Who does not know that the first law of historical writing is the truth. -- Cicero
Often in discussions of slavery, facts are cited which can generate incorrect conclusions in the absence of further examination. As one quick example, click on the graphic to see an animation of distribution of slaves by slaves per household in 1860. As the numbers of slaves per household increases, those households are concentrated in areas other than those we consider the traditional slave counties and regions in Virginia.
It is also a fact that at the beginning of the Civil War around 6% of white people owned slaves. This low percentage has given rise to the idea that the practice of slaveholding was undertaken by a very small minority. This figure has been used to minimize slavery as a factor in the Civil War by depicting slavery as primarily engaged in by a small but very wealthy elite. The most simplistic implication is that some 94% of citizens were outside the domain of slavery. The 6% figure has also been used as an illustration of class division.
Setting those arguments aside and revisiting the data and other documents, it becomes clear under an analytic rather than a directed approach that slavery was an integral part of society across classes. As backdrop, an important fact to keep in mind is that some 90% of the population of Virginia was involved in farming and cities were very small. Conseqently, the population distribution was radically different than it is today. Women owned slaves or land only under certain conditions. Generally, widows with children were temporary owners, and they were usually not permitted to sell land or slaves. Unmarried women who held property were permitted to retain it until marriage. Usually children did not own slaves, and young men who did own slaves were not permitted to sell them until the age of 21. Hence, circumstances that would have resulted in women or minor children owning slaves under a hypothetical system of equal ownership rights by age or gender resulted in adult male ownership in most cases. The reality of gender and age inequality concentrated ownership in the adult male demographic.
About one fourth of white citizens of Virginia lived in a slave-holding household. The concentration varied by region and areas within counties; religion and economic status were factors. The first census was undertaken in the 1790's, and an examination of those details helps flesh out the story. James Madison was the census taker for his district, and though there were more slaves in his district than was typical (over 9% owned slaves), the distributions are fairly typical and examining the data from those 61 households is instructive. This is nothing more than a closer look at what's behind the 9% number in Madison's district.
| Madison's District - 1790's | |
| Minimum Percentage of Whites Who Owned Slaves: | 9.3% |
| Total White: | 343 |
| Total Slaves: | 582 |
| Households with Slaves: | 34 |
| Households without Slaves: | 27 |
| Whites in Households with Slaves: | 174 |
| Whites in Household without Slaves: | 169 |
| Percentage Whites in Household with Slaves: | 50.7% |
| Percentage Whites in Household without Slaves: | 49.3% |
Volumes of data are available in the public domain; historical census data may be found at http://www.census.go...
In order to look at slavery among the general population, it's necessary to remove owners of large numbers of slaves and possible gangs owned by wealthy speculators. To approximate slave ownership in Madison's district among more ordinary citizens numerically, households with many slaves and households with a very low white to slave ratio were removed and the district reanalyzed. Rather arbitrarily, only households with less than 40 slaves for which the white to slave ratio was greater than 10% were considered. This left 54 households, and among those removed was James Madison with his 84 slaves.
Out of the 54 households remaining, 27 had slaves. There were 330 white people and 279 slaves. Note that the 303 slaves, more than half in the district, who are no longer in the analysis were concentrated in only 7 households. At least in Madison's district, the "happy family" scenario was clearly not the rule of the day for most slaves. Of the 330 white people, 161 (48.8%) lived in a household with slaves while 169 (51.2%) lived in households with no slaves. By removing a handful of likely elites and absentees from the analysis, over half of the slaves are also removed. Nevertheless, the practice of slavery among the remaining white population is still very widespread. This modification results in the mean number of slaves per household dropping from 9.5 to 5.2.
One intention of this example was to illustrate how slave ownership can simultaneously be described acurrately as both concentrated among elites as well as being widespread among the not so wealthy. More importantly, by looking at the make up of families, one quickly discovers that behind the 6% figure is a more widespread reality.
Many studies have focused on slave ownership among the elites. In his influential 1954 article, "The One Hundred," Jackson Main used tax records as an aid in fleshing out the picture of the assets of the richest 100 planters in Virginia and their economic status in the 1780's. Most of the 100 were concentrated along the James, Rappahannock and Potomac. Around 40 of the homes were in the Northern Neck and around 40 were along the bank of the James. Many of them held speculative properties to the West, generally upstream from their primary homes.
Half of these men had estates in four or more counties, including their home, and nearly one third owned land in at least five; two had property in twelve counties.
While Main concentrated on the elite 100, his analysis has other implications. While they may or may not have owned slaves themselves, those who oversaw those slaves in remote locations were totally dependent upon slavery for their livelihoods. It's possible that several households showing no slave ownership were overseer families.
[1] Jackson T. Main, The One Hundred, The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 11, No. 3. (Jul., 1954), pp. 354-384.
Wilma Dunaway has some fascinating material on selling and age cohorts.
During the same period, the northern and the growing western states were enjoying the value of free labor and expanding commerce, even though many freed slaves in the New York and Boston areas were being recaptured, force-traded and sent to the cotton plantations in the Mississippi Delta.
While I am not an historian, it would be fairly accurate to say that this resurgence of slavery was one of the major reasons for cessation attempt of the Confederacy thus the main cause of the Civil War.
Do you know what your great-great-grandmother did for work when she was rented?
2/25/2007, 12:20 p.m. CT
The Associated PressNEW YORK (AP) - Genealogists have found that civil rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton is a descendent of a slave owned by relatives of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, a newspaper reported Sunday.
The Daily News said professional genealogists, working at the newspaper's behest, recently uncovered the ancestral ties between one of the nation's best known black leaders and a man who was once a prominent defender of segregation.
"I have always wondered what was the background of my family," the newspaper quoted Sharpton as saying. "But nothing - nothing - could prepare me for this."
Kathy -- excellent and thought provoking as always. Haven't forgotten about your brother.
He's no saint by any means, but he has worked as a welder for over 25 years. Turns out that's a risk factor for several things including brain tumor according to a number of studies in EUROPE. Why the hell can't we in the US 1) do more of this kind of research or at least 2) disseminate this information?
The merciful reality is that he is in "Billy Land" which is something like Nick Cage in Raising Arizona without the fretting...
There should be a law that requires health disclosures at the inception of employment. There are so many industries that have particular, strong health risks.
On the Bush front: "President Bush has proposed cutting the institute's budget for the second consecutive year. The cuts would reduce the NCI's 2007 budget by almost 1%, or $36 million, to just over $4.7 billion. Although NCI director John Niederhuber notes that the institute's final budget has not been set, he's concerned that Congress could shrink his budget by 5% to 10%." http://www.usatoday....
It isn't the moral equivalent of slavery, granted, but it is a level above that.
Indentured servitude is a means to maintain a cheap and exploitable labor force. The "comprehensive immigration" as drafted in the last bill expands this type of indentured servitude.
When Democrats push their version of immigration reform, it should expressly remove any restrictions of movement from one employer to another, and it should remove any penalties immigrants currently face when changing jobs - such as their permanent residency application process starting over.
In short, I ask you and all Democrats to oppose "employer sponsored visas". Employers should have no role in immigration, short of verifying a person's right to work.
I have other demands from a labor perspective, but I think every Democrat can at least agree that we need to end the exploitation of immigrants and the "indentured servant" aspects of the program. Corporations should not control a person's freedom to work in this country - that is the job of our government.
The deportation process needs to be streamlined - it shouldn't take months in holding to either remove a person or to allow them to stay. Justice needs to be more swift, and the conditions during that period need to be optimal. Children should not be housed in prisons.
Everyone can agree that our immigration process is slow, cumbersome, and ineffective. It doesn't serve the interests of our nation, it doesn't protect immigrants, and it doesn't protect American workers. It doesn't even protect our society from the violent criminals from other countries. It fails on every level.
Not to mention - going back to why I posted in the first place - it creates a system of indentured servitude, or what I call "slavery-lite".
Most Americans are not aware that many of the words they speak and write every day are derived from African words. Who would have thought that the word "doggies" in the cowboy lyric " ... get along little doggies, for Wyoming shall be your new home," stems from the African word kidogo, which means "a little something," or "something small."How did this African word become part of the American language? Part of the explanation is that one in every five American cowboys was black in the 1880s, and much of what we think of as "cowboy culture" is rooted in African cattle herding.
Some others mentioned in the article:
Perhaps the most commonly used African word in the English language (and probably the word used in more countries than any other) is "okay," or "O.K," which became popular in the 1830s in America. Clues to its African roots were found in the 19th century black-spoken English of Jamaica and Surinam, as well as the Gullah speech of South Carolina, all of which have numerous forms of the word. Two prime examples from Mande and Wolof cultural groups for the use of similar words are o ke, "that's it" or "all right," in Mande language, and waw kay, which means "all correct," in Wolof culture. The use of the expression "O.K." is first recorded in the speech of black Americans around 1776, but it was probably used much earlier in the 1700s.Another Wolof word popular in present-day American English is "dig," as in "dig this man." This word stems from the Wolof word dega, meaning either "look here" or to "understand," often used to mark the beginning of a sentence. In the English spoken by African Americans in the 1960s, "dig" means " to understand something." An example in Wolof is dega nga olof, "Do you understand Wolof?"
Several Wolof words were popularized during the jazz era. For example, "jive" in Ebonics (Black English) means "misleading talk," which is code language originating from the Wolof word jey. The American words hep, hip, and hippie translate roughly into "to be aware or alive to what is going on," or an awareness especially to drugs. In Wolof, the verb "hipi" means "to open one's eyes." The American slang cat means a person, as in hep-cat or cool cat, and is similar to the Wolof kai used as a suffix following the verb. The Wolof lexicon jamboree is now a standard part of American language. Originally, a jamboree was a noisy slave celebration. A "jam session" during the days of plantation slavery meant a time when enslaved musicians and their friends assembled for dance and entertainment. We still use the term today. The origin most likely is the Wolof word for slave, jaam.
This overview is probably just scratching the surface.
You have to click on the tabs and scroll up and down to get any one of the census summaries for 1790-1860.
A comparison of the slave and free age distributions would be interesting.