Southern Farms Study, 1860

Principal Investigator(s): Parker, William N.; Gallman, Robert E.

Summary: This study presents 1860 data on population and farm production in 5,228 farms located in 405 major cotton-producing counties in the South. The data was compiled from the agriculture, slave, and population schedules of the 1860 United States manuscript Census. For each farm, variables describing farm land, machinery, crops, and livestock are included, as well as production figures for specific crops and types of livestock on the farm. The population variables tabulate the free and slave resident... (more info)

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Parker, William N., and Robert E. Gallman. Southern Farms Study, 1860. ICPSR07419-v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 1991. doi:10.3886/ICPSR07419.v1

Persistent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR07419.v1

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This survey was funded by:

National Science Foundation

Summary: This study presents 1860 data on population and farm production in 5,228 farms located in 405 major cotton-producing counties in the South. The data was compiled from the agriculture, slave, and population schedules of the 1860 United States manuscript Census. For each farm, variables describing farm land, machinery, crops, and livestock are included, as well as production figures for specific crops and types of livestock on the farm. The population variables tabulate the free and slave residents of each farm by sex, race, and age in five- or ten-year categories.

Subject Terms: agricultural census, agricultural land, agricultural production, agricultural workers, agriculture, Antebellum South (USA), crops, economic conditions, farms, livestock, rural population, slave labor, slavery, Southern United States

Geographic Coverage: United States

Time Period:

1860

Universe: All farms located in Southern counties that produced over 1,000 bales of cotton in 1860.

Data Types: census/enumeration data

Data Collection Notes:

ICPSR added Variable 236, representing an identification number given to each farm, to the original data.

Sample: A total of 405 counties produced over 1,000 bales of cotton in 1860. A random bloc of five farms was selected from every 280 farms located in the target counties (i.e., a five-farm bloc from every 14th page of the manuscript Census). The resulting sample thus comprised 1.67 percent of all farms in the major cotton-growing counties of the 11 states forming the Confederacy.

Data Source:

Schedules 1 (free population), 2 (slave population), and 4 (agricultural production) of the 1860 manuscript U.S. Census

Extent of Processing: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.

Original ICPSR Release: 1984-05-11

2003

Alexander, J. Trent, Condon, Sean, Digman, Jason Carl, Hacker, J. David . A Public Use Microdata Sample of the 1860 Census of Slave Inhabitants. Historical Methods. 36, (1), 21-26.

1988

Field, Elizabeth B. Free and Slave Labor in the Antebellum South: Perfect Substitutes or Different Inputs?. Review of Economics and Statistics. 70, (4), 654-659.

1988

Field, Elizabeth B. The Relative Efficiency of Slavery Revisited: A Translog Production Function Approach. American Economic Review. 78, (3), 543-549.

1974

Fogel, Robert W., Engerman, Stanley L. Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. Boston: Little, Brown.

1974

Fogel, Robert William, Engerman, Stanley L. Time on the Cross: Evidence and Methods, A Supplement. Boston: Little, Brown.

1975

Foust, James D. The Yeoman Farmer and Westward Expansion of U.S. Cotton Production. New York: Arno Press.

1970

Parker, William N. The Structure of the Cotton Economy of the Antebellum South. Washington, DC: Agricultural History Society.

1969

Wright, Gavin . The Economics of Cotton in the Antebellum South. Dissertation, Yale University.

1978

Wright, Gavin . The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Norton.

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Southern Farms Study, 1860 (ICPSR 7419)

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