5% reflects reality. You just want to abuse stats for the highest number possible to make your case appear stronger. Unless you can provide a legit number showing that 1 in 4 households were rich enough to afford slaves then you sont have much of a claim.
Reality tends to be that way. Rarely does it fit the fictional narrative being spun.
You can't quote a different number because 5% is the legit number. I dare say it's actually lower that that, but 5% is what data I cite with any credibility. Lie I say only 1% of the richest people could afford slaves at the time.
In 1850 on avg, slaves sold for the equivalent to $40,000 per in today's money. That's the kind of money most people don't have. And that just 1 slave mind you, most slave owners owned multiple slaves. Which means multiple $100,000's spent on slaves. This is not the kind of money most people even today have, let alone 200+ years ago. So you're 25%+ number you so desperately want to believe in is just not supported by facts.
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It's your numbers that don't appear to be supported by facts ...
“The white South’s social structure was much more complex than the popular stereotype of proud aristocrats disdainful of honest work and ignorant, vicious, exploited poor whites. The old South’s intricate social structure included many small slaveowners and relatively few large ones.
Large slaveholders were extremely rare. In 1860 only 11,000 Southerners, three-quarters of one percent of the white population owned more than 50 slaves; a mere 2,358 owned as many as 100 slaves. However, although large slaveholders were few in number, they owned most of the South’s slaves. Over half of all slaves lived on plantations with 20 or more slaves and a quarter lived on plantations with more than 50 slaves.
Slave ownership was relatively widespread. In the first half of the 19th century, one-third of all southern white families owned slaves, and a majority of white southern families either owned slaves, had owned them, or expected to own them. These slaveowners were a diverse lot. A few were African American, mulatto, or Native American; one-tenth were women; and more than one in ten worked as artisans, businesspeople, or merchants rather than as farmers or planters. Few led lives of leisure or refinement.”
… The southern economy generated enormous wealth and was critical to the economic growth of the entire United States. Well over half of the richest 1 percent of Americans in 1860 lived in the South.
Digital History
“Even more revealing was their attachment to slavery. Among the enlistees in 1861, slightly more than one in ten owned slaves personally. This compared favorably to the Confederacy as a whole, in which one in every twenty white persons owned slaves. Yet more than one in every four volunteers that first year lived with parents who were slaveholders. Combining those soldiers who owned slaves with those soldiers who lived with slaveholding family members, the proportion rose to 36 percent. That contrasted starkly with the 24.9 percent, or one in every four households, that owned slaves in the South, based on the 1860 census. Thus, volunteers in 1861 were 42 percent more likely to own slaves themselves or to live with family members who owned slaves than the general population.”
Small Truth Papering Over a Big Lie
“Almost one-third of all Southern families owned slaves. In Mississippi and South Carolina it approached one half. The total number of slave owners was 385,000 (including, in Louisiana, some free Negroes). As for the number of slaves owned by each master, 88% held fewer than twenty, and nearly 50% held fewer than five. (A complete table on slave-owning percentages is given at the bottom of this page.)”
Selected Statistics