Where did I get the idea that there were many huge slave plantations all over the South, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Honestly, I can't clearly say. Maybe it had something to do with Roots, the epic television event that I saw as a kid. (Roots was Alex Haley's journey into his own family's slavery roots.) Until that program aired, I think the most that I learned about slavery was: Lincoln and Civil War...I'm not kiddin', that's it. Perhaps a teacher here and there said that slavery was a bad thing (no, really); but I never learned many details beyond that.
It wasn't until well after I graduated from high school that I learned that the vast majority of slave owners were small planters, who owned just two or three to about fifteen slaves. Fact is, Fewer than 15% of all slaveholders owned plantations with more than twenty slaves. This means that the big plantations that I always envisioned when I was a kid were actually the exception and not the rule. Moreover, discovering the aforementioned numbers (and other detailed facts) on the "peculiar institution" of slavery allowed me to better understand how the culture of slavery reached a level of normalcy in the South. Once one sees that this was an institution which received participation more from lower to middle class planters than wealthy "businessmen", it's hard to ignore one glaring observation: that among all of the reasons slavery existed as long as it did in the South, perhaps the most underrated reason was the fact that slaves provided a sort of buffer zone between lower class whites and the reality of their actual position in society.
-Amir Said
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