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February 27, 2007
More on Slaveowners in the Family Tree
[J]ust as one example, I picked Horry County, SC (because it was the only SC county that I knew the name of) where I believe Myrtle Beach now is. That was a rice plantation area, I believe. It definitely was a part of the heart of the plantation system of agriculture/slavery.Interesting. Mark makes a strong case, but I still find myself puzzling over the question of how family trees would actually look when you laid them out over 5 or 6 generations.Because it is too much trouble to analyze the whole county, I only looked at the first parish (alphabetically) which is All Saints Parish. Here is what I found from the 1860 US Census:
In All Saints Parish in 1860, there were 841 slaves, who were owned by just 77 free people. At the time, there were 1009 free people (including children) in All Saints Parish. Granted married women would not usually separately own slaves (or anything else) and likewise children would not have owned slaves, but even so: Most folks did not own slaves in the heart of the plantation world.
The average slaveowner in my little study owned 11 slaves. Twelve people owned just one slave each. Eleven people owned twenty or more. The top slave-owner owned 91 slaves. His name was J J Wortham. He lived with his wife Martha and their 10 year old son James. One way of viewing things would be that the 3 members of the Wortham family owned these 91 slaves amongst the 3 of them. That type of analysis would expand the count of slaveowners considerably, but I think it is obvious that it would not expand the number of slaveowners from 77 to anything approaching 1009 (or even half of that).
This subject could definitely be (and surely has been) studied more rigorously, but the conclusion is obvious: Most free people in coastal South Carolina did not own slaves (and this was probably even more true in other areas of the South). And I suppose that most free people did not own slaves because they could not afford to.
All of which makes me think that Ms. Senter is probably wrong. Only the wealthiest South Carolinians had slaves and though those wealthy people have many, many descendants today, their descendants probably do not constitute the majority of "native South Carolinians."
Posted by Eric at February 27, 2007 8:12 AM
Comments
We need a biologist. This shouldn't be that hard to model. To Pharyngula!
Posted by: Patrick at February 27, 2007 9:59 AM
I've done population studies like it. It depends on a lot of crucial assumptions. Birth rates, do they vary between the wealthy class and the non wealthy class (they probably do), how much mixing between these classes went on (probably not too much).
In reality, while the number of ancestors doubles with every generation, after a fairly small number they then to have repeats. Each of us has about 262 thousand great^16-grandparents from 400 years ago, but not all of them are unique. Going back only 160 years (6 generations) only gives us about 64 ancestors in that generation.
Let's guess. Lets start with 100 wealthy and 1000 common folk. If only 10% of the wealthy stray from their clique and the rate of having children who survive to have children is 2 per couple for the wealthy and 4 per couple for the poor, then the number of people with wealthy ancestors declines from 9% of the population to 0.16% over 6 generations. If the birth rate is the same at 4 per couple, those with wealthy ancestors grow very slowly to 9.6%. If 90% marry outside of their class, those with wealthy ancestors grow from 9% to 18% of the population. But they don't ever grow to be 50%
This whole analysis ignores immigration which can only decrease the amounts.
I don't see any way that the "average South Carolian native" can have a liklihood of having a slave-owning ancestor of anything near 50%.
Posted by: ruidh at February 27, 2007 11:43 AM
i don't think you can make assumptions about today's "south carolina native" based on the 1860 census. there's no indication of who stayed in SC during the intervening years, and who moved out of the state.
for a query of this specificity, you don't need a biologist - you need a genealogist.
Posted by: jenny at March 1, 2007 8:07 AM
Suffice it to say that it would be difficult to answer the original question in an academically rigorous manner. But let me throw a few more thoughts at you:
1. About 30% of all South Carolinians today are African Americans. Very few slave owners were themselves people of color (although there were some as I understand it). I assume Ms. Senter did not intend to include any African Americans in her definition of "average South Carolinian." [Insert smart remark about Strom Thrumond here.]
2. On the other hand, I suppose that a good portion of African Americans in South Carolina do, in fact, have slave-owning white ancestors (as may be the case for Al Sharpton, for example). And, it could well be that African Americans in South Carolina are MORE likely to have slave-owner ancestors than non-African Americans. But this matter would be very difficult to determine one way or another.
3. I suppose that the real point of Ms. Senter's comment is that South Carolinians in her peer group are mostly descended from slave-owners. I have no doubt that she is correct about that.
I will now try to let go of this topic.
Posted by: Mark Chilton at March 1, 2007 2:46 PM
"On the other hand, I suppose that a good portion of African Americans in South Carolina do, in fact, have slave-owning white ancestors (as may be the case for Al Sharpton, for example). And, it could well be that African Americans in South Carolina are MORE likely to have slave-owner ancestors than non-African Americans."
I can hardly see how that can possibly be true. For this to be true, then slave owning South Carolinians would, *as a group*, have had to have had more offspring with their slaves than with their legal spouses. While we know that some children were conceived between slaveowning males (approximately half the population of slaveowners) and their female slaves, the rate of such out-of-wedlock births would have had to have been huge for the number of descendants to outnumber the children of the legal spouse.
Posted by: ruidh at March 2, 2007 1:05 PM