nvested in the stock market in 1949. In the first half of the article Olsen sets up the arguments he is going to challenge by showing what historians from the antebellum US through the present, believed the distribution of slaves in the South to be, and also by showing the supposed economic and political effects of this distribution. He focuses heavily on the numbers and percentages of white slave owners and the sometimes relaxed, even incorrect manner in which they were accepted. He cites a study done by Allan Nevins in which Nevins says that, “of the 6,184,477 white folk in the slave States, only 347,525 were listed by the census of 1850 as owners.” Nevins then adds family members of slave owning families and other workers involved and states that the final number of whites directly involved with slavery probably “did not exceed 2,000,000. If so, not one-third of the population of the South and border States had any direct interest in slavery as a form of property.” Olsen uses two more studies to show that these numbers, or very slight variations, are widely accepted and concedes that they are probably correct, but he disagrees with the treatment these statistics have been given. In what could easily be his thesis statement he says, “Although the constant conclusion has been that the number of whites owning slaves was remarkably small and that the South was therefore an unusually oligarchical society, the comparative basis for such a judgment has never been firmly established. Instead, that judgment appears to have rested primarily upon a moral repugnance toward slavery.” He then begins to investigate the prevailing attitude toward slavery in the past as well as the attitude of historians in the 20th century. 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 ...
