Thread by @soychicka

Query:

what proportion of living Americans have inherited more than $100,000, or $500,000 that originated with wealth derived from slavery?

How does that transfer of wealth map to political identity and geographic location?

Does anyone have a reference or primary source data?

It's a shame that Adam Goodheart at @washcoll doesn't have a twitter account. We could really use some more learned historians around here - to proviede truthful answers to questions about slavery and political dynamics around the civil war...

infogram.com/untitled-1gqnm…

Note: above is untitled, for some reason - it's the proportion of households per state that owned slaves.

This is the overall proportion in all slave-owning states.

You'll note that as the population moves westward, more families have slaves. Curious to know if that's because there were larger plantations that were acquired via prior slavery-derived wealth, or if there were more slaves on smaller farms.

There are bigger issues to address here, for sure - I wrote them up, but I'm not ready to talk about those publicly yet... if there are any researchers out there who would be interested in discussing a couple of future directions, I'd be game.