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Only one or two.

Almost 85% of the white people in the American South up until the Civil War were poor white farmers who could not afford slaves. The upper ten to fifteen percent of the white population owned only one or two slaves for necessary household chores like cooking, laundry, cleaning, and child care. It was only the upper 2%, the master planter aristocracy, that owned upwards of hundreds of slaves who worked vast expanses of cotton fields. Though this aristocracy consisted of about 2% of the white population, they owned a vast majority of the slaves.

Ignoring the non-slaveholding masses, the typical slaveholder only had one or two slaves, as they were quite expensive to buy.

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16y ago

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