both of his studies using the numbers he has chosen but both can be debated as to the impact they have. It seems that while emphasizing the inclusion of all persons directly involved in slave ownership to arrive at the figure of 31 percent, the author fails to do so on the opposite side of his comparisons, using “spending units (families)” and “households” respectively, instead of calculating each family member as he did for the slavery statistic. Had he not slightly distorted them, percentages of employers and investors to slave owners would have been much closer and made his study less powerful. Secondly, in the study of the investor, the year chosen, 1949, can also be debated as somewhat biased for this particular case because the effects of the Great Depression were more than likely still being felt by investors. A family with $5,000 to invest was probably still hesitant to put it into the stock market thus affecting the given percentage. To make his argument more valid Olsen would have been better off finding the percentages of investors at a time when confidence in the stock market was higher. The impact of what were supposed to be Olsen’s strongest arguments is therefore lessened. In writing on this topic, one worthy of debate and further study, Olsen hoped to show that the “the enslavement of black people did provide extensive economic opportunities for whites,” and that, “slavery appears a good bit less oligarchical in several significant economic respects than twentieth century free labor capitalism.” Although he has shown the reader that the extent of slave ownership in the south was more widely distributed than previously thought, has made some decent arguments through showing the distortion of facts by some antislavery supporters, and shown studies that support his ideas, Olsen’s own studies fail to be thoroughly persuasive. The question as to the extent of slave ...
