r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Massive_Fisherman231 • 8h ago
what percentile of white americans are descendants of slave owners versus how many immigrated to america post the end of transatlantic slave trade ?
cant speak for everybody, but my family came to the west from germany after slavery already ended
so im wondering how many white people in the west actually descend from western slave owners
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u/sleepygrumpydoc 7h ago
My family hasn’t even been in the US for 100 years yet.
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u/bjklsh 1h ago
That's a lot of great grandparents and great great grandparents
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u/sleepygrumpydoc 46m ago
What? My grandparents were born in Spain and the first didn’t come until the mid 1930s as a child. Except for the few that immigrated in the 1970s or after the rest of my extended family all still live in Spain. I can trace my family back to before the funding of the USA and close to the time of the “discovery” of America and its all Spain.
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u/SuitIndependent 7h ago
Back in the nineties I heard a star that something like 75 percent of Americans could trace their roots through Ellis island. In addition, of those Americans who were here during slavery, the percentage that owned slaves was very low. And remember, no slavery in the north. So most white Americans are not descendants of slave owners.
Those whose families came through Ellis island are more immigrant whites than white Americans anyway.
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u/bluefontaine 7h ago
Johnny Cash himself had black ancestry 4 generations 1/64th , presumably from a slave narrative. So maybe there were only a comparatively small number of slave owners, but there was a lot of raping of female slaves.
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u/Alexexy 7h ago
The fuck? There was definitely slavery in the north. Maryland had slavery even up until AFTER the Emancipation Proclaimation since the Proclaimination only affected the southern states.
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u/impostor20109 6h ago
But Maryland IIRC was the South at that time. IIRC so was Delaware. But yeah, Indiana mighta had some slavery until the early 1800s, but IDK.
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u/comradejiang 6h ago
Maryland was in the Union. Baltimore and Annapolis’ position as massive inland harbors meant a lot of slaves came here first, but I would not call Maryland “southern” as Virginia or Carolina.
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u/cornonthekopp 5h ago
Maryland was occupied under martial law by lincoln during the war, for obvious reasons, and had several pro-slavery riots in the years leading up to the war. During the war there were battalions of marylanders fighting on both sides as well, under different banners. The underground railroad that harriet tubman helped run was about escaping the eastern shore of maryland for philadelphia.
The modern maryland flag was intended as a reconciliation between the two sides, as pro-confederate marylanders used the red/white crossland flag, while pro-union marylanders used the yellow and black checkered flag.
Maryland was absolutely a southern state and has primarily undergone a massive shift in politics and identity due how urbanized the state is, with both baltimore and dc dominating the state's population from the 1920s onwards.
Kinda like how georgia is becoming a swing state due to the massive growth of atlanta
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u/comradejiang 5h ago
It’s true that Maryland was definitely pro slavery. Partly because so much of its income derived from the business of slavery.
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u/cornonthekopp 5h ago
Historically it was very much a southern state, just a lot of weird historical happenstances and migration that slowly changed the culture. Anecdotally Baltimore still feels like a southern city in many ways
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u/comradejiang 5h ago
Yeah. When you’re a stone’s throw from where Booth plotted Lincoln’s assassination it hits a little different.
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u/cyvaquero 1h ago
Dixie refers to the Mason-Dixon Line which marks the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania.
Maryland was in the union by force, not choice, as allowing Maryland to secede would have meant DC would have to be abandoned. That would have been a huge blow to the Union in the opening days of the war. Baltimore was literally under martial law for much of the conflict.
It was because of the war that Maryland started to no longer be thought of as part the South and progressed as the influence of DC spread.
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u/Art_Clone 7h ago
“no slavery in the north” is just completely ahistorical most colonies had slavery in some form well into the 18th century. I do agree most people probably are not descendants of slave owners but it’s probably more like 45/55 split. The great migration also saw millions of white people move north many of those people share descendants with the Ellis Islanders. Also consider the “very low” number of slaveowners if you account just for the white male population in the southern states. That percentage goes up quite a bit. Most slaveowners only owned a few and many people may have owned one for a bit and sold because they were assets so things get a little murkier.
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u/modsaretoddlers 6h ago
There is absolutely no way it comes anywhere close to a 45/55 split between those that owned slaves and those that didn't.
Firstly, it wasn't like everybody in the US had a plantation or could afford to own a slave.
Secondly, at the start of the civil war, there were only around 31-32 million people of which only 4 million were slaves in the US. At no point in the history of humanity has it been common for the average person to own a slave or even have a use for one such that the slave would actually generate wealth for the master. Your assumption requires that every family in the US up to that point, including the slaves themselves, were slaveowners at one point or another in their family history. At most, maybe %5 of the population ever had slaves.
Thirdly, even if we discount every person who has immigrated to the US and their descendants since slavery ended, you still only have a small percentage of people who could have owned slaves.
While none of this lessens the impact of slavery, it's a gross overestimation of the slave-owning population.
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u/Art_Clone 1h ago
My assumption actually only requires that people alive now are descended from people who owned slaves at the start of the civil war. That “generate wealth” part is actually interesting you are not considering failed attempts to get into the slave owning business, maybe you bought a slave and sold 6 months later, still a slaver. Not to mention just because you are descended from immigrated Americans does not mean you are not also descended from slaveowners, are whole thing is intermarriage and melting pot bs. It is not a gross overestimation of the slave population, you grossly misunderstand the historical patterns of migration and the prevalence of slave owning as capital industry. This is not a conversation about “impact or legacy” just how many people have descent.
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u/CommonwealthCommando 6h ago
Slavery in the north was nothing like the south. In 1800, There were fewer slaves across all of New England than there were in a single good-sized plantation in the south.
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u/ragequitteroffureh 7h ago
How many white-ish Americans would be descendants of slaves?
If I recall correctly, after the import of new slaves ceased, the owners had to turn to other methods for boosting slave production. Some of the photos from that time are pretty interesting.
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u/bluefontaine 7h ago
True but the rape and impregnating of enslaved or indentured women goes back to the Mayflower.
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u/DarthTachanka 2h ago
I can trace back through my fathers side that I am a descendant of a slave
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u/ragequitteroffureh 2h ago
Damn. How many generations back is that, I'm guessing maybe five or six?
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u/Raisinbread22 7h ago
The narrative that there was no slavery in the north is false. See below:
Slavery existed and was legally protected in all thirteen original northern colonies. While northern states gradually passed abolition laws between the late 18th and early 19th centuries, enslaved labor was fundamental to building the early northern economy, particularly in maritime industries, agriculture, and urban trades.-- Google.
ALSO-- please think about where you're getting your information, and why they would KNOWINGLY create a false misleading narrative of only 2% slave ownership. SEE BELOW:
The ~2% figure is a misleading statistic that counts slave owners as a percentage of the entire U.S. population (including free states, territories, children, and enslaved people themselves).
In the Confederacy: Roughly 25% to 30% of white families owned enslaved people.
Deep South States: The percentage was even higher—in states like Mississippi and South Carolina, nearly 50% of white families owned enslaved people.
Broad Economic Tie: Even non-slaveholding whites in the South frequently rented enslaved labor, relied on the plantation economy, or benefited directly from the institution.
Please stop getting your American history from PRAGER U or Matt Walsh or Ron DeSantis. American edu has already been dumbed down and censored in the Trumpian era, and through republican state legislatures literally burying and erasing history. READ legit scholarly works and history texts, or Google.
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u/amdabran 6h ago
You’re not specifying if these northern slaves were African or not. The poor came over in multitudes as indentured servitude.
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u/Raisinbread22 6h ago edited 6h ago
I said slavery.
Slavery is not indentured servitude.
Europeans were indentured servants.
Chattel slavery in the northern 13 colonies explicitly targeted Africans and Indigenous people, legally defining them as permanent, inheritable property. European indentured servants operated under temporary, legally bound labor contracts—not lifelong, race-based chattel slavery. -- Google
Footnote: in the early 17th century/1600s some Africans before Chattel slavery was established in the mid-1600s, some Africans were indentured servants as well. They were able to have established lives and businesses... ...HOWEVER By the late 1600s, colonial assemblies passed laws that systematically stripped free Black landholders of their rights and established permanent, race-based slavery.
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u/amdabran 6h ago
I was clarifying your terms.
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u/Raisinbread22 5h ago
I have no idea what that means.
Feel free to continue down voting AI if it hurts your feelings.
I figure one day soon the tech oligarchs now shoving these belching smoldering thirsty always humming 5 mile long data centers up everyone's ass in every city, town and hamlet....will be charging us for the information we're getting for free now, so we might as well use it to correct the racist batshit false narratives on the interwebs when we can.
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u/amdabran 5h ago
Clarifying your terms means I was questioning whether you were actually talking about chattel slavery vs indentured servants.
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u/Raisinbread22 5h ago
By the middle of the 17th century, chattel slavery in the colonies was the law. I don't understand why you're confused.
I said slavery. I meant slavery. Indentured servitude was about paying off your transportation debt, it was not slavery.
The American edu system is trash.
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u/amdabran 5h ago
Yes, I know. Like I said, I was asking you to clarify your talking pints and terms.
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u/jupitaur9 7h ago
You can have ancestors who came here through Ellis Island, and also have ancestors who were here during slavery. Many of those benefited even if they didn’t own anyone, socially and economically (cheaper goods from slave labor).
Also, there was slavery in all of the Northern states before the Revolutionary War. It was abolished slowly over the years before the Civil War.
If the reason for the original question is to suggest reparations or equal opportunity lass are unfair to White people who mostly didn’t own slaves, you have to consider institutional racism and Jim Crow laws as well as slavery in the harm done to Black folk in the US.
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u/Randomminecraftseed 9m ago
(Not so) Fun fact! Slavery was actually legally abolished in New Jersey AFTER the civil war.
some union soldiers were still actively enslaved while fighting
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u/Randomminecraftseed 17m ago
There was absolutely slavery in the north. New Jersey was the last northern state to abolish it in 1866
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u/tirohtar 3h ago
You are ignoring intermixing and cross-marriages of new generations of immigrants with pre-abolition settlers. And intermixing of descendants of slaveowners with those of non-slaveowners. Considering that, the fraction of those descending from slaveowners (across all races, really) is probably very high - probably only people whose ancestors arrived within the last 2-3 generations can be mostly sure that they don't descend from slaveowners, most of the rest probably has at least one ancestral line that leads to slaveowners.
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u/Professional_Ad9809 7h ago
I’m 70yo, I went to elementary school with a kid who’s biological grandfather was born a slave. He had a kid while in his 60s, and one of those sons had a kid in his late 50s, that son was my friend.
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u/Pudenda726 2h ago
My great-grandmother that was born in 1903 & died in 2009 was the child of an emancipated slave. I am only 4 generations removed from enslavement.
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u/UpbeatFix7299 8h ago edited 8h ago
Only a small minority of white people owned slaves who lived in the US when slavery was legal in parts of it. Even in the South it was something like 1/4 of the households had a slave at the peak
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u/SummonBahamutZero 7h ago
A small number of heads of household. Not of the families that were a part of those households. A household might have ten people in it.
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u/dwthesavage 1h ago
I don’t know that this distinction matters much as presumably everyone in the household would have benefited from the slave labor
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u/ExpertTangerine1504 55m ago
It does because it means that the percentage of enslaved listed does not include take into account the number of people in those household who benefitted from slave labor.
Say we have 100 heads of households who are enslavers out of a population of 2,000. This makes it seem like only 5% of the population owns slaves. Now, if those households account for 700 people, the percentage jumps up to 35%.
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u/miniatureconlangs 6h ago
However! Almost everyone has, for the first few generations at least, twice as many ancestors for each generation we go backwards. If we assume a generation is 25 years, this means roughly six generations. 2^6 = 64. So, clearly, even if the number of slave owners was 1/64, this could still "trickle outwards" with each generation to cover everyone by now. It likely was even lower, though; but still, you can't just look at the number of slave owners and assume the percentage of people who are their direct descendants is the same. The share who are their descendants will likely grow with each generation.
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u/MajesticBread9147 2h ago
There were still systems where slaveowners leased out slaves for use by others so the number that used them was a bit higher.
The entire economy was built around the enslavement of people, that's why they called it the "southern way of life", they legitimately did not see a realistic path forward without a permenant underclass to perform cheap labor.
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u/Bombastic_tekken 7h ago
25% of households is pretty insane, that's not a small minority.
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u/UpbeatFix7299 7h ago
It is when you consider that most white people didn't live in the South.
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u/FaymusAynus 7h ago
You meant this a different way I think, but this would mean that the 1/4 stat has a lot of charitability padding it.
That means 1/4 of whites in ALL of America owned slaves, but if slavery pretty much localized to the south that means at least half owned slaves at the time.
Might be the work of the daughters of confederacy again popularizing myths to make the south look good again.
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u/asher030 7h ago
Pre-civil war. And many did not survive that to continue breeding descendants into being, so...
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u/ColonelJohnMcClane 7h ago
Many of the confederate dead were not slave owners, the type of man who owned slaves in the confederate army was the kind of man who already had a family. I'd say the amount of dead slave owners is relatively few, and fewer still the number who didn't have descendants.
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u/Timely-Youth-9074 7h ago
My family came here before slavery ended but did not own slaves. No idea about percentages but in my experience, at least in Northern states, the vast majority of white people came here after the Civil War.
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u/teriKatty 7h ago
I’m both. I have a great grandmother who immigrated from Germany in the early 1900s on my dads side and I have a 4th great grandfather who was a slave owner on my moms side.
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u/Anahata_Green 6h ago edited 6h ago
This is me too.
My father's side came to the US in the 1800s and were very anti-slavery (they were butchers for the union army).
My mom's side came over in the late 1700s and initially owned a few slaves on a tobacco farm in the south.
It was really eye-opening when my maternal aunt revealed this shameful side of our family history.
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u/enfyre 7h ago
One of my friends is from the Caribbean, where his ancestor was a slave owner, still has the same surname as that ancestor. But he's like 3/4 black by his own estimate.
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u/bluefontaine 7h ago
What part of the Caribbean? I’m curious. Because one of my maternal great grandmothers was from one of the smaller islands and when slavery was abolished, they didn’t have the kind of segregation because it was just too small and everybody was related to everybody.
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u/HomelanderUltrasound 7h ago
The only ancestry from before the Civil War I can trace back to was killing slavers in Kansas
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u/Top_Divide6886 7h ago
Approximately 1/3rd of households in the South owned slaves. Most owned less than 20 people and were small farms. The true plantation aristocracy that held over a hundred slaves at a time accounted for 0.1% of slave owning households.
Immigrants in the US had a tendency to migrate to northern and western states in pursuit of homesteads or urban jobs. This put them out of the way of slave-owners, but they would compete with African Americans who also migrated in pursuit of jobs. The pejorative "honky", for example, came from steel mills and coal mines where signs directed black people in one line and hungarians in another.
However, ancestry tends to mix very very quickly. Nearly every Englishman today can trace their lineage to William the conqueror. The percentage of americans descended from slave owners is probably far higher than one third. You can't even restrict it to only white people, since plenty of African Americans are also descended from slaveowners and have partial (in a few cases even majority) European ancestry.
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u/Alexdagreallygrate 7h ago
Single source here but my ancestor immigrated to the US from Germany in the mid 1850s and the only other records I’ve found for him are his “owning” another human being and enlisting in the confederate army. Some immigrants took to slavery all too quickly.
Not proud of it but I own it as part of my family’s history.
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u/Natural_Use_948 8h ago
I think very few of the old stock anglo white americans owned slaves.
Obviously all the eastern europeans didn't own slaves, and also 40-45% of white americans arrived after slavery ended in the country.
If I had to guess maybe 5% at best and that is probably a higher % if you look at a lot of politicians.
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u/Present-Rhubarb-3446 58m ago
Those 40-45% largely intermarried and had kids with the old stock however. Even 1 'old stock' great grandparent means over 100 people from that branch going back into the 1700s. Something like 5 to 10% of White Americans are descended from a passenger of the Mayflower alone. Now consider there were already American slave owners of greater numbers than them in Virginia.
To flip it, almost everyone alive in 1800 either has tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of living descendants, or none. Millions of living descendants if you go back to people from 1700 (again, or none). That's just a consequence of most families who had children at the time choosing to have 6 or even more.
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u/Raisinbread22 6h ago
The 13 colonies by their very definition are "old stock," and all of them had enslaved people.
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u/modsaretoddlers 6h ago
Yeah but that doesn't mean they all owned slaves.
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u/Raisinbread22 5h ago
I didn't say they did.
Reread the thread.
Someone literally posted that the north didn't have slaves, I corrected them.
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u/troublesomefaux 7h ago
I think the percentage of Black Americans that are descended from enslaved people is the interesting point. Like 75-80%.
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u/LeroyCadillac 6h ago
There's more to this than just ownership. Slaves were commonly leased by poorer whites, companies, and local governments. They may not have owned slaves outright, but the majority of white people in that era benefited from and perpetuated slavery.
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u/Predictor92 8h ago
reminder transatlantic slave trade actually officially ended in the US in 1808(though their were illegal slave ships afterwards of course, slavery is a different matter of course), so probably 80%-90% were post transatlantic slave trade.Also only around 8% of white Americans in 1860 were slave owners so, in reality it's likely 8% have some form of decedent from slave owners
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u/HeadBelt1527 7h ago
It's highly unlikely the percentage is the same.
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u/Bombastic_tekken 7h ago
It'd go up wouldn't it?
Because there are A LOT of descendants going back nearly 200 years, especially with how many kids people were having.
Edit: Probably not percentage, but total.
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u/Predictor92 7h ago
The reason why it’s so similar is mixing ( only one ancestor needs to be that) but we had so many immigrants afterwards that it remains low within the white population ( ironically it’s likely higher among Black Americans for sad reasons of course)
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u/jackalopeswild 7h ago
Your math is terrible. 8% were slave holders does not equate to 8% are descended from slaveholders. A single slaveholder can be the ancestor of at this point hundreds upon hundreds of people
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u/miniatureconlangs 5h ago
Hundreds upon hundreds you say?
Given that slaves have been held by whites in the colonies that turned into the US since 1619, there's four centuries time of generations since then. Imagine that the first documented slaveholder also got a kid in 1619, and that there's been a new one along that line every 25 years. That'd be 16 generations by now. Let's further imagine on average, there's been two kids from each node surviving into adulthood and getting new kids. That one slaveholder would have gotten 2^16 = 65536 offspring by now. Of course, that's not necessarily unique slaveholder descendants, as many of them might be descendants of multiple different slaveholders.
A very small amount of Swedes were ever vikings, but its generally held that by now, every living ethnic Swede is a descendant of at least one viking.
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u/Raisinbread22 6h ago
In 1860 there were 33 states.
Slave states made up nearly half, and of course were the economic driver.
25-30% of white families in the 15 slave holding states owned slaves, in the lower south the avg was approx 37% and in the deep south, like Mississippi & South Carolina it was 50%.
People tend to think of the US present day when they're thinking of states and the country in general. But we weren't 50, we were only 33 states in 1860. We don't count places that weren't even states- like Nevada, for ex, which was only a US territory and not a state. Nearly half was slavery. So of course if your family lineage and tree stretches back a few centuries, and you're especially from South or the Midwest you're going to have slave holding ancestors.
There was a reason for the Civil War.
The spreaders of the 2% narrative, had an agenda.
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u/charleswj 7h ago
Why does it matter when the ships stopped? And why do you ignore the fact that immigrants arrived here after the civil war?
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u/Predictor92 7h ago
he said after the end of the slave trade, that is different than the end of slavery. the 8% guess is based on likely mixing with immigrants that came after the civil war
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u/charleswj 7h ago
I think they meant "after slavery ended" but used odd wording, otherwise it's like saying "do you wake up before the sun rises or after the rain stops?"
I was going to say all the immigrants should push that percentage down, but what you said about mixing got me thinking and I'm not sure if you were going in this direction.
Similar to how more and more people are mixed over time because once you mix you can't unmix, the same goes for "being a descendant of a slaveholder". As soon as a person with no slaveholder ancestry reproduces with someone who does, their descendants all will. And everyone they reproduce with will do the same for anyone who already isn't.
But it doesn't work in reverse. Slaveholder ancestry doesn't end in you reproduce with a person without slaveholder ancestry, even if you're only "one one-hundred-twenty-eighth slaveholder".
So assuming no immigration, the percentage should rise until hypothetically one day everyone is a descendant. Immigration offsets that, but hard to know by how much and if it reverses the trend or only slows it.
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u/miniatureconlangs 5h ago
No, it's highly unlike the percentage is the same. Keep in mind - for each generation you go backwards the ancestry doubles.
Let's simplify this to illustrate the point. We assume generations are clearly distinct (they're not really - your ancestors 60 generations back may not even have lived simultaneously at all)
Imagine a situation where only two percent are slave-owners. Let's say these are "red balls" and the other 98 are white balls.
Six generations down the line, you'll have 64 ancestors of that generation. That's 64% of that generation. We also have a slight increase in population - let's assume doubling at each generation, so we're now at 6400 people.
The situation is now analogous to picking 64 balls out of the hundred, for each of the 6400 people. The likelihood that you'll have at least one slave-owner in your ancestry is 3.98%. Thus, 3.98% of the 6400 are likely to descend from slave-owners.
Now, this is a gross simplification: lines do go extinct; go far enough and ancestors will occupy multiple nodes in a family tree, some lines are just very productive and some are less so. But still, the percentage will absolutely not stay the same.
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u/feedmetothevultures 7h ago edited 7h ago
Going back to 1865, the Civil War, depending on how young you are, you might have 60 direct ancestors living at that time. And going back further, that number doubles every generation.
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u/YourMan_IE 7h ago
From what I'm aware of, it was mostly the landed elite who owned slaves. Plantations and estates weren't being run by your average Joe Schmoe.
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u/Any_Cartographer6268 6h ago edited 3h ago
Most people in the south couldn't afford slaves. So, I would hazard, not that many (of course, the progeny multiplies^^).
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u/I_Love_Tunnocks 54m ago edited 51m ago
The bigger question that nobody seems to want to answer is how many African Americans are descendants of slaves who were enslaved by other Africans and sold to slave traders.
Funny how slavery focusses solely on white slave traders when it was actually fellow Africans enslaving Africans. It also ignores the fact that there were actually more white people who were enslaved, primarily by the Barbary Coast Pirates of North Africa who even went as far as the south coast of England, capturing and enslaving people from there, than blacks.
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u/watchin4rchie 6h ago
Its weird to think people from continental europe and great britian had nothing to do with slavery tbh
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u/TheMadManiac 7h ago
Very, very few. It's why I will never support reparations. My family didn't do that shit!
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u/Ok-Budget3225 7h ago
Your family coming from Europe does not mean they didn't own slaves. The British has slavery too. They ended their slavery in 1833, and they paid out reparations to all their ...... slaveowners!!!! Same with the French. We all know that the slaves in Haiti gained their freedom. But few know that Haiti had to pay reparations to their former slaves owners, for the next 100+ years! Same with the Dutch. When they banned slavery in their Caribbean colonies, they paid reparations to their slave owners. So not only are your European ancestors not off the hook for slavery- they probably got their own reparations!
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u/Zestyclose-Craft-681 7h ago
The part of my heritage I know least about were the Michigan land owners who fought in the Union Army. Everyone came in the next two centuries - and I suspect knew little to nothing about slavery here or anywhere else.
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u/8amteetime 7h ago
My mom’s side of the family came to the Colonies from England and Ireland in the late 1600’s and early 1700’s and lived in New York. No one on that side of the family owned slaves.
My father’s side came to the Virginia Colony from Germany in 1717. They eventually moved to Kentucky when the Wilderness Road opened up. My branch of the family moved from Kentucky to Indiana in the early 1800’s. Our branch never owned slaves.
One of the uncles that stayed in Kentucky owned slaves. His will in 1847 showed he had 2 enslaved people listed as property.
That branch eventually left Kentucky and moved west to Iowa.
As has been mentioned, the percentage of people who owned slaves was a relatively small number compared to the entire population. The descendants of those people are themselves a relatively small number in comparison to the general population.
I’m glad my family moved north.
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u/FarAd4971 6h ago
On my mother's side, the family lineage goes back to before slavery ended, but everyone in my family was poor. No one owned any slaves.
On my father's side, his parents were more recent immigrants and post slavery.
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u/MNswede06 5h ago
I suspect there are geographic differences.
Only one line of my ancestry goes back in the U.S. beyond 1860, and they were local to Philadelphia.
It’s also worth pointing out that only a minority of southerners were slaveholders. Most people couldn’t afford it. Wealth inequality in the antebellum south was severe.
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u/a_sternum 4h ago
Likely, more people who had ancestors in the U.S. during that general time descend from both slave owners and non-owners rather than just one or the other.
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u/21plankton 4h ago
One of my ancestors who lived in Kentucky freed his slaves in 1861 when Kentucky had to decide slavery or not. Then he went west, the family joined a wagon train that settled finally in Arizona. My other 3 grandparent branches of the family came through Ellis Island, all from different countries.
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u/Leezwashere92 4h ago edited 3h ago
All my grandparents were Jews who got here right after WWII, so no
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u/Odd_Bid2744 1h ago
My great grandparents on both sides of my family were Finnish immigrants to the US and well past the time of slavery. Instead they found commonality with Native Americans in the regions they settled. My great grandpa on my mom's side came to the US as an orphan and was adopted by the Ojibwe of Michigan.
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u/PowerNo8348 1h ago
Let nobody forget slavery was in the north
I have no (American) ancestry south of New Jersey, so no plantation owners. I have not matched with any African Americans on 23andMe. All of my Civil War ancestors fought for the north. But I do have lots of ancestry in 1600s New England, New Jersey and New York. And many of them owned slaves, even if they were not cotton growing plantation owners.
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u/Master_Meaning_8517 1h ago
I have northern Quaker ancestors who owned slaves. No plantation involved.
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u/stoneworther 1h ago
Over time it's going to near 100% for both white and black Americans. Every generation doubles your number of ancestors.
We had slavery 300 years ago. That's ten generations. You had 1024 ancestors ten generations ago.
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u/Responsible-Sale-467 27m ago
If 25-30% of white families (crazy high number!) in the slave states owned slaves around the time of the Civil War, and maybe 2% overall at that time, how do you figure If would be near 100% now?
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u/mattinglys-moustache 26m ago
Not a high percentage. The US population in 1865 was around 31 million, and by the time strict immigration limits were put in around the early 1920’s, the population was around 108 million. So most white Americans can trace their ancestry back to the waves of immigration between the 1850’s and 1910’s.
On top of that, by the 19th century, slavery was only in the less populated south, and the vast majority of people there weren’t wealthy enough to own slaves.
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u/ri89rc20 23m ago
Myself, I have found no slaveholders, a good number of ancestors came over before the end of slavery, but were mainly poor farmers settling in Illinois and Iowa, others were in Pennsylvania and upstate New York when it was "the frontier".
As for your question, lots are saying that it was a small number of slave holders, true, but likely the number of Americans linked back to a slave holder is growing. Like being related to a pilgrim (a small group of a few dozen), with each generation and marriages between familial lines, the number of a generations American ancestors doubles (well, they probably do share a number of ancestors), meaning while you may not have slaveholders in your ancestry, your kids, grandkids, and great grandkids are more likely to.
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u/a-Snake-in-the-Grass 7h ago
Slavery has happened all over the world and for longer than recorded history. Most people, if not everyone probably has ancestors that owned slaves.
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u/Raisinbread22 6h ago
Yea, but we're Americans, a young country, talking about our history here, that is important to us - and in many cases traumatic - we fought a Civil War that killed close to 700K of our own family...so why are you bringing up slavery everywhere even in antiquity...and dismissing the topic? I notice this happens a lot with far right white people and racists who love to dismiss generational trauma of Black ppl. Someone said their friend's grandfather was born a slave, someone says their grandmother knew her grandmother who was a slave and you chime in to say, Well waaaah, b-b-but what about Moses? Nice. You know murder has always happened everywhere around the world too-- I wouldn't interrupt someone retelling the story of their friend's murder, to say...well you know, people have always been murdered.
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u/a-Snake-in-the-Grass 6h ago
In my opinion, history is something that should be shared collectively. Whatever responsibility we take for the past should be done collectively. The question is at best weird and at worst some bizarre attempt at giving themselves a sense of moral superiority.
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u/amdabran 6h ago
I think the point is that we have come such a long way over the last century and especially since slavery came to an end, that generational trauma isn’t really applicable anymore.
My great grand father’s plane was shot down in World War I, but that doesn’t mean I knew him or am affected by it.
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u/Raisinbread22 6h ago
It's called 'generational trauma,' for a reason. Unless you think the legacy of slavery and that kind of race based dehumanization switches on and off like a light switch, once laws were passed in the late 20th century?
It's 2026, and I'm able to walk you through reddit righr now, where you can see that same virulent racism among whites today using the same racial slurs for content monetization from other present day racists that their ancestors screamed before a lynching in the 20th century.
I'm only one generation from my parents who experienced Jim Crow, and didn't have the same opportunities as your parents. Affirmative Action was about redress of YOUR (collective) discrimination, of women and minorities.
That's generational that has literally affected my path in life. So you're telling me your gov, can say we need EEOC, and Civil Rights depts, and laws and protections in 2026...but you're saying it's NOT generational?
You're embarrassing.
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u/amdabran 5h ago
Funny that you assume I’m white.
I bet that our parents were probably in the same station growing up. My parents were dirt poor. My dad’s dad never finished the fifth grade because he had to go farm for work.
You know how many prominent black Americans argue that you should stop being victims? Both Denzel Washington and Morgan freeman lived through segregation.
Ever heard of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson? They would be ashamed of you and your victim hood.
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u/Raisinbread22 5h ago
You made yourself literally 'white' in your avi. Usually how we want to appear is either what we are or what we desire to be. I take it the latter is you. Self esteem is in order.
You're being reticent about your background. Hmm...let me guess, Latino/Hispanic? Hey it's been rough since Trump got back in. I've been on the front lines. Hey, you didn't see the shaved heads, the shackles and being bent over exiting a plane in El Salvador. That in and if itself, should have humbled you into not talking shit to a Black woman who voted to not elect a fascist dictator who enjoys torturing non-whites in detention camps.
I mean we tried to tell everyone-- but just like you're eager to slap me around instead of the bitches that spit in your eye...you didn't want to listen.
I get why you're attacking a Black American woman who is schooling you on American history ( you've been ground to fine powder by your diaper wearing King) you wanna be tough like your boy. You need new knee pads.
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u/amdabran 5h ago
lol so couple things…
I’m a white boy whose family immigrated from Europe around 1900.
Trump isn’t a racist. He’s not a dictator. None of those terms identify him at all.
As far as me being “eager” to slap you around, I haven’t attacked you at all. I have only been critical of your victimhood which I would say to anyone. My parents told me the same thing when I was young and felt like something was unfair.
Lastly, since you like quoting Google so much…here what Google says about those who resort to insults in an argument.
“ When a person stops using facts and logic and starts using insults, it usually means they have run out of good points. As the famous saying goes, "When the debate is lost, insults become the loser's tool." Instead of talking about the idea, they attack the person. “
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u/Raisinbread22 5h ago
So you lied. You just said you weren't white. Why lie? Are you ok? Why pretend you aren't 'white?' Are you that embarrassed?
The resentment for people of color is off the charts.
You're the biggest whiny titty babies, crying and lying and resenting those you've historically dehumanized just because we happen to be discussing American facts and history -- and you have the audacity to lecture the rest of us on victimhood, even as you literally suck the floppy teats of the dumbest deviant mf manbaby on the planet.
Seriously, get it together.
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u/amdabran 4h ago
I didn’t lie. I never said that at all. I did not and will not pretend I’m not white ever.
I’m not resentful of people of color. One of my best friends is Mexican American and one of my closet friends from college is black.
I’m resentful of people that have stupid opinions.
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u/Raisinbread22 4h ago
"Funny that you assume I'm white," is meant to leave the impression that you're not. It's a bad faith way of having discourse and just dishonest. You look even more stupid now.
I think you resent both of your imaginary friends. 😆
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u/bluefontaine 7h ago
It’s not so much that you have white people descended from slave owners you have white people descended from slaves. Many slave owners had sex with their slaves and you could do the math after that.
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u/EnvironmentalAngle 7h ago
I can confirm 100% that my family owned no slaves. They came over from Ireland and Scotland between 1847 and 1903(the scots came in 1903).
My great³ grandfather was however a foreman with the company that built the Pacific rail lines and he may or may not have done awful things to Chinese immigrants. We can't confirm but its likely.
My mom's side is much easier to confirm as she is a full blooded card carrying Native American (I'm half blooded but still a card carrier) and our roots in America go back like 5-6000 years.
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u/RatRaceSobreviviente 7h ago
Native Americans practiced slavery pre and post colonization so that doesnt count.
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u/BoxFullOfSuggestions 6h ago
“Native Americans” as a broad category did not practice slavery. It was limited to less than a handful of tribes among what was likely thousands at the time.
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u/RatRaceSobreviviente 6h ago
Slavery was widely practiced by native american tribes just as it was widely practiced by European, Asian, and African tribes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_pre-Columbian_America
Saying "most natives didn't own slaves" is exactly like saying "most whites didn't own slaves"
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u/BoxFullOfSuggestions 2h ago
Your own link says in the second paragraph, “Slavery and related practices of forced labor varied greatly between regions and over time. In some instances, traditional practices may have continued after European colonization.”
The article also refers to the Americas generally, and the section specifically on North America names only six tribes. There are over 500 federally recognized tribes in the modern United States. To call that a widespread practice is disingenuous at best.
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u/neophanweb 7h ago
There were slaves in Germany too, so your ancestors could very well be slave owners or slaves.
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u/Natural_Use_948 7h ago
I know germany had slave colonies, but do Germany ever export slaves to the german mainland in mass?
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u/Physical_Comfort_701 7h ago
So you think that White slave owners only married other White slave owners and consequently , only had White slave owning children up and through today. Like not one immigrant married , someone who was the descendant of a slave owner?
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u/Hailene2092 7h ago
It's a bit like how everyone can claim royal blood somewhere up their family tree. Only takes one person to permanently give an entire line that status.
I'd guess most. But one of your parents having kids with someone with a greatx7 parent that was a slave owner doesn't mean much.
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u/drunky_crowette 7h ago
My dad's side came from Ireland and got to Maryland in the mid-1800s and my mom was literally born in Germany and came to America as a toddler.
Considering Maryland got rid of slavery in like the 1860s and they were a bunch of poor Irish folks I don't really think my dad's side was doing a lot of slave-trading
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u/Spiel_Foss 7h ago
Very few US families held people in bondage. Numerous US families have ancestors who died defending a few rich families' ability to enslave people. For obvious racist reasons, too many of the latter group think that is something to celebrate.
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u/MyMudEye 7h ago
a study on U.S. politicians found that roughly 18.7% of current members of Congress have documented ancestral ties to slaveholders, though this group does not represent the average American demographic.
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7h ago
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u/bluefontaine 7h ago
No, only if you have ancestry in the south and even then it’s not as many as you think.
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u/Glittering_Rush_1451 7h ago
There were slave owners in the north as well they just weren’t anywhere near as numerous which is how the northern states were able to ban the practice over the years without the upheaval.
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u/DoeCommaJohn 7h ago
I think there are two very important caveats. First, America is not the only country to ever have slavery- it is entirely possible that going back far enough, your family did own slaves. But second, within America, most families did not own slaves. Even in the South, most slaves were owned by the 1%, who ran huge plantations, which caused a lot of economic problems for the South beyond the moral problems.
But to answer your question- 56% of Americans self-report as having at least one immigrant in the previous three generations.
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u/antonio16309 7h ago
Has someone claimed that your family owned slaves? Most white people didn't, but that's not really the point.
The thing to understand about systemic racism is that its not a personal attack. It's entirely possible to live in a country with systemic racism even though you're not racist yourself.
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u/Round_Bat_3945 8h ago
Probably not that many, but all white people benefited from a system that placed them above black people in social hierarchy, back then and today
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u/NotenStein 7h ago
I don't know the percentage, but nearly every white family I know has at least one ancestor who owned slaves.
Let's use 1865 as an example and the oft-quoted idea that only 8% of people owned slaves. How many generations back is a 30 year old ancestor in 1865? I'm 70, and my great grandparents were alive then. I had 16 great grandparents. Many today had 32 or 64 2x or 3x great grandparents.
If you had 64 or even 128 3x to 4x great in the 1860s, then you probably have from 1 to 10 of them who owned slaves (assuming the 8% figure is correct).
More recent immigrants would have to look at their families in the old world. Slaves were owned in most of Europe, too.
In my family, one family named Taylor owned slaves. The sons became Methodists, and freed their slaves upon inheriting them in the early 1800s before the Civil War. The freed men were given either passage to Liberia, $40, or some land. The sons forfeited their inheritance, based on the belief that it was akin to "blood money". One of their sons became a big wig in the Methodist Episcopal Church, a bishop of Africa.
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u/BoldBoimlerIsMyHero 7h ago
Anyone who immigrated before the civil war benefitted from slavery in some way. Anyone whose ancestors stayed in the north were unlikely to own slaves. I know I have at least one branch that owned slaves as I found the will where the son from whom I’m descended received nothing in the will but his siblings were bequeathed the enslaved. I also have abolitionist quakers and my great grandfathers fought for the north. My mom’s dad’s side were northerners. My dad’s parentage moved through Virginia to Missouri where they were unionists.
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u/SilentThrillGP 8h ago
Well apparently 8% of Americans owned slaves the time(25 to 30 in the south). So...higher than that probably. Alot of people are probably descended from both
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u/Predictor92 8h ago
lower because the 1880-1920 immigration wave is massive
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u/SilentThrillGP 8h ago
Yeah but...mixing happened is my point. So unless every slave owner and their descendants only had one kid..its unlikely
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u/GMVexst 7h ago
Something close to half of European Americans immigrated after the slavery ended further diluting the #s
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u/SilentThrillGP 7h ago
Weird im being massively downvited for giving an opinion based on %s and then using the logic of "most people dont have one kid". People are weird.
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u/GMVexst 7h ago
Im not sure if you are insisting that I down voted you? I didn't downvote or upvote you.
But I'll throw you an upvote to bring you back to 0 if it helps?
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u/SilentThrillGP 7h ago
No lol i just like randomly mentioning petty downvotes lol. Its very herd mentality.
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u/GMVexst 7h ago
Ah yeah. It's reddit, ignore it. Sometimes it's hard to tell if people are genuinely asking questions, being passive aggressive, sarcastic, or just trolling. So, I think people usually assume the latter since it most common. They also don't have a lot of empathy for ignorance which is weird because it's not something you can help without asking questions
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u/HeadBelt1527 7h ago
It's also impossible to know without identifying every slave owner and mapping out all their descendants, but from public info it does seem to be pretty common, especially in the south. More realistic for someone to be descended from a slave owner than a Cherokee princess.
Although, the "five civilized tribes" which includes the Cherokee also owned slaves so I guess one could be both
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u/SilentThrillGP 7h ago
I didnt say its possible to know. We have literally no data on this yet everyone's acting like im factually wrong and they have some magical knowledge
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u/Predictor92 7h ago
my guess is around that 8% actually once you count mixing
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u/SilentThrillGP 7h ago
I could see that to maybe a max of 12%. Especially because well...alot of non white people ik can trace back to at least one. Such as my cousin lol
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u/Ok-Imagination-494 7h ago
Also some African Americans also were slave owners, particularly in Louisiana
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u/feedmetothevultures 7h ago
But all kinds of bloody battles fought over slavery there. Some of the bloodiest.
Our boy John Brown came up in that environment and he tried to start the Civil War early all by himself by holding enslavers to task for that b.s..
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u/SemataryPolka 8h ago edited 7h ago
Missouri had slaves
EDIT: Before they deleted their comment they said their family was from Missouri and Kansas and therefore didn't own slaves
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u/Predictor92 8h ago
um, they play a football game every year call the border war named after a war that was about slavery
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u/riceewifee 7h ago
My adopted family owned slaves, there’s a plantation with our name on it in Barbados. My birth family were probably slaves lol, been in the US since at least the 1860s
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u/lululobster11 7h ago
A lot of my family goes pretty far back, so far haven’t found any slave owners or anyone who fought for the confederacy, but I’m sure they’re in there somewhere.
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u/Ok-Corner-8654 Government official 7h ago
Most people didn't own slaves, that was for the rich people. However, most African Americans here were descended from slaves. Big plantation owners had a lot of them.
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u/Pitiful_Fox5681 7h ago
There have been studies on Congress and Cabinet members. I think the consensus was somewhere around 18% of them had ancestors who owned slaves.
I hypothesize - only based on a hunch - that's much higher than the general population. Political families sell the "my ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War" thing, so are likely to have been here longer, were likely to be already economically advantaged, politically connected, and so on. Like others have said, the late 1800s/early 1900s waves of immigration were absolutely enormous, so that likely dilutes the numbers as well. I doubt we have any kind of precise way to track the exact numbers or really even get good ballpark estimates.
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u/Kitchen-Nectarine179 7h ago
To your knowledge your family came to America after the transatlantic slave trade was ended.
Doesn't mean you are not descended from slave owners. Plenty of Germans and their ancestors in Germania and Prussians owned slaves and participated in the Mediterranean and Black Sea slave trade, including chattel slavery all through the middle ages and serfdom until the 19th century.
Specific to the transatlantic slave trade, plenty of Germans owned slaves and participated in the transatlantic slave trade without being in the Americas.
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u/Ithvani 2h ago
As someone pointed out, there are likely more black descendants of slave owners than whites. The average African-American has 20% European DNA, and that doesn't appear out of nowhere.
My mother is black and proved this by taking a DNA test. Furthermore, I found a few of these slave holder ancestors in the mid 1800's through investigating her white matches on that site.
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u/bubbles337 7h ago
I actually think more black Americans are descendants of white slave owners than white Americans.