"Only a minority of the whites owned slaves," "at all times nearly three-fourths of the white families in the South as a whole held no slaves;" "slave ownership in the South was not widespread;" "not more than a quarter of the white heads of families were slave owners, and even in the cotton states the proportion was less than one-third;" "in 1850, only one in three owned any Negroes; on the eve of the Civil War, the ration was one in four;" and slave owners "probably made up less than a third of southern whites." From the US History textbooks in an elementary school to the Civil War journals of a major university, these lines are reprinted and repeated in an attempt to shape the perception of the public and to ease the insecurities of a nation embarrassed by slavery, an institution that supposedly marred its glorious history, or so says Otto H. Olsen.

In an article that appears in the journal of Civil War History of 1972 entitled, "Historians and the Extent of Slave Ownership in the Southern United States" Olsen attempts to challenge the widely accepted notion that slave ownership was confined to only a few southern whi

Olsen makes good points in both of his studies using the numbers he has chosen but both can be debated as to the impact they have. It seems that while emphasizing the inclusion of all persons directly involved in slave ownership to arrive at the figure of 31 percent, the author fails to do so on the opposite side of his comparisons, using "spending units (families)" and "households" respectively, instead of calculating each family member as he did for the slavery statistic. Had he not slightly distorted them, percentages of employers and investors to slave owners would have been much closer and made his study less powerful. Secondly, in the study of the investor, the year chosen, 1949, can also be debated as somewhat biased for this particular case because the effects of the Great Depression were more than likely still being felt by investors. A family with $5,000 to invest was probably still hesitant to put it into the stock market thus affecting the given percentage. To make his argument more valid Olsen would have been better off finding the percentages of investors at a time when confidence in the stock market was higher. The impact of what were supposed to be Olsen's strongest arguments is therefore lessened.

Olsen blames the antebellum antislavery movement for the origin of the accusations that southern slavery was politically and economically oligharchical. A prime example is the viewpoint of the Republican party. In a speech to the people of the United States in 1856 the address asserted that non-slaveholders in the South "were reduced to a vassalage little less degrading than that of the slaves themselves...although the white population of the slaveholding States is more than six million, of whom but 347,525, or less than one-seventeenth, are the owners of slaves." From the numbers given in previous studies we can see that these numbers do not include all who were directly involved and thusly agree with Olsen when he says that facts were often distorted in the past and still are today in an attempt to promote a negative view of slavery. He lists several other studies by prominent historical figures such as Karl Marx, John Elliott Cairnes, and Woodrow Wilson in which facts were distorted for the sake of antislavery sentiment. Olsen begins to construct one of his main topics of debate when he challenges a statement made by Civil War historian James Ford Rhodes. Rhodes states, "the political system of the South was an oligarchy under the republican form. The slave-holders were in a disproportionate minority in every State." To that Olsen replies, "Rhodes, a very wealthy stockholder, failed to note that similar comments were being made by some social critics about nineteenth century capitalists."

As the reader might assume, Olsen approaches the same statistical evidence with a different perspective. Where historians usually calculate the percentages of slave ownership using all slave states Olsen points out that in the s

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1998
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)