FREE ESSAY ON SLAVES IN THE SOUTH

SLAVES IN THE SOUTH

"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;" "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 ration was one in
four;" and slave owners "probably made up less than a third of southern whites." From the
US History textbooks in an elementary school to the Civil War journals of a major
university, these lines are reprinted and repeated in an attempt to shape the perception
of the public and to ease the insecurities of a nation embarrassed by slavery, an
institution that supposedly marred its glorious history, or so says Otto H. Olsen. In an
article that appears in the journal of Civil War History of 1972 entitled, "Historians
and the Extent of Slave Ownership in the Southern United States" Olsen attempts to
challenge the widely accepted notion that slave ownership was confined to only a few
southern white plantation owners and that most of the white population was unaffected by
it. The author spends nearly half of his thirty-seven paragraph article displaying the
past and present attitudes of the general population through several case studies which
he lists chronologically and explains in brief detail. He tries to discredit a handful of
them while, at the same time, injecting his own views. In an attempt to persuade the
reader he sets up his side of the debate by citing a few case studies that promote his
hypothesis and concludes by relating some of his own opinions and findings including a
study where he makes a seemingly strong comparison between those of the population who
invested in the slave labor market in 1850 and those who invested in the stock market in
1949. In the first half of the article Olsen sets up the arguments he is going to
challenge by showing what historians from the antebellum US through the present, believed
the distribution of slaves in the South to be, and also by showing the supposed economic
and political effects of this distribution. He focuses heavily on the numbers and
percentages of white slave owners and the sometimes relaxed, even incorrect manner in
which they were accepted. He cites a study done by Allan Nevins in which Nevins says
that, "of the 6,184,477 white folk in the slave States, only 347,525 were listed by the
census of 1850 as owners." Nevins then adds family members of slave owning families and
other workers involved and states that the final number of whites directly involved with
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." Olsen
uses two more studies to show that these numbers, or very slight variations, are widely
accepted and concedes that they are probably correct, but he disagrees with the treatment
these statistics have been given. In what could easily be his thesis statement he says,
"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 upon a moral repugnance toward slavery." He
then begins to investigate the prevailing attitude toward slavery in the past as well as
the attitude of historians in the 20th century. Olsen blames the antebellum antislavery
movement for the origin of the accusations that southern slavery was politically and
economically oligharchical. A prime example is the viewpoint of the Republican party. In
a speech to the people of the United States in 1856 the address asserted that
non-slaveholders 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 million, of whom but 347,525, or less than one-seventeenth, are
the owners of slaves." From the numbers given in previous studies we can see that these
numbers do not include all who were directly involved and thusly agree with Olsen when he
says that facts were often distorted in the past and still are today in an attempt to
promote a negative view of slavery. He lists several other studies by prominent
historical figures such as Karl Marx, John Elliott Cairnes, and Woodrow Wilson in which
facts were distorted for the sake of antislavery sentiment. Olsen begins to construct one
of his main topics of debate when he challenges a statement made by Civil War historian
James Ford Rhodes. Rhodes states, "the political system of the South was an oligarchy
under the republican form. The slave-holders were in a disproportionate minority in every
State." To that Olsen replies, "Rhodes, a very wealthy stockholder, failed to note that
similar comments were being made by some social critics about nineteenth century
capitalists." With the studies the author has given thus far, including those revealing
the percentages of southern slave owners and those showing the distorted manner in which
they were used by the antislavery movements, Olsen has done well in showing the reader
the argument he is about to take on. One can easily see the weaknesses in the way
statistics were distorted and can also begin to see the approach Olsen will take in
trying to disprove them. Before moving into his personal findings the author looks at a
handful of studies that agree with his own theories and attempt to show the opposite of
what we have already examined. They are, for the most part, weaker in comparison to the
previous studies with the possible exception of a comment by Frederick Jackson Turner in
which he questioned the study by Rhodes. He said of Rhodes' idea of an interest in
slavery solely with planters and certain higher classes, "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."
He adds that, "in the regions where slavery flourished, there was a society which
depended upon the institution, and this society was dominant throughout the South." The
first comment is an interesting one to which Olsen will build a bit more and the second
is one that contradicts some of what the antislavery movement has always promoted.
Although neither Turner nor Olsen offer any quantitative evidence it is believable that
an institution such as slavery in which thirty percent of the white population is
directly influenced could easily be perceived as a dominant society. As the reader might
assume, Olsen approaches the same statistical evidence with a different perspective.
Where historians usually calculate the percentages of slave ownership using all slave
states Olsen points out that in the seven states of the lower South the numbers show a
different story. He lists them in the 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. Olsen says that even though
these percentages might not appear large as an isolated ownership statistic they are huge
if slavery is viewed as the economic foundation of an entire social system and the supply
of slaves is compared to parallel factors in a free society. He makes these comparisons
using two of his own studies. In these studies Olsen compares the percentages of
slaveholders in 1860 to the percentages of first, investors and then employers in the mid
1900s. In the first instance he chooses the year 1949 and uses what he calls "a very
modest estimate of $5,000" as an investment comparable to the investment of one slave in
1860. From this he discovers that "in 1949 only 2 percent of the spending units
(families) in the United States held stock worth $5,000 or more." The author then makes
his point by saying, "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…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." The second of these examinations is a comparison of the
opportunity extended to white citizens of the slave South to achieve an employer status
with the same opportunity afforded citizens in the twentieth century Untied States. Olsen
says that the results are similar to those of the first argument. He says that in 1940
the number of employers in the nation was less than 10 percent of the number of
households. Pointing out the comparison the author says, "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." Olsen makes good points in both of his studies using
the numbers he has chosen but both can be debated as to the impact they have. It seems
that while emphasizing the inclusion of all persons directly involved in slave ownership
to arrive at the figure of 31 percent, the author fails to do so on the opposite side of
his comparisons, using "spending units (families)" and "households" respectively, instead
of calculating each family member as he did for the slavery statistic. Had he not
slightly distorted them, percentages of employers and investors to slave owners would
have been much closer and made his study less powerful. Secondly, in the study of the
investor, the year chosen, 1949, can also be debated as somewhat biased for this
particular case because the effects of the Great Depression were more than likely still
being felt by investors. A family with $5,000 to invest was probably still hesitant to
put it into the stock market thus affecting the given percentage. To make his argument
more valid Olsen would have been better off finding the percentages of investors at a
time when confidence in the stock market was higher. The impact of what were supposed to
be Olsen's strongest arguments is therefore lessened. In writing on this topic, one
worthy of debate and further study, Olsen hoped to show that the "the enslavement of
black people did provide extensive economic opportunities for whites," and that, "slavery
appears a good bit less oligarchical in several significant economic respects than
twentieth century free labor capitalism." Although he has shown the reader that the
extent of slave ownership in the south was more widely distributed than previously
thought, has made some decent arguments through showing the distortion of facts by some
antislavery supporters, and shown studies that support his ideas, Olsen's own studies
fail to be thoroughly persuasive. The question as to the extent of slave ownership in the
Southern United States remains one of perspective. 
Bibliography 
Olsen, Otto H. Historians and the Extent of Slave Ownership in the Southern United
States. Civil War History 1972. vol. 18, pp. 101-116