Slave Ownership in the Southern United States

Critical Review: "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 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, ...

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