Full Citation

Title: Systems of Slavery in the United States, 1860

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2015

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Abstract: This thesis studies the causal factors of US slavery prior to the Civil War. My main data set is the 1860 census from the National Historical GIS (nhgis.org), which is aggregated to the county level. Historians have traditionally broken the slave owning South into vague regions, called "belts" based on the dominant cash crops of those regions. There is no spatial demarcation of these boundaries, and this regionalization completely ignores areas that are not conceptualized as cash crop production areas. As old territories exhausted their soil and evolved from slave societies into societies with slaves. Slavery is seen as a single system migrating across the South, with new territories being brought into the monolithic system. As a result, there is limited qualitative or quantitative understanding of regional diversity within the South, and the existing regions have not been questioned for over a hundred years. I use county level census data to study the entire slave owning South. This allows the study of the interrelation of the various cash crop producing regions as well as the areas that were not involved in these industries. I will also be able to gauge the impact of the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem and the impact of autocorrelation on my models of different study areas. The result is the rejection of the null hypothesis based on traditional historical conceptualizations that slave density was dependent on cash crop cultivation. I present a new alternative hypothesis that explains slavery as a more generic phenomenon, capable of deriving profits from a wide variety of crops and industrial products as well as the more traditional cash crops. This thesis argues that there were many facets to slavery, and that necessitates the discussion of these facets. Profitability from slavery was more general and not just from cash crops. Cash crops had become less labor intensive by 1860. Money could be made from slaves in many economic pursuits, including cash-crops, grain crops, urban industry, and rural industry. These products were not substitutes for each other. Most of them, especially cash-crops, were only capable of growing in certain locations under certain conditions. Cotton could not have substituted for tobacco in the tobacco belt any more than sugar could have been grown in the colder climate of Virginia. Because a profit could be made off of slave labor in many agricultural and industrial activities, the value of putting a slave to work in a corn field in Kentucky was competitive with putting that same person to work in a cotton field in Mississippi or an iron blasting furnace in Virginia. By 1860, the supply and demand for enslaved people was at equilibrium across the South and the Upper South was not diminishing or economically dependent on the slave trade. The slave population of the Upper South was not decreasing in the antebellum period or even stagnating. It was instead growing while still supplying the Lower South with slaves through the domestic slave trade. The Upper South had not and was not transferring to a society with slaves, nor was it moving in that direction. This was not even true within urban settings.

Url: http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/etd/9300/

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Authors: Burris, Gregory David; Mooney, Katherine Carmines; Blaufarb, Rafe; Doel, Ronald Edmund

Institution: Florida State Univeristy

Department: History

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Publisher Location: Florida

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Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS

Topics: Housing and Segregation

Countries: United States