What was the typical cost of an American slave, in modern dollars?

[Balthisar]

@Martin Hyde

In those 17 states, the state with the most slave owners was Virginia with 52,128. The state with the highest rate of slave ownership was South Carolina, where 9.1% of the white population owned slaves.

I wonder, though, what was the typical size of a family? I can’t imagine that owning slaves was like owning cars, where the Volvo is the wife’s, the Lincoln is mine, son Bobby has his Mustang, and daughter Jenny her hybrid Escape. Maybe the better statistic, is what percentage of households had slaves?

[ivylass]

@Cosmic Relief

I’m kinda :dubious: on that one. Who files paperwork in a stable, even for transactions of things like saddles or chicken feed, much less high-dollar purchases like horses or slaves? If there were some sort of plantation manager’s office, I could maybe accept that. Paperwork in a stable just sounds like convenient hyperbole.

Sorry for the confusion. The paperwork was filed with the paperwork they kept on the buying and selling of horses, since slaves were considered property like horses and livestock…not that they found a filebox in the stables.

[HMS_Irruncible]

@ivylass

Sorry for the confusion. The paperwork was filed with the paperwork they kept on the buying and selling of horses, since slaves were considered property like horses and livestock…not that they found a filebox in the stables.

Even so, is that because slaves are equated with horses, or just because they were labor expenses associated with agricultural/stable operations? You would expect that the records of paid hired hands would be stored in the exact same file, and what would be the shame in that? Certainly slaves were treated horribly and considered as property, but in this anecdote I just don’t see the slaves = horses mentality that is implied.