As Mick Nicholls has observed, if slave husbands and wives belonged to different owners, the husbands would not appear (or be enumerated) on the census schedules along with their wives. The plantation with a equal number of adult male and adult female slaves was rare indeed.

Why else might males appear to be missing?
1) running away (most runaways were males);
2) hired out (most slaves hired out to employers in nearby towns [or elsewhere] were likely to be skilled males).

If we add all three reasons together, a sizable number of households with no adult male slaves would not be that unusual. 

Doug Deal
History?SUNY Oswego

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