Roger Brothers
Re: Blacks In The CSA
Tue May 29 11:04:07 2001


Sir,

As a Christian and a gentleman it is impossible for me to reply to you "in kind". I do however, acknowledge and humbly apologize for my error in stating the numbers of free blacks in the States of Virginia and Maryland.

If we are to remain intellectually honest or just honest we need to compare "apples to apples" in a question of statistics. This mean if we are comparing "free" and the "slave" as they relate to States we must compare
the Southern "slave" States to the Northern "free" States. Anyone who wishes to do the numbers themselves can visit:

http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/censusbin/census/cen.pl

The totals come out Northern or "free" States: 225,961 and Southern or "slave" States 250,787

If my calculator is correct this means a difference of 24,826 more in the "slave" States.

I believe that the basic misunderstanding here is which States were “free” and which were “slave”. The slave States included Delaware, Maryland, Virginia North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana and Texas

Absolute numbers by themselves however rarely (and certainly in this case)are of much use. It would be much more enlightening to look at the proportion of free blacks to the total population of the various States.