Reddit reviews Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia: A Statistical Portrait of the Troops Who Served under Robert E. Lee (Civil War America)

I'm not disagreeing with your argument, I think there are great points in there I would like to discuss.

However, I want to point out that your statistics on how many people owned slaves is wrong. Its factually inaccurate and has been repeatedly disproved.

Summarization here

Relevant reading

To sum up the largest point, you are taking census data after states independantly banned slavery (and additionally stopped recording illegal slave holdings). You're also taking individual slave holdings which ignores the most common form of slave holdings, family slave holdings.

The same census also points out;

> an average of more than 32 percent of white families owned slaves. [And in states where slavery was still lega] Some states had far more slave owners (46 percent in South Carolina, 49 percent in Mississippi) while some had far less (20 percent in Arkansas).

And even if you factor in the entire individual slave holdings, inclusive of places where slavery was illegal, and exclusive of family slave holdings, the figure is 5% (4.9%) using the incomplete census data.

It makes me feel like I cannot trust your arguments - even the well made ones - when you start off the bat with a disproven and factually inaccurate representations. One that is commonly known to be wrong for more than a decade. Sorry, not biting on a post like that.

The census data you cited does not contradict what the poster was saying. Just counting the number of slave owner does not show how rampant slavery is relative to family units.


Let's say you own a car. The car is in your name and that's the only car in your family of 5. All five in your family would benefit from having a car, but technically only 1/5 of the people were car owners. Furthermore, let's say your car is leased from a dealership. and the dealership owns 1000 cars that they lease out to families. Now 5000 people benefits from having cars, but only 1/5000 (the dealership owner) would be considered a car owner.

In a statistical study for a book by Joseph Glatthar, he found that even though only 4.9% of people owned slaves in slave owning states, 24.9% of people had slaves in their household. Over 44.4% of solders in Robert E Lee's army had slave in their household. source