| [214] | Report of American Colonization Society presented January 20, 1833, pp. 16 and 17. |
| [215] | Professor Hart, of Harvard University, in his recent work, Slavery and Abolition, says: "The fact that some thousands of negroes every year left the Border States for the South seemed to show that there was profit in keeping them alive; but recent investigation seems to establish that the greater number of these negroes were taken in a body by the men who owned them to settle in other states." (Slavery and Abolition, Hart, p. 124). |
XXII
Small Proportion of Slaveholders Among Virginia Soldiers
The accusation that the people of Virginia of the Civil War period stood ready to fight "no matter whom and little matter how, for the protection of slavery and slave property," because of the profits derived from the inter-state slave trade, would seem to acquit those Virginians who derived no benefit from the traffic. We have seen, from the facts heretofore presented, what a small proportion of the people of Virginia were owners of slaves; and all available data indicate a still less proportion of slaveholders among the soldiers which the state contributed to the armies of the Southern Confederacy.
Professor A. B. Hart, of Harvard University, says: "Out of 12,500,000 persons, in the slave-holding communities in 1860, only about 384,000 persons—or one in thirty-three—was a slaveholder."[[216]]
The same author estimates that each slaveholder was the head of a family and that, therefore, 350,000 white families in the South, out of a total of 1,800,000, owned slaves; though 77,000 of these families owned only one slave each, and 200,000 of the remaining owned less than ten slaves each.[[217]]
The author is, of course, in error in assuming that every slaveholder was the head of a family. Doubtless in a large majority of cases such was the fact. The Federal census, however, from which his first figures are taken, is correct in showing the exact number owning slaves. This number included men, women and children, and, not infrequently, a number of persons were part owners of the same slave or slaves, and yet each was enumerated as a slaveholder.
Admiral Chadwick's analysis of the census returns for Virginia shows that of the 52,128 slaveholders in the state, one-third held but one or two slaves, half one to four, and that but one hundred and fourteen persons held as many as one hundred each. He also points out the fact that the great majority of the soldiers in the ranks of the Confederate Armies, from Virginia and the South, possessed no such interest.