Why were most slave owners English?

[Richmondbread]

Looking on my family tree, all my ancestors who were slaves holders were of English descent. I don't know of many , if at all German slave owners or even much of the French or Irish . Is this largely because of primogeniture?

I know some argue most slave owners in America were Jews, but I actually see little evidence of this . If you look at the "African Americans " they have very Anglo surnames retained by their owners..names like Washington, Jefferson, Fitzhugh, Brown, Carter, Clifford, etc not Feldman or Finkelstein.

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[Creoda]

You mean in the USA. Remember that not everybody lives in your godforsaken country, there was plenty of slavery elsewhere.

Because most people in the US South were English? Because the Thirteen Colonies were English, not German,French or Irish. Most of everything was English there.

A lot of their surnames are artificial too, naming themselves after presidents etc.

[Alexandro]

[Diego Garcia]

Looking on my family tree, all my ancestors who were slaves holders were of English descent. I don't know of many , if at all German slave owners or even much of the French or Irish . Is this largely because of primogeniture?

I know some argue most slave owners in America were Jews, but I actually see little evidence of this . If you look at the "African Americans " they have very Anglo surnames retained by their owners..names like Washington, Jefferson, Fitzhugh, Brown, Carter, Clifford, etc not Feldman or Finkelstein.

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Jews have been manly and traditionally known as slave traders, at least since the Middle Ages, and not as slave owners strictu sensu.

As good merchants they just wanted them as a mercandise, not as a labour force.

[sean]

Looking on my family tree, all my ancestors who were slaves holders were of English descent. I don't know of many, if at all German slave owners or even much of the French or Irish. Is this largely because of primogeniture?

Maybe, but all of them were guilty of slave trade.

Spoiler!

Only difference is in the 1800's in the south of America the slave owners were saying that they were the 'master race' because they were of Norman and Cavalier stock but the northerners were of Anglo-Saxon and Puritan stock and inferior.

Puritan based north had some customs of their original villages in England, where food was boiled and bland so as not to indulge in the sensual pleasures of food, but the slave owning south enjoyed extremely rich foods and revelled in corporeal pleasures.

Also, they turned their work roles in subjugation into virtue which spurned lots of hard working, literate places where capitalism became more and more an economic factor. This indulgence in work was the opposite attitude of Cavalier Normans who either were gentry in England or in the case of US claimed land and created a kin related political dominant master race that had slaves do the work.

The puritan attitude towards work led England to venture into capitalist ventures, which kicked off the agricultural and later industrial revolutions.

I know some argue most slave owners in America were Jews, but I actually see little evidence of this.

We don't know exactly for sure, various sources give different figures.

This source by the Jewish Virtual Library states that before the end of slavery, the number of Jews in the US did not surpass two hundred thousand.

Here's another one:

Spoiler!

The only source that actually gives information on slavery instead of purely population censuses, The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery by Junius P. Rodriguez and others. The page referenced (385) falls in the section defined by the index found in the end of Volume 2 L-Z as "Jews - U.S. South 384-386".

Yet it must be remembered that as successful as these Jewish [slave-owning] Southerners were by Southern standards, they represented a very tiny percentage of the 20,000 Jews residing in the pre-war [so] South who could, or would, ever aspire to own a slave. (About 5,000 Jews owned one or more slaves—about 1.25 percent of all the slaveowners in the pre-war [so] South.)

However, from the book "Thomas Jefferson's Views on Education" by John Henderson; they give approximately 347,000 slave holders (an important distinction), and a little under 6.2 million free whites in the slave states (there were 33,000 slave holders in Kentucky alone) in 1850.

Spoiler!

A vast majority of those slave holders hired slaves from slave owners, and it only accounts for 740k of the 3 million slaves in existence at that time (generous estimate of holders who had 5 or less). So we're down to 173,000 people who are either renting or holding more than 5 slaves, and we're back to the whole "rental aspect". Since I don't have better data and pareto distributions tend to be at least ballpark accurate, 20% of 173k is 34,600 actual owners of 5 or more slaves, which interestingly also puts us in the ballpark of the US Jewish population of the time (50-100k total).

If you look at the "African Americans " they have very Anglo surnames retained by their owners..names like Washington, Jefferson, Fitzhugh, Brown, Carter, Clifford, etc not Feldman or Finkelstein.

Freed blacks weren't named after their masters, this is a dumb myth. They picked their own last names based on what they thought sounded important.

Slaves before the Civil War were given names from the Old Testament, and when the Bible was mentioned around slaves, only the Old Testament was read, as the themes of emancipation in the New Testament were too spicy for slave owners to tolerate.