In early and mid-2025, a claim that "only 1.6% of US citizens owned slaves in 1860" resurfaced and circulated widely online, including on X, Reddit and Facebook.

Exploring an ancestry website, I discovered an 1860 Slave Schedule showing that my great-great-grandfather, William Henry Robertson of Mason County, Kentucky, owned 13 human beings.

In 1860, the average price of a young adult male slave was $1,800, an extraordinary sum at a time when the average annual income of a free person in the United States was only $144.

The Slave States lose 11 Representatives and gain 4 -- being a positive loss of 7. The Free-States gain 14 and lose 10 -- being a positive gain of 4, with 4 Senators in Minnesota and Oregon.

For former slaves, federal proposals to redistribute land fell apart in the 1860s, leaving millions without the promises of full citizenship guaranteed to them by the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.

See the article in its original context from November 5, 1860, Page 4 Buy Reprints. View on timesmachine. ... If Slavery did not now exist among them, they would not introduce it.

Freedom came to Russian serfs and U.S. slaves in the same decade. The future was fraught with uncertainty for both. ... At roughly the same time, in the early 1860s, ...

The actor makes a man who fled from slavery—and whose scarred back was famously photographed in the 1860s—into an implausible action-movie hero.

In early and mid-2025, a claim that "only 1.6% of US citizens owned slaves in 1860" resurfaced and circulated widely online, including on X, Reddit and Facebook. As we previously reported, this ...