You do like simple answers, don't you? Anyone who disagrees is a Marxist, things like that? Webb's statistics are for slave holding states as a whole and include those 4 states that did not participate in the rebellion. If you look at the seven original rebelling states the percentage of families that owned slaves was around 37%. In some states like Mississippi and Alabama it was almost half. In the four states that joined the rebellion after Sumter about 25% of all families owned slaves. In all the rebellious states the percentage was about 31%. A much more reasonable figure than your 5%, and easier to understand why the south could rebel to protect slavery when so many people received benefit from it.
And even that 5% is misleading. In 1950 the percentage of people in this country who owned corporate stock equal to the value of a single prime slave, about $1000, was only 2%. Slavery in it's time was more common than stock ownership was 90 years later.
." Further, of the 385,000 who did own slaves, more than 200,000 had five slaves or less, and "fully 338,000 owners, or 88 percent of all the owners of slaves in 1860 held less than twenty slaves.""
I'm not sure what your point is here. If you're trying to say that most slave owners were not large plantation owners then I would agree with that. Slave ownership was very much a middle class institution for the southern white. Thomas Jackson, for example, was a college professor prior to the war. He owned as many as 9 slaves at one time. Most slaves weren't out laboring in the fields. They were cooks, maids, grooms, gardeners, and nannies. Household staff. But does that make their impact any less on the southern white family, does it?
If I did I'd probably think you were the soul of wit. But it's my opinion that when someone begins with a paltry attempt at insult, it's because it's the best he has to offer.
Webb's statistics are for slave holding states as a whole and include those 4 states that did not participate in the rebellion.
And where did you get that nugget? It's not in Webb's text. Did you make it up? If not, pony up the footnote that shows his source.
A much more reasonable figure than your 5%
The 5% figure is Webb's, not mine. I thought you were familiar enough with his writing that you could even add missing information, as with "the 4 states that did not participate in the rebellion."
I'm not sure what your point is here.
The point was Webb's.