Visualizing Slavery

I saw this article and wanted to share it with the members, it has an interactive map from 1861 based on the 1860 census and shows the slave population density, and was considered a favorite map of President Lincoln during the civil war. There is also discussion of the famous.. “President Lincoln Reading the Emancipation Proclamation to His Cabinet” by Francis Bicknell Carpenter.

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

The 1860 Census was the last time the federal government took a count of the South’s vast slave population. Several months later, in the summer of 1861, the United States Coast Survey—arguably the most important scientific agency in the nation at the time—issued two maps of slavery that drew on the Census data, the first of Virginia and the second of Southern states as a whole. Though many Americans knew that dependence on slave labor varied throughout the South, these maps uniquely captured the complexity of the institution and struck a chord with a public hungry for information about the rebellion.

The map uses what was then a new technique in statistical cartography: Each county not only displays its slave population numerically, but is shaded (the darker the shading, the higher the number of slaves) to visualize the concentration of slavery across the region.

reply to post by JacKatMtn


A truly fascinating bit of American history . Slavery was a ticking time that was fused at the time of the USA was born as a nation . Thomas Jefferson basically said that he was against slavery but he was unable to do anything about it due to self interest and that it was up to future generations to abolish it . Once it became apparent that the American Civil War was going to last more then ninety days a strong sense of irony could not have escaped the more educated members of the Southern cause . Jefferson Davis the anointed president of the Confederacy centralized the government in the South in order to gain a war footing .