ntebellum South African-Americans consisting primarily of huge plantations holding hundreds or thousands of African-American slaves is almost completely wrong. The percentage of Southern slaveowners who owned more than a few slaves is small, and that of those who owned a hundred or more slaves is quite tiny. In the South, as throughout the United States, the vast majority of slaves were owned by small farmers, by small businessmen, or as domestic help in individual households, and the general pattern that gradually developed was for such slaveowners to free their slaves but continue to employ them as legally free labor.
One may presume that the freedom was appreciated, but in practice it was often only a legal technicality, and the working conditions of such "freed" slaves were often not at all improved. In addition, African-Americans who continued to be employed by and often to live with their former masters in what was then a predominantly rural society were kept in isolation from one another in this way, and thus had
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