" Perhaps one-half of 1 percent of the population of the slaveholding states owned a hundred slaves or more, and a few owned a thousand or more. It has been suggested that the 1860 census numbers might have underreported large slaveowners, but it’s unlikely that large slaveholders—again, almost the entire political class of the South—amounted to even 1 percent of the population of their states. "

― Ned Sublette , The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry