I was reading an old Vice article that said that, across the entire United States at the time (North and South) that 1.4% of white people owned slaves. I know that there were nearly 3 million slaves in the States at the time, so this seems like a very small percentage for such a large group of people. Is this statistic true?
Hi, this seems to be a bit of a hot topic this month :) There's always room for more discussion, but you can get started on these recent threads and just jump right in if you have follow-up questions there
At the peak of slavery in the continental United States, what percentage of the population would have owned one or more slaves? - a long discussion thread featuring /u/sowser and /u/freedmenspatrol