I once went through some 1860 Census records looking for some potential relatives in (IIRC) northwest Georgia, and decided to check all the households in a precinct (or whatever… basically whatever the smallest division was took 7 or 8ish pages and had one enumerator working it). Completely unscientific and very possibly non-representative, to be sure, but I came out with about a quarter to a third of households having at least one enslaved person in the enumeration. Given the white women, children, and other non-enslaved people in households, you do indeed end up with a tiny number of OFFICAL SLAVE-OWNERS, but owning human beings as chattel property seemed incredibly widespread.
If nothing else, I came away with the idea that while the basic narrative may still be true, that poor whites were fighting to defend a system which did absolutely nothing to benefit them other than keep them out of the bottom-most social stratum, the idea that only the truly wealthy were invested in the system may be worth revisiting in the public consciousness. I assumed actual historians have a better grasp on these numbers across the antebellum slave-states, and sure enough it seems I accidentally picked a slightly high but not crazy sample: Twenty-five percent of slave-state households were listed in the 1860 census as having at least one slave.
A disproportionate share of Confederate soldiers also came from slave-owning households, compared to the general population - something like a third - but non-slave owning households still provided the majority of recruits. But yeah, it wasn’t a tiny minority, it was widespread and normalized. It was a ‘realistic’ thing to aspire to, to be a slaver shithead, like climbing from the working to the middle class. Then you can sneer at all the other poors and their lack of slaves.
Yeah, it would have been fairly common to have a small number. Even if you didn’t “own” any people, it was possible to “rent” their services for a time, increasing the number of households that directly benefited from the system.
As for why they didn’t just run away, several reasons I know of. One, it was hard to travel incognito, especially as a visible minority.
Two, black people trying to do so in slave states would frequently have been required to keep a “slave pass” on them to travel away from their “homes” at all, and the fact that it was generally illegal to teach enslaved people to read and write would have further complicated the inherent challenges of forging one.
Three, enslavers would take out literal classified ads for “runaways” and offer bounties.
Four, overarching all of this, all slave states had laws regulating the relationship between free people, enslaved people, and the state, and the most organized law enforcement institutions in the antebellum South were the slave patrols.
No society is just one thing, but the Antebellum slave states had a systemic and pervasive infrastructure of laws, customs, and institutions to ensure chattel slavery “worked.”
I once went through some 1860 Census records looking for some potential relatives in (IIRC) northwest Georgia, and decided to check all the households in a precinct (or whatever… basically whatever the smallest division was took 7 or 8ish pages and had one enumerator working it). Completely unscientific and very possibly non-representative, to be sure, but I came out with about a quarter to a third of households having at least one enslaved person in the enumeration. Given the white women, children, and other non-enslaved people in households, you do indeed end up with a tiny number of OFFICAL SLAVE-OWNERS, but owning human beings as chattel property seemed incredibly widespread.
If nothing else, I came away with the idea that while the basic narrative may still be true, that poor whites were fighting to defend a system which did absolutely nothing to benefit them other than keep them out of the bottom-most social stratum, the idea that only the truly wealthy were invested in the system may be worth revisiting in the public consciousness. I assumed actual historians have a better grasp on these numbers across the antebellum slave-states, and sure enough it seems I accidentally picked a slightly high but not crazy sample: Twenty-five percent of slave-state households were listed in the 1860 census as having at least one slave.
A disproportionate share of Confederate soldiers also came from slave-owning households, compared to the general population - something like a third - but non-slave owning households still provided the majority of recruits. But yeah, it wasn’t a tiny minority, it was widespread and normalized. It was a ‘realistic’ thing to aspire to, to be a slaver shithead, like climbing from the working to the middle class. Then you can sneer at all the other poors and their lack of slaves.
So there were middle-class households with slaves? Like could you get just 1 or 2 even if you you were not super rich?
If so how did they stop them from escaping, I imagine these slaves did stuff like go to the market, wash clothes etc…
Yeah, it would have been fairly common to have a small number. Even if you didn’t “own” any people, it was possible to “rent” their services for a time, increasing the number of households that directly benefited from the system.
As for why they didn’t just run away, several reasons I know of. One, it was hard to travel incognito, especially as a visible minority.
Two, black people trying to do so in slave states would frequently have been required to keep a “slave pass” on them to travel away from their “homes” at all, and the fact that it was generally illegal to teach enslaved people to read and write would have further complicated the inherent challenges of forging one.
Three, enslavers would take out literal classified ads for “runaways” and offer bounties.
Four, overarching all of this, all slave states had laws regulating the relationship between free people, enslaved people, and the state, and the most organized law enforcement institutions in the antebellum South were the slave patrols.
No society is just one thing, but the Antebellum slave states had a systemic and pervasive infrastructure of laws, customs, and institutions to ensure chattel slavery “worked.”