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As more Confederate monuments were being removed in the South this month, an old claim seeking to downplay the extent of slave ownership began to recirculate online. Data archived from the 1860 census ...

The Vault is Slate's history blog. Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter @slatevault, and find us on Tumblr. Find out more about what this space is all about here. This map, made by the U.S. Coast ...

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 ...

Confederate-themed posts are cropping up on social media in the wake of the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Va. The march was sparked by efforts to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert ...

The Official Medallion of the British Anti-Slavery Society--1795 This is the second post in a six-part series dealing with the race questions on the census. Just as the concept of race differs from ...

RALEIGH - A renegade census taker charged with recording the population of a tiny northeastern North Carolina county in 1860 left behind a record of slave names that is the only such known document in ...

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln (and the Republican Party) stood as the only viable alternative to the moral indifference of Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas’s “popular sovereignty” and the pro-slavery ...

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 claim ...