In 1860, there were about 385,000 slave owners in the South, among whom about 46,000 were planters. Even if only half of all planters experienced a single runaway in a year, and if only 10 or 15 percent of other slaveholders faced the same problem (both extremely conservative estimates) the number of runaways annually would exceed 50,000. Add to this the number of slaves who, like Sam King on Morville Plantation, continually ran away, and it becomes clear that Olmsted’s impressionistic observation was far more accurate than the “scientific” data provided in the United States Census.
