Basic logic can be fun.

I read that a higher percentage of blacks in the slave states owned slaves than the percentage of whites who owned slaves. At first I wondered if that was propaganda, but then I realize that, if you deal in simple logic, it is quite likely.

Very few whites owned slaves, maybe ten percent. And slaves were concentrated in areas like low-state South Carolina. In other words, slave owners were clustered where there were lots of slaves.

So where were most of the slaves who bought their freedom? They were in the slave belt where, as in the Roman Empire, slaves constituted the single biggest item of property, probably more than real estate. Blacks who had the ambition to buy their freedom would often go on to accumulate property.

Political Correctness has it that all a black man would do after buying his own freedom would be buy his family’s freedom. There is a true and ironic story about a black woman who owned her husband. She was an ardent Confederate and he was rooting for the Union.

But the simple logical fact is that there were more slaves where free blacks lived, because that was where blacks lived. Basic logic can be fun.