Critical Review Historians and the Extent of Slave Ownership in the Southern United States
"Historians and the Extent of Slave Ownership in the Southern United States""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 whi
7 percent of the white families owning slaves, Mississippi with 48 percent, Florida with 36 percent, Alabama with 35. 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. Olsen begins to construct one of his main topics of debate when he challenges a statement made by Civil War historian James Ford Rhodes. Bibliography Olsen, Otto H. 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. He says that in 1940 the number of employers in the nation was less than 10 percent of the number of households. He tries to discredit a handful of them while, at the same time, injecting his own views. The question as to the extent of slave ownership in the Southern United States remains one of perspective. The impact of what were supposed to be Olsen's strongest arguments is therefore lessened. A family with $5,000 to invest was probably still hesitant to put it into the stock market thus affecting the given percentage. 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. te plantation owners and that most of the white population was unaffected by it. In these studies Olsen compares the percentages of slaveholders in 1860 to the percentages of first, investors and then employers in the mid 1900s. 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. " 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.
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