Critical Review: "Historians and the Extent of Slave Ownership in the Southern United States" "Only a minority of the whites owned slaves," "at all times nearly three-fourths of the white families in the South as a whole held no slaves;" "slave ownership in the South was not widespread;" "not more than a quarter of the white heads of families were slave owners, and even in the cotton states the proportion was less than one-third;" "in 1850, only one in three owned any Negroes; on the eve of the Civil War, the ration was one in four;" and slave owners "probably made up less than a third of southern whit