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.