re: How many poor dirt farmers owned slaves

Look, the exact percentage is not the big picture. The higher up a family was on the Southern economic and social ladder, the more slaves they tended to own.

That wouldn't have been a controversial statement to make at the time. Slave holding was not universal, but fairly common, and usually a small-scale thing except on the plantations.

Your typical grunt in a Southern infantry company usually didn't own slaves. They were younger and not really established yet financially. But I suspect a good many had no moral objections to it and aspired to the kind of economic success that would make owning slaves an option.

It was their society. It was the times.