[BroJoeK]

Brass Lamp: "It's a nonsense term, linguistically, which refers to more acts of enslavement..."

FRiend, you are obviously a world-class Master of Obfuscation, and should be rightly proud of your skills.

Regardless, facts are still facts.

We are having this discussion because pro-Confederates often claim that: "only 6%" (or some similarly small number) of Southerners owned slaves, and therefore, "slavery" was not their motivation for fighting the Civil War.

There are, of course, numerous problems with that assertion, and...

• We can begin with the fact that those "six percent" were heads-of-housholds which averaged at least four and more often six or eight members.
  So the young-unmarried son who enlisted (or was drafted) into the Confederate Army, did in fact come from a slave-owning family, even if he himself owned no slaves.

  So: when that young son said he was fighting to preserve "our way of life", he certainly did include his right to own slaves.

• A second problem is: there were huge areas of the Confederacy -- western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, western Virginia -- where slave ownership was, in fact, quite low, and those areas all remained hot-beds of Unionism.
  Indeed, where slave-ownership fell below about 20% (i.e., the Border States) of all households, nothing could persuade the population in general to join the Confederacy.
  Bottom line: where slave ownership was in fact rare, there you found Unionists, not Confederates.

• A third problem is that when the Deep South slave-power first declared their secession (circa January 1861), Upper South states refused to join them, since the slave-power seceded "at pleasure", just to protect slavery, without a constitutionally valid justification.
  Only after the Confederacy provoked, started and then formally declared war on the United States (May 6, 1861), when they were forced to chose sides in war, then the Upper South joined the Confederacy.
  In summary: when slavery was only threatened by Lincoln's election, the Upper South refused to secede, but when threatened by war, then the Upper South joined the Confederacy.

Here is the important point in this: a state's commitment to the cause of Confederacy was directly proportional to the percentage of its households which owned slaves.

[SampleMan]

BroJoeK,
If the census statistics are correct that ~40% of people in the southern states were slaves, and that was a fairly constant number from state to state, then there is a problem with your assertion that higher percentages of whites owned slaves in the deep south than the upper south.

The issue is that the very, very large plantations, held and run by single families were much more common in the deep south. These large plantations would have hundreds, even thousands of slaves. Pure math would then lead to the conclusion that you had fewer owners of larger numbers of slaves in the deep south and more owners of smaller numbers of slaves in the upper south.

In reference to your overall presumptions, IF your 6% figure is correct and only applied to heads of households, you still have to have an extremely large average family size to get to 50% of whites being in a slave holding family. If the average number of slaves held was only 2, then only 33% of white families could have owned slaves, before the supply was exhausted. And the average was a lot higher than 2.

Before you get too preachy, do the simple math.