Us map of population density for free#
Us map of population density free#

Historian Steven Deyle estimates 'that between 18 at least 875,000 American slaves were forcibly removed from the Upper South to the Lower South.' A minority of that migration happened because white planters migrated along with the people that they owned. Slavery spread rather than grew because it was an agricultural rather than industrial form of capitalism, so it needed new lands.Īnd slavery spread because enslaved African Americans were forced to migrate. But for the most part the slave population spread westward to the lands opened for settlement by the Louisiana Purchase, the dispossession of the Indian nations of the Southeast, the war with Mexico, and the distribution of public lands. It grew in intensity in places around the Chesapeake Bay, even as slavery was gradually abolished in the North. The slave population had a different dynamic.

Us map of population density free#

The free white population in the North grew in already settled places and spread to the West.

Us map of population density for free#

The total number of slaves in the eastern seaboard states did, however, grow slowly over time, but not at anything like the rate of growth for free people in the North. In 1840, the slave population reached its peak of nearly 59,000 people by 1860, there were 37,000 enslaved people, just 63 percent as many slaves as two decades earlier. In 1790, almost 51,000 people were enslaved in that county. (This is all the more remarkable since many slaves fled to the British during the Revolutionary War.) Take for example, Charleston County, South Carolina. In counties along the Atlantic Coast in 17, the population of slaves at any one time was nearly at its peak. When looking at all of these maps together, it's noticable that even as the total number of enslaved peoples in the United States increased between 17, the multitudes were dispersed across the increasing expanse of the United States, rather than becoming more concentrated in areas where slavery was well established. You can explore the map for yourself, but below I have created animations to highlight some of the major patterns. The map extends from the first Census in 1790 to the Census taken in 1860 on the eve of the Civil War. Where the Coast Survey map showed one measure, the interactive map shows the population of slaves, of free African Americans, of all free people, and of the entire United States, as well as each of those measure in terms of population density and the percentage of the total population. To help show the big patterns of American slavery, I have created an interactive map of the spread of slavery. One of the fundamental problems of history is scale: how can historians move between understanding the past in terms of a single life and in the lives of millions within a city and at the bounds of continents over a period of days and over the span of centuries? Maps can't tell us everything, but they can help, especially interactive web maps that can zoom in and out, represent more than one subject, and be set in motion to show change over time. Though thematic mapping had its origins in the 19th century, the technique is useful for understanding history in our own day. Army.' The data map was an instrument of government, as well as a new technology for representing knowledge. A banner on the map proclaims that it was 'sold for the benefit of the Sick and Wounded Soldiers of the U.S.

Abraham Lincoln consulted it throughout the Civil War. As historian Susan Schulten has shown, this particular map was created by a federal government agency from statistics gathered by the Census. The Coast Survey map of slavery was one of many maps drawn from data produced in 19th-century America. With each county labeled with the exact percentage of people enslaved, the map demanded some closer examination. At a glance, the viewer could see the large-scale patterns of the economic system that kept nearly 4 million people in bondage: slavery was concentrated along the Chesapeake Bay and in eastern Virginia along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts in a crescent of lands in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi and most of all, in the Mississippi River Valley. Coast Survey published a large map, approximately two feet by three feet, titled a 'Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the southern states of the United States.' Based on the population statistics gathered in the 1860 Census, and certified by the superintendent of the Census Office, the map depicted the percentage of the population enslaved in each county.