lay in his appeal to the people
in 1845 stated that there were 31,495 owners of slaves in the
State.[245] The same year the auditor's tax books showed that there
were 176,107 slaves in Kentucky.[246] This would mean an average of
5.5 slaves for each owner. The accuracy of these figures is
substantiated by those for the census of 1850 which gave 210,981
slaves held by 38,456 slaveholders or an average of 5.4 to each owner.
These holders were classified according to the number of slaves held
as follows:

Holders of 1 slave 9,244
Holders of over 1 and less than 5 slaves 13,284
Holders of 5 and under 10 slaves 9,579
Holders of 10 and under 20 slaves 5,022
Holders of 20 and under 50 slaves 1,198
Holders of 50 and under 100 slaves 53
Holders of 100 and under 200 slaves 5
38,385[247]

This distribution shows that, although the average number of slaves
held may have been 5.4 for each slaveholder, 21,528 or 50 per cent of
them held less than five slaves each, and that 34,129 or 88 per cent
held less than 20 each. Of the 132,920 free families in the State only
28 per cent held any slaves at all. This was somewhat below the
average for the whole South. The total number of families holding
slaves in the United States, by the census of 1850, was 347,525. With
an average of 5.7 persons to each family there were about 2,000,000
persons in the relation of slave owners, or about one third of the
whole white population of the slave States. In South Carolina,
Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana about one half of the white
population was thus classified. As stated above, this percentage in
Kentucky was only twenty-eight.

This comparison can be more clearly shown by a table of the slave
States from the census of 1850 showing the number of white people, the
slaveholders, slaves, and the average number of slaves for each
slaveholder.

======================================================================
| Whites | Slave |Per Cent | Slaves | Average per |
| | holders |of Whites | | Holder |
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Alabama | 426,514| 29,295 | 6.8 | 342,844| 11.6 |
Arkansas | 162,189| 5,999 | 3.7 | 47,100| 7.8 |
Florida