Haduken.com

Distribution of Slave Population in Southern states

I’ve been following the NYT’s Disunion blog since its inception a couple months ago. While overly Northernly focused — for this guy — its fun to see things playing out in quasi-realtime. As a lover of fine chartsandgraphs this post caught my eye.

There’s an interesting note on the side of the map:

It should be observed that several counties appear comparatively light. This arises from the preponderance of whites and free blacks in the large towns in those counties such as — Henrico Co. Va, Norfolk Co. Va., Shelby Co. Tenn., Davidson Co. Tenn., St. Louis Co. Mo., Orleans Co. La., Charleston Co. Sc., etc.

How comparatively light is Henrico County? Here’s a detail:

Henrico had a 30-40% slave population while surrounding areas had as high as 80% slave population.

The full map is available as a PDF.