Barrack Obama and Slavery

I’ve heard some very ugly comments about how our country will be destroyed once ‘the black man’ gets power. And, I’ve heard about how few people even owned slaves, fewer than 1 out of 17 people in the South owned slaves. I wanted to know if that was true. So, I looked up the raw data for Chatham County, Georgia.

Chatham includes the city of Savannah, so it’s not completely rural. It’s far enough away from Hall County that I can’t be making direct accusations of my neighbors.

Chatham County had about 1200 slave owners in 1860 out of a total population of 23,901. That’s about 1 in 20 people as slave owners. However, 14,018 slaves are included in the total population. Eliminate those from the equation and we have about 1 in 7 people owning slaves. But, women could not own property aka slaves. So we only have 4,794 while males in Chatham County or 1 in 4 white males owning slaves. But, children didn’t own slaves. When we deduct underage white males we have 1861 white males over the age of 19. Or, we have about 2 out of 3 adult white males owning slaves. We could try looking at the number of dwellings in the County. For all the population, there were only 1,915 houses, about 5 people per house, including slave dwellings. Now, this might give the best data on the number of households that owned slaves if we could determine how many whites had homes. But, if we assume every white male had a house, which leaves only 54 dwellings for 14,018 slaves, 250 slaves per dwelling. That assumption can’t be right, can it? A barn couldn’t hold 250 people to eat and sleep. So the earlier assumption that all 1861 adult white males were the head of a household is wrong. So, I haven’t really found a truth at the beginning of truth. But, in Chatham County, it's possible that almost every white household owned a slave but it is not possible that only 1 in 17 households owned a slave.

Now, racism needs to die in the South. Personally, I’m tired of hearing it in conversations about the race to the White House. ‘The black man’ isn’t going to burn down ‘whiteys’ house and rape all the white women if Barrack Obama becomes President. Nor, is Obama going to take away 40 acres and mule from every white voter in the South.

The vote on November the 4th isn’t about slave ownership, slavery, or mules. It’s about the here and now. Stop fighting for The Cause and start planning our future.