By 1820 most South Carolinians were enslaved Africans

Evidence

In many respects, South Carolina was a paradigmatic slave state. Although the largest enslavers resided in the Lowcountry region, with its large rice and cotton plantations, nearly the entire state participated in plantation agriculture and the economy built on slavery. By 1820 most South Carolinians were enslaved Africans. By midcentury, the historian Manisha Sinha notes in The Counterrevolution of Slavery, it was the first Southern state where a majority of the white population held enslaved people. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 627

Categorization

• SHARE: The stunning stat that by 1820 a majority of South Carolina’s population was enslaved — and by midcentury a majority of whites held enslaved people — is exactly the kind of specific figure a slavery-history specialist would want.
• QUESTION: Worth verifying the Sinha metric ‘majority of the white population held enslaved people’ — this is a contested-sounding empirical claim central to the reader’s need to separate data from framing.