“Only 1% of white people in the US had slaves” is a great example of using a fact for misinformation. That is true, but extremely manipulative bc it cuts out really important details about the statistic.
1) It includes the more populous Northern states that did not allow slavery.
2) It ignores the fact that family units were much larger and only the family patriarch tended to actually own the slaves for the family, meaning there were significantly more slave-holders than slave-OWNERS. So you need to measure by household.
So, using the exact same data (the 1860 census) you can determine that about 25% of households in the south had slaves. In Mississippi alone 49% of households had slaves. South Carolina is 46%. The 1% figure I’ve believed in the past is propaganda to undersell the role of the general white population in slavery and to undersell just how much everyday southern whites benefitted from slavery.
And I haven’t even mentioned that slave owners often rented out their slaves…
And ignores how many people, even without necessarily owning slaves, fought vehemently against the idea of abolition. Even in states that didn’t allow slavery, there were incidents of violence against abolitionists.
