Sometimes maps make history

[tsaiko]

I thought How a Map Divided Virginia was really well done. I had already known that West Virgnia split from Virgina early on in the Civil War because of the slavery issue, but the map and article gives some good context for that.

There's another map/article that shows the prevalence of slavery throughout most of the South called Visualizing Slavery. What I find interesting is that you can see that the counties with the highest slave population form belts. It's really interesting to look at.

Keep in mind, all the numbers for these maps (and that's from the census) were tallied by hand, then the maps were hand drawn and shaded with ink washes before they were reproduced with a printing press. The amount of work that went into them is enormous.

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Comments

[mechante-fille.livejournal.com]

Very cool! I had thought I had heard quite enough already about the sesquicentennial, but this was a nice new spin on things that was really very interesting.

Thanks!

[sasami.livejournal.com]

Is there any correlation between the counties with high percentages of slaves and the soil quality? Plantations would only have been really effective on largely flat, fertile land.

You can make out a rough approximation of the Appalachian Mountains on the map from the counties that did not have a high number of slaves.

[tsaiko.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's "fertile" land. The mountains have fertile land but you what you grow on it is corn, apples, grapes, etc. Missouri has tons of fertile soil, but it's mostly used for wheat and corn. Before mechanization this would have been rice, cotton, tobacco, and sugar were the labor intensive crops. So you have slaves where you can grow those: low, wet areas for rice; large, flat fields that drain for cotton; sandy soil for tobacco; wet, hot areas for sugar. That's what you see in the belts.