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.

Editor's note: Please see our updated and expanded coverage of this topic published in June 2025. On April 2, 2024, the claim that "only 1.6% of US citizens owned slaves in 1860" went viral on X ...

A Twitter post from 2019, reshared on Facebook in 2021, claims 1.6% of US citizens owned slaves in 1860. That downplays slave ownership at that time.

The viral post said that "at the PEAK of slavery in 1860, only 1.4% of Americans owned slaves. What your history books doesn’t tell you is that 3,000 blacks owned a total of 20,000 slaves the ...

A Twitter post from 2019, reshared on Facebook in 2021, claims 1.6% of US citizens owned slaves in 1860. That downplays slave ownership at that time.

In 1840, the slave population reached its peak of nearly 59,000 people; by 1860, there were 37,000 enslaved people, just 63 percent as many slaves as two decades earlier.

The importation of slaves into the United States was banned by Congress (under Constitutional command) in 1808, yet by 1860, the nation’s black population had jumped from 400,000 to 4.4 million ...

According to Johnson and Roark, the wealthiest black person in Charleston, S.C., in 1860 was Maria Weston, who owned 14 slaves and property valued at more than $40,000, at a time when the average ...

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 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 ...

In 1840, the slave population reached its peak of nearly 59,000 people; by 1860, there were 37,000 enslaved people, just 63 percent as many slaves as two decades earlier.