Which of the following statements describes the institution of slavery in the nineteenth-century South? Group of answer choices Slave gangs proved to be less efficient than those who worked more independently. Throughout the nineteenth century, most white southerners owned some slaves. The percentage of white slave-owning families continually increased between 1800 and 1860. About 5 percent of southern whites owned 50 percent of the South's slave population.

About 5 percent of southern whites owned 50 percent of the South's slave population.

Explanation:

Throughout the 1800s, the institution of slavery established itself in the southern states, becoming the main means of economic production in these states, whose agricultural and livestock producers used slave labor to produce the various goods that were sold. they produced there: tobacco, cotton, sugar cane, pig farming and grain cultivation, among other activities. Slaves were used to carry out these tasks, without pay and in exchange only for their food and a place to sleep, often in deplorable conditions.

The acceptance of this situation was justified by two factors: on the one hand, the white inhabitants of the south saw blacks as inferior beings, devoid of all rights and in a non-human condition; on the other, slaves were the economic support of southern society, and their emancipation would mean a total crisis and the loss of wealth for many landowners.

Now, not all whites in the south had slaves: a large percentage of white people did not own slaves, because they did not have the economic capacity to buy and maintain them: it is estimated that about 4 million slaves worked in the south by 1860, which they were owned by a few wealthy landowners who used them for the exploitation of their lands. It is estimated that only 20 percent of white families owned slaves, and that only 5 percent owned more than half of the slaves in the region.