I recently saw someone claim that the rate of slave ownership among Southerners was as small as 4.9 percent. After looking into that figure and trying to verify it I found a different figure that said it was as high as 32 percent. Can anyone clarify this? Is it possible that since one figure is about individuals and the other is about families there is truth to both?
The 8th Census of the United States, conducted in 1860, which you can look through here, put the percentage of Americans who owned slaves at just under 5%. Of those, the vast majority owned only a handful of slaves or less. Slave ownership was concentrated in the hands of a small subset of the Southern population, usually referred to as the "Planter Class".
To get to the inevitable follow-up question, yes, the Civil War was primarily about slavery. (pinging u/Georgy_K_Zhukov because he wrote the linked comment).