From Cotton to Carbon: America’s Long Habit of Lying With Numbers

In 1860, at least one in five Southern households enslaved human beings — and in some states, it was half. Remembering the true numbers matters for how we confront inequality now.

When a clip from Fox News floats across my feed, I sometimes have to remind myself that this isn’t just the background noise of a broken culture. Millions of people are tuned in, nodding along, believing what they hear. And what they hear is often absurd, and more than absurd—dangerous.

Take Jillian Michaels, the fitness trainer whose abs-and-buns VHS tapes cluttered living room shelves in the nineties.

These days, she resurfaces on television not to teach people how to stretch but to tell them what to think about the history of slavery.

On a recent segment, she insisted that almost no white people owned slaves in the years before the Civil War.

In one breath she managed to defend white fragility and distort the history of bondage. Then she doubled down on social media, as if sheer repetition could rescue a falsehood.

It’s a claim as old as the Confederacy itself, where leaders said the war was about tariffs or states’ rights or anything but slavery.

That lie metastasized into the “Lost Cause” mythology that still echoes across the South — in monuments, in textbooks, in politics.

I know; I grew up in Mississippi, where Confederate nostalgia hangs heavy.

People who feel uncomfortable with America’s racial history often recast themselves as victims, complaining that “everything is about race” while making sure the subject always pivots back to whiteness.

But history isn’t optional. The Articles of Secession are right there in the archives, stating in plain language that the Confederacy was founded on the defense of slavery.

The lie Michaels repeated is no accident; it’s part of a broader campaign, one now turbocharged by Project 2025, to rewrite the past so that the present can be bent to authoritarian ends.

And at its core, like so many MAGA-era fictions, it relies on bad math.

In 1860, the U.S. population stood at about 31 million people. That includes every state, North and South, enslaved and free. By then, slavery was illegal across most of the Union.

In the 11 states that would form the Confederacy, the total population was about 9 million.

Of those, nearly 4 million were enslaved¹.

That left roughly 5 million white people in the South. And among them, around 400,000 individuals were recorded as slaveholders. Do the division: 8% of the total Confederate population.

But that percentage hides more than it reveals.

Only white men were legally permitted to own slaves.

So when you calculate the rate among actual eligible owners, the figure leaps dramatically.

In 1850, census records show that about 9.7% of families in slave states owned enslaved people.

By 1860, with the population swelling², about one in five Southern households held at least one human being in bondage. In Mississippi and South Carolina, the figure was closer to one in two.

This wasn’t a marginal practice. It was a defining feature of Southern society. The plantations didn’t just grow cotton and tobacco — they grew wealth, political power, and a racial caste system. Even white Southerners too poor to own slaves clung to the institution, because it elevated them above millions of Black people. It promised that, no matter how hardscrabble their lot, there was someone below them in the hierarchy.

To deny this is to deny the foundation stones of the nation. It’s to pretend that slavery was a footnote, when in fact it was the headline.

Slavery was, in every sense, geographic. It mapped onto the land itself — the rich soils of the Mississippi Delta, the rice fields of the Carolinas, the cotton belt that stretched across the Deep South. This wasn’t abstract; it was physical, measured in acres and bushels, in broken backs and whipped flesh.

And because it was geographic, it was political.

Gerrymandering before the word existed, representation in Congress was tilted by the infamous three-fifths compromise, counting enslaved people not as citizens but as fractions of property, inflating the power of their owners. The South’s political clout was built on bodies it refused to acknowledge as human.

That geography persists. The counties that once depended on plantations are today some of the poorest in America, their wealth long extracted by slaveholders and later by Jim Crow landlords.

The scars are visible in maps of poverty, health disparities, even climate vulnerability. When hurricanes or floods come barreling in, it’s overwhelmingly Black communities — descendants of the enslaved — who bear the brunt.

The effort to minimize slavery’s role in history isn’t just about the past. It’s about erasing the way it structures the present.

We’re used to lies now — about climate change, about elections, about vaccines. They’re not mistakes; they’re tools. The claim that hardly any white Southerners owned slaves is designed to comfort white audiences today, to suggest that their forebears were innocent, that guilt is a liberal invention. It’s a way of dodging responsibility, of laundering history.

But it’s not just a question of guilt. It’s about power. Because if you can convince people that slavery was minor, you can convince them that racism is exaggerated, that inequality is accidental, that justice movements are overreactions. You can convince them that the true victims are the ones asked to remember.

That’s the same logic driving today’s book bans and curriculum fights. It’s the same logic behind Project 2025, which aims not just to roll back voting rights and reproductive rights but to control the narrative about who we are as a nation. If you erase slavery from the center of the Civil War, you can erase the fight for freedom from the center of American history.

And here’s where the parallel to the climate crisis becomes unavoidable.

For decades, fossil fuel companies insisted that only a tiny fraction of pollution came from their industry. They leaned on percentages, manipulated numbers, told us not to believe the evidence of our warming world.

Just as Michaels’ statistic about slave ownership is technically framed but morally false, Exxon’s claim that their emissions were a drop in the bucket ignored the systemic reality: that an entire economy was rigged to depend on their product.

The math is familiar. Denominators are inflated to make the numerator seem small. But whether you’re counting slaves or carbon molecules, the effect is the same: to disguise the breadth of complicity.

And in both cases, the costs are borne by the vulnerable. In the nineteenth century, enslaved people absorbed the full violence of an economy built on cotton.

In the twenty-first, frontline communities — often poor and often Black or brown — absorb the hurricanes, the floods, the heat waves, while the companies and politicians most responsible keep getting richer.

There’s a reason authoritarians always attack history. Because history tells us that things can change — and that they must.

If slavery was a system propped up by lies, it was also undone, at least formally, by people who refused to keep silent. If fossil fuels have dominated for a century, they too can be toppled, if we insist on telling the truth about them.

Jillian Michaels’ bad math may seem trivial, the rant of a minor celebrity past her peak. But when it’s broadcast to millions, it becomes another brick in a wall of denial. And when that denial is weaponized by political projects like Project 2025, it’s no small thing.

The truth is harder, but it’s also liberating. One in five households in the Confederacy enslaved people. Half in Mississippi. Half in South Carolina. Those are the facts. To minimize them is to deny the suffering of millions, and to dishonor the fight for freedom that followed.

And the parallel truth today: the climate crisis is not the fault of some tiny sliver of humanity. It’s the direct result of systems we built and still uphold. Pretending otherwise may comfort us in the moment, but it leaves the world less habitable for our children.

The only antidote is honesty, spoken plainly and relentlessly, until the lies lose their power.

---

Sharing point:

Research shows that about 20% of family units in slave states owned slaves in 1860, and that 24.9% of households owned slaves. (Note: Households are a broader category than families.)

Across the entire Confederacy in 1860, at least 20% of households owned at least one slave, and in Mississippi and South Carolina slave ownership was as high as 50%³.

1. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1860/population/1860a-02.pdf

2. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/1909/decennial/century-populaton-growth-part15.pdf

3. https://socialequity.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/8.10.20.pdf

---

Additional References:

Berlin, I. (2003). Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. Harvard University Press.

McPherson, J. M. (1988). Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University Press.

Ransom, R. L., & Sutch, R. (2001). One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation. Cambridge University Press.

U.S. Census Bureau. (1860). Population of the United States in 1860: Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

U.S. Census Bureau. (1850). Population of the United States in 1850: Compiled from the Original Returns of the Seventh Census. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

Baptist, E. E. (2014). The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Basic Books.

Foner, E. (2010). The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. W. W. Norton & Company.

Klein, N. (2014). This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. Simon & Schuster.

Oreskes, N., & Conway, E. M. (2010). Merchants of Doubt. Bloomsbury Press.

IPCC. (2023). AR6 Synthesis Report: Climate Change 2023. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.