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Perhaps you are not aware, but it was only something like 2% of the population at a peak that owned slaves.
Do you have verifiable evidence for this claim?
The numbers I have seen are these - and these come from Yahoo Answers using the 1860 US Census figures and other sources who all seem to agree on the numbers
Total number of slaves in the Lower South : 2,312,352 (47% of total population).
Total number of slaves in the Upper South: 1,208758 (29% of total population).
Total number of slaves in the Border States: 432,586 (13% of total population).
Almost one-third of all Southern families owned slaves. In Mississippi and South Carolina it approached one half. The total number of slave owners was 385,000 (including, in Louisiana, some free Negroes). As for the number of slaves owned by each master, 88% held fewer than twenty, and nearly 50% held fewer than five. (A complete table on slave-owning percentages is given at the bottom of this page.)
For comparison's sake, let it be noted that in the 1950's, only 2% of American families owned corporation stocks equal in value to the 1860 value of a single slave. Thus, slave ownership was much more widespread in the South than corporate investment was in 1950's America.
On a typical plantation (more than 20 slaves) the capital value of the slaves was greater than the capital value of the land and implements.
This article confirms that information from the census
http://civilwarcauses.org/stat.htm
as does this one
http://www.civil-war.net/census.asp?census=Total
So where does this 2% claim come in?
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