York, 1934), 34; Gerald W. Johnson, The Secession of the Southern States (New York, 1932), 134. Also see above note 4

(25.) Rosser H. Taylor, Antebellum South Carolina: A Social and Cultural History (Chapel Hill, 1942), 8; Guion G. Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina: A Social History (Chapel Hill, 1937), 57; Roger W. Shugg, Origins of Class Struggle in Louisiana (paperback ed., Baton Rouge, 1968), 2.

(26.) Herbert Aptheker, Toward Negro Freedom (New York, 1956), 59; Algie M. Simons, Social Forces in American History (New York, 1920), 224.

(27.) Carter G. Woodson, The Negro in Our History (7th ed., Washington, D.C., 1941), 355; W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (paperback reprint, Cleveland, 1964), 32; John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (3rd ed., New York, 1967), 186.

(28.) Herbert S. Klein, Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba (Chicago, 1967), 186. Klein asserts that in 1860 Virginia slaveholders "represented o­nly 0.5% of the white population." Perhaps he meant to say 5 percent, but he should have said 25.9 percent.

(29.) John Hope Franklin, "'As For Our History,'" in Charles G. Sellers, Jr. (ed.),The Southerner as American (Chapel Hill, 1960), 15.

(30.) G. W. Dyer, Democracy in the South Before the Civil War (Nashville, 1905), 40-42, 46, 59.

(31.) Blanche Henry Clark, The Tennessee Yeomen: 1840-1860 (Nashville, 1942), xvii.

(32.) Compare Owsley s failure to mention slaveholders in his introduction with their subsequent inclusion in the text. Frank L. Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South (Baton Rouge, 1949), vii-viii, 8. Fletcher Green's work also stresses the importance of the plain folk and democracy in the South but does not dwell o­n the question of slaveholding. Green, "Democracy in the Old South," Journal of Southern History, XII (Feb., 1946), 3-23.

(33.) Harold D. Woodman (ed.), Slavery and the Southern Economy. Sources and Readings (New York, 1966), 127-54; David Potter, The South and the Sectional Conflict (Baton Rouge, 1968), 123. (Italics added.)

(34.) Ibid., 192. An appreciation of the extent of slaveholding could serve to bolster Potter's thesis that self-interest lay at the heart of southern nationalism, but he focuses o­nly o­n an undefined "vital interest" and the "dangers of a slave insurrection." Ibid., 78-79.

(35.) William E. Dodd, The Cotton Kingdom: A Chronicle of the Old South (New Haven, 1919), 24.

(36.) Frederick Jackson Turner, The United States, 1830-1850 (New York, 1935), 153.

(37.) Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York, 1965), 4.

(38.) Genovese, "Marxian Interpretations of the Slave South," Barton J. Bernstein (ed.), Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (New York, 1967), 96.

(39.) Louis M. Hacker, The Triumph of American Capitalism. The Development of Forces in American History to the End of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1940), 288.

(40.) Our comparison probably minimizes the point being made. Thus $750 has been used as the average investment represented by the ownership of o­ne slave, although Conrad and Meyer set that amount between $1,400 and $1,450. Since $750 is about 4 1/2 times the average agricultural wage in 1860 for a full twelve months, it would appear appropriate to compare this to an amount 4 1/2 times the annual income of someone in 1949 earning the established minimum wage of 75 cents, which amounts to about $7,020. Again, however, we utilize instead an even lower figure of $5,000 for our comparison in 1949. At that time, according to a federal survey of "owned stock in corporations open to investment by the general public," but not including "a much smaller number of units that owned stock in o­nly privately held corporations," o­nly 2 percent of the spending units held stock worth $5,000 or more. It is true that this figure would be slightly higher if we could also include those holding stock in privately held corporations, but the comparative result would be about the same. See Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer, The Economics of Slavery and Other Studies in Econometric History (Chicago, 1964), 53; Stanley Lebergott, "Wage Trends, 1800-1900," Conference o­n Research in Income and Wealth, National Bureau of Economic Research, Trends in the American Economy in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1960), 462; "Survey of Consumer Finances," Part VI, Federal Reserve Bulletin, Oct. 1949, 1183.

(41.) In 1940 there were 54,447,000 gainfully employed workers in the United States. Of these 81.4 percent were employees and 18.6 percent were self-employed, the latter including 9.6 percent in farming, 8 percent in business, and 1 percent professional. Not all of the self-employed were, however, employers. For example, o­ne year earlier 45 per cent of all the business firms in the United States had no regular paid employees. If we apply this same percentage to the total number of those self employed in business in 1940 (4,378,000), we approximate the number of business employers at 4.4 percent of all those gainfully employed. We then add to our number of business employers 15 percent of all self-employed farmers. Since in 1950 o­nly 9.4 percent of all farms utilized regular hired labor and another 5 percent utilized seasonal labor, this is a generous percentage and provides an additional 1.44 percent of those gainfully employed. Then also adding the entire professional group of 1 percent we approximate the total employer group at 6.44 percent of all gainfully employed individuals. This in itself is an appropriate comparative figure, but assuming that each employer is the head of a household, employers constitute 9.97 percent of the number of the households in the nation in 1940. See Joseph D. Phillips, Small Business in the American Economy, Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, Vol. 42 (Urbana, 1958), 4, 26, 29; U.S. Census of Agriculture: 2950. General Report, Vol. II, 250; The Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present (Stamford, 1965), 15.

(42.) Cf. George Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind (New York, 1971), 68.

(43.) Gavin Wright, "'Economic Democracy' and the Concentration of Agricultural Wealth in the Cotton South," in William N. Parker (ed.), The Structure of the Cotton Economy of the Antebellum South (Washington, D.C., 1970), 85.

(44.) Conrad and Meyer, The Economics of Slavery, 82; Richard A. Easterlin, 'Regional Income Trends, 1840-1950," in Seymour Harris (ed.), American Economic History (New York, 1961), 527, 530; Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, "The Economics of Slavery" (unpublished manuscript, 1967).

(45.) Cornelius O. Cathey, Agricultural Development in North Carolina, 1783-1860 (Chapel Hill, 1956), 53, 62.
(46.) Gavin Wright, "'Economic Democracy,'" 83-85.

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