Full Citation
Title: Antebellum Slave Revoluts and Urbanization in the Southern United States
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2018
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Abstract: This paper investigates some of the causal factors which fomented slave insurrections , discovered conspiracies and panics in the antebellum Southern United States. The analysis relies on a novel dataset, which is an amalgam of decennial census data and a compilation of incidents of slave unrest as recorded by Aptheker (1993), as well as a theoretical model of slave rebellion. An influential strand within the economic history literature, referred to herein as the Wade hypothesis, which attributes the relative decline of Southern industry and urbanization to the inherent difficulty in supervising slaves in an urban environment, is analyzed. The finding that the probability of a slave insurrection event is not correlated with the degree of urbanization in a given county, even when an instrumental variable strategy is employed to rule out potential endogeneity, is interpreted as evidence against this hypothesis.
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Authors: Finn, Ian
Publisher: University of California at Irvine
Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS
Topics: Land Use/Urban Organization, Other
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