What I meant by the stat was that while a sizable chunk of the white population may have owned slaves, most of those owners only had a few and weren't working the ones they had to death in the fields. The vast majority of slaves were owned en masse on large plantations in harsh conditions, by the richest of society. Compare the size and percentage of it to modern corporately owned farms. Independent farmers might outnumber corporate farms 100:1, but the crops and livestock owned and produced outnumber all the production of every small private farmer together 100:1.

The razorbacks link mentions 88% of slave owners owned 20 or less slaves. 20 is still a lot and no better than 1 at the end of the day, but I thought it worth mentioning that Robert E. Lee falls into that category. The only slaves he ever owned were ~15 that he inherited from his father-in-law. He is on record as saying that he, like most southerner, knew slavery was evil but thought it necessary for the economy. While we know he did have at least one slave whipped after they tried to run away, by most accounts he treated them very well and human for the day. He never had them working as servants and handymen and not in a field. But people still hear his name and just write him off as an evil racist, without really knowing anything about him.

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Do you have anything to support this? I do think many Southerners struggled with the morality of slavery, but there was also a lot of money invested in it. And it was pretty much the only driver of the Southern economy at the time. I don't think the voluntary conclusion of it would have been as quickly and peaceful as you suggest. Just look at how far into the 1950's and 60's the Jim Crow laws extended to. And those took multiple Supreme Court decisions and Federal laws to unravel.

Obviously there is nothing concrete that I can point to. Obviously it isn't something that would have happened overnight. But it is something that was going on all over the world throughout the entire 19th century, and in the rest of the country too.
3/4th of white southerns did not own slaves. There was already vocal opposition to slavery in the south, and most knew it was wrong. There was already considerable pressure to do away with the practice before Lincoln ever got to the White House. The only thing keeping it alive was the money. Maybe in the 4-5 years that the country was occupied with war one of the several hundred thousand young men who died could have come up with a new way for the south to make money or farm without slaves. Instead the south was left burned to the ground, literally in ruins and poverty with no way to rebuild on their own and an entire generation of their finest young men gone.

It could have also taken another 30 years like some places in the world, and obviously everything that happened was 100% worth it to keep another generation out of slavery. But I think it's clear that the way it happened is what ultimately caused a lot of the animosity and hatred that happened afterwards.
Like I said the south was left in poverty and ruins after the Civil War, a shell of it's former antebellum past. In hard times it's human nature to want to blame somebody else, and I think that is what bred a lot of the resentment and hateful racism in the south.
Before the Civil War I don't think that most peoples racism was "hateful." Yes almost everybody was racist, even Lincoln thought he was better than black people. It was just that though, people had a misguided view that black people were somehow lesser. I don't think most people actually hated black people though, most actually had compassion for them.
But the resentment and bad feelings from the Civil War was eventually directed towards black people and manifested into a hateful racism that directly bred things like the KKK and Jim Crow Laws. The economic impact of the Civil War affected the south for 100 years, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the Civil Rights Movement also occurred 100 years later as the southern economy was finally recovering.
The racial tension that we feel in this country today is directly linked to that and we can trace it clearly all the way back to the Civil War.

We can point all around the world to areas where civil rights issues developed naturally and handled mostly peacefully, like the north, and see much less division and tension among different races. Conversely we look at other areas where like in the south civil rights issues were forced violently by an outside power and there still exists racial issues that are deeply ingrained in the culture.