One particularly salient fact brought out was that while only 6% of American whites owned slaves, 28% of free American blacks owned slaves.
The Neo-Confederates love to twist the numbers, but they never want to talk about the numbers of families that owned slaves in 1860.
Only about one in twenty Southerns own slaves, but about one in four belonged to families that owned slaves.
That is like comparing the number of people who don't own the house they live in to families that own their own house.
http://www.civilwarcauses.org/stat.htmSelected Statistics on Slavery in the United States
(unless otherwise noted, all data is as of the 1860 census)
Total number of slaves in the Lower South : 2,312,352 (47% of total population).
Total number of slaves in the Upper South: 1,208758 (29% of total population).
Total number of slaves in the Border States: 432,586 (13% of total population).
Almost one-third of all Southern families owned slaves. In Mississippi and South Carolina it approached one half. The total number of slave owners was 385,000 (including, in Louisiana, some free Negroes). As for the number of slaves owned by each master, 88% held fewer than twenty, and nearly 50% held fewer than five. (A complete table on slave-owning percentages is given at the bottom of this page.)
For comparison's sake, let it be noted that in the 1950's, only 2% of American families owned corporation stocks equal in value to the 1860 value of a single slave. Thus, slave ownership was much more widespread in the South than corporate investment was in 1950's America.
On a typical plantation (more than 20 slaves) the capital value of the slaves was greater than the capital value of the land and implements.
Slavery was profitable, although a large part of the profit was in the increased value of the slaves themselves. With only 30% of the nation's (free) population, the South had 60% of the "wealthiest men." The 1860 per capita wealth in the South was $3,978; in the North it was $2,040.
Census data can be appealed to in order to determine the extent of slave ownership in each of the states that allowed it in 1860. The figures given here are the percentage of slave-owning families as a fraction of total free households in the state. The data was taken from a census archive site at the University of Virginia.
% of slave owning families In 1860
Mississippi: 49%
South Carolina: 46%
Georgia: 37%
Alabama: 35%
Florida: 34%
Louisiana: 29%
Texas: 28%
North Carolina: 28%
Virginia: 26%
Tennessee: 25%
Kentucky: 23%
Arkansas: 20%
Missouri: 13%
Maryland: 12%
