On the Eve of the US Civil War, the 1860 national census revealed the prevalence of slavery in the South and helped answer future questions as to why thousands of non-slave holding whites, mostly yeomen farmers, enlisted in the “Cause.” Additional research highlights the treatment of free blacks in the South and the incidents of blacks owning slaves.
United States Slavery and the 1860 Census
Of the 27 million whites counted in the 1860 census, 8 million lived in the slave owning states of the South. Of these, 385,000 owned slaves. Statistically, 4.8% of all Southern whites owned slaves. When factored by the entire population, 1.4% of all United States whites were slave owners. The Gone With the Wind notion that most Southerners owned large numbers of slaves and lived in huge plantations is a myth.
Deep South states held the most slaves and this is where most of the larger plantations existed. Mississippi’s slave population stood at 55% out of a total population of 791,305. South Carolina’s slave population represented 57% of the total population. These percentages decrease with upper South states like Virginia (31%), Tennessee (25%), and Kentucky (20%). Border States like Maryland accounted for the lowest numbers (13%).
In 1860, there were 4.5 million blacks in the United States, 4 million living in the South. Of those, 261,988 were free blacks living in the South, usually in urban centers like New Orleans that accounted for 10,689 free blacks. Restrictions on free blacks were severe, however. They could not move from one state to another and in 1859 the Arkansas legislature, for example, passed a law ordering sheriffs to force freedmen out of the state. The Arkansas slave population was at 26%.
Free Blacks That Owned Slaves in the Pre-Civil War South
According to Duke University’s Emeritus Professor, John Hope Franklin, in New Orleans over 3000 free blacks owned slaves themselves (or 28% of the black population). In Louisiana, 6 blacks owned 65 or more slaves while in Charleston, SC, 125 blacks owned slaves, 6 owning ten or more. In North Carolina there were 69 black slave owners.
Statistically, this represents a fraction of all slave holders and many theories can be ventured to explain the phenomenon. In some cases, free blacks with financial means used the system to buy the freedom of family and friends, perhaps through the slave system, thus adding to statistical data that usually paints a sterile picture and leaves interpretations to the historian. It would be grossly negligent to use such statistics to justify slavery by intimating that free blacks supported the evil institution.
Why Did Non-Slave Owning Whites Support the System?
Slavery was enshrined in the Constitution of the Confederate States of America. Most of the political and military leaders of the Rebel States, as Lincoln called them, owned slaves. As recent historians like James McPherson of Princeton have demonstrated, non-slave owning whites enlisted to fight for an ideal of freedom (generally, freedom from “Northern tyranny”). But this also entailed the full acceptance of the peculiar institution that drove the Southern economy.
It wasn’t about slavery per se, but more about a lifestyle and culture that existed, at its core, because of slavery. Slavery dominated every aspect of Southern existence, regardless of how many people actually owned slaves. That the South saw itself as a confederation of sovereign state entities able to leave the federal union was based on John C. Calhoun’s notion that the South could not safely remain in the Union if the North challenged slavery. Slavery was the dagger that pierced the heart of the Union in 1861.
Sources & Further Reading:
Alfred H. Kelly and Winfred A. Harbison, The American Constitution: Its Origins & Development (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1976)
Frederick Merk, History of the Westward Movement (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978)
Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (available on-line)
The 1860 Census
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