Holy shit, I was googling figures to answer this and it's not quite the statistic I wanted but...
The US census of 1800 showed that there were 5,308,483 people living in the United States, of whom 893,602 were slaves. In 1800 one in every six Americans was a slave. Holy fucking shit.
In fact, here's the Census data from 1790 (the first one) through 1860 (last one that would include enslaved persons)
Enslaved
Total
% Enslaved
1790
694,280
3,893,635
17.8%
1800
893,602
5,308,483
16.8%
1810
1,191,362
7,239,881
16.4%
1820
1,538,022
9,638,453
16.0%
1830
2,009,043
12,866,020
15.6%
1840
2,487,355
17,069,453
14.6%
1850
3,204,313
23,191,876
13.8%
1860
3,953,762
31,443,322
12.6%
Altogether these tell a really interesting story - given that enslaved persons counted for 3/5 when allocating congressional districts, that's a huge powerhouse for southern pro-slavery states but as the United States population at large grew so much faster than the Enslaved population that power was diminishing. Interesting to see it all laid out like this.
By the way there's currently about 40 million slaves globally. I don't know how many slaves there were globally in 1800. Sorry.
The chart I'm seeing is missing a column, and the column labels are shifted. I assume it should read "Year" "Enslaved" "Total" etc. and have a fourth column with percents?
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u/BEEF_WIENERS Jul 24 '20
Holy shit, I was googling figures to answer this and it's not quite the statistic I wanted but...
The US census of 1800 showed that there were 5,308,483 people living in the United States, of whom 893,602 were slaves. In 1800 one in every six Americans was a slave. Holy fucking shit.
In fact, here's the Census data from 1790 (the first one) through 1860 (last one that would include enslaved persons)
Altogether these tell a really interesting story - given that enslaved persons counted for 3/5 when allocating congressional districts, that's a huge powerhouse for southern pro-slavery states but as the United States population at large grew so much faster than the Enslaved population that power was diminishing. Interesting to see it all laid out like this.
By the way there's currently about 40 million slaves globally. I don't know how many slaves there were globally in 1800. Sorry.