The issue of race and slavery was arguably the largest cause of the American Civil War, with the southern states seceding from the Union as the practice of slavery became increasingly threatened. From the graph we can see that roughly 16.5 percent of the entire US population at this time was black, and the vast majority of these were slaves. In 1860 there were almost 27 million white people, four and a half million black people, and less than one hundred thousand non-black or white people (mostly of Native/Latin American or East-Asian origin).

This statistic shows the population of the United States in the final census year before the American Civil War, shown by race and gender. From the data we can see that there were almost 27 million white people, 4.5 million black people, and eighty thousand classed as 'other'. The proportions of men to women were different for each category, with roughly 700 thousand more white men than women, over 100 thousand more black women than men, and almost three times as many men than women in the 'other' category. The reason for the higher male numbers in the white and other categories is because men migrated to the US at a higher rate than women, while there is no concrete explanation for the statistic regarding black people.

The 1860 election was one of the most divisive and influential elections in US history, with scholarly consensus citing it as one of the most decisive factors or catalysts that led to the outbreak of the American Civil War. The election saw candidates from four separate parties compete, with candidates not appearing on ballots in multiple states. The Republican Party nominated Abraham Lincoln, and opposed the extension of slavery into new states, while the Democratic Party nominated Stephen A. Douglas and favored popular sovereignty, which allowed states to vote on the legality of slavery. This approach however did not appeal to many Democrats in the south, who feared that this did not protect the status of slavery, and so rather than supporting Douglas, southern Democrats split and nominated John C. Breckenridge as their candidate. The fourth candidate was John Bell of the Constitutional Union, whose party's main focus was to avoid the secession of the south at all costs. Results With a plurality of the popular votes, Abraham Lincoln won almost sixty percent of the electoral votes, and was named the sixteenth President of the United States. Despite winning almost thirty percent of the popular votes (the second highest amount), Douglas carried only one state, and received just four percent of the electoral votes. Breckenridge carried eleven states, however if both Democratic candidates pooled they would have received more popular votes, yet Lincoln would have still won due to the electoral college system. There were also ten southern states where Lincoln's name was not on the ballot, as he was so unpopular in the slave states that his team could not print or distribute ballots for voters to choose him (this issue would be rectified in the 1880s, with the introduction of the secret ballot). Outbreak of the war Political leaders and merchants in the south believed that a President with abolitionist views would implement measures that threatened the institution of slavery. Following Lincoln's victory, seven states seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America, and elected Jefferson Davis to President of the Confederacy (despite Breckenridge's strong performance in the election). Lincoln did not take any action against the Confederacy, but also refused to surrender federal property in the area. This led to Davis ordering a Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, which led to retaliation from the Union, the cessation of four more states into the Confederacy, and the beginning of the deadliest war in US history.

Abstract

This dataset includes all individuals from the 1860 US census.

Before Manuscript Submission

All manuscripts (and other items you'd like to publish) must be submitted to

phsdatacore@stanford.edu for approval prior to journal submission.

We will check your cell sizes and citations.

For more information about how to cite PHS and PHS datasets, please visit:

https:/phsdocs.developerhub.io/need-help/citing-phs-data-core

Documentation

This dataset was developed through a collaboration between the Minnesota Population Center and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The data contain demographic variables, economic variables, migration variables and race variables. Unlike more recent census datasets, pre-1900 census datasets only contain individual level characteristics and no household or family characteristics, but household and family identifiers do exist.

The official enumeration day of the 1860 census was 1 June 1860. The main goal of an early census like the 1860 U.S. census was to allow Congress to determine the collection of taxes and the appropriation of seats in the House of Representatives. Each district was assigned a U.S. Marshall who organized other marshals to administer the census. These enumerators visited households and recorder names of every person, along with their age, sex, color, profession, occupation, value of real estate, place of birth, parental foreign birth, marriage, literacy, and whether deaf, dumb, blind, insane or “idiotic”.

Sources: Szucs, L.D. and Hargreaves Luebking, S. (1997). Research in Census Records, The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy. Ancestry Incorporated, Salt Lake City, UT Dollarhide, W.(2000). The Census Book: A Genealogist’s Guide to Federal Census Facts, Schedules and Indexes. Heritage Quest, Bountiful, UT

The Urban Household Sample of the 1860 United States Census was designed to supplement the Bateman-Foust rural sample with observations from urban areas. The sample covers both northern and southern towns and cities and permits examination of female occupations and labor force participation rates. Information on individuals includes occupation, city of residence, age, sex, race, dollar value of real and personal property owned, whether American or foreign born, and literacy. The second release of this collection adds nine constructed variables, including several weight variables, collapsed occupation, ICPSR state code, region, and unique internal family and household identifier numbers.

The 1860 Presidential Election was one of the most divisive and influential elections in United States history. This election campaign was overshadowed by the issue of slavery, which was illegal in the northern states of the US, but was still allowed in the south (although the slave trade had been banned for decades). Slavery caused the Democratic Party to split into the Northern and Southern Democratic parties, as those in the north were against slavery being made legal in the new western states, whereas those in the south believed that slave owners should be allowed to expand into these new territories without interference. Popular vote Because of this issue, the overall election results were split across the country. Abraham Lincoln won 1.9 million votes (40 percent) compared to Douglas' 1.4 million (30 percent), and the majority of these votes were won in the northern states as Lincoln's name was not included on the ballots across most of the south. The southern candidates Bell and Breckingridge received 0.6 (13 percent) and 0.8 million (18 percent) votes respectively. Electoral college results While the results show that the northern candidates received the majority of the popular votes, the electoral college votes were not distributed in the same way. While Douglas received the second-highest number of votes overall (and almost the same amount as Bell and Breckingridge combined), he received the fewest electoral college votes, with just 12 in total. Abraham Lincoln won the most electoral college votes with 180 (59 percent), and Bell and Breckenridge received 39 and 72 electoral votes respectively.

This dataset includes all individuals from the 1910 US census.

This data collection contains information about the population of each county, town, and city of the United States in 1850 and 1860. Specific variables include tabulations of white, black, and slave males and females, and aggregate population for each town. Foreign-born population, total population of each county, and centroid latitudes and longitudes of each county and state were also compiled. (Source: downloaded from ICPSR 7/13/10)

Please Note: This dataset is part of the historical CISER Data Archive Collection and is also available at ICPSR -- https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR09424.v2. We highly recommend using the ICPSR version as they made this dataset available in multiple data formats.

1860 United States Federal Census contains records from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA by Year: 1860; Census Place: Philadelphia Ward 23 Division 1, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Roll: M653_1174; Page: 439; Family History Library Film: 805174 - Occupation: Gatekeeper.

The 1860 Presidential Election in the United States was dominated by the issue of slavery, with the Democratic Party running a northern candidate who opposed slavery and southern candidate who opposed it.

Because of this issue the overall election results were split across the country. Abraham Lincoln's name did not appear on the ballot in many southern states, yet he still received forty percent of the popular vote, which was equal to almost sixty percent of the total electoral college votes. From the graph we can see that Stephen Douglas received the fewest electoral college votes with just twelve, however he received almost the same amount of popular votes as Breckenridge and Bell combined, who received 72 and 39 electoral votes respectively.

These data on 19th- and early 20th-century police department and arrest behavior were collected between 1975 and 1978 for a study of police and crime in the United States. Raw and aggregated time-series data are presented in Parts 1 and 3 on 23 American cities for most years during the period 1860-1920. The data were drawn from annual reports of police departments found in the Library of Congress or in newspapers and legislative reports located elsewhere. Variables in Part 1, for which the city is the unit of analysis, include arrests for drunkenness, conditional offenses and homicides, persons dismissed or held, police personnel, and population. Part 3 aggregates the data by year and reports some of these variables on a per capita basis, using a linear interpolation from the last decennial census to estimate population. Part 2 contains data for 267 United States cities for the period 1880-1890 and was generated from the 1880 federal census volume, REPORT ON THE DEFECTIVE, DEPENDENT, AND DELINQUENT CLASSES, published in 1888, and from the 1890 federal census volume, SOCIAL STATISTICS OF CITIES. Information includes police personnel and expenditures, arrests, persons held overnight, trains entering town, and population.

1860 United States Federal Census contains records from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA by Year: 1860; Census Place: Philadelphia Ward 16 East Division, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Roll: M653_1166; Page: 77; Family History Library Film: 805166 - .

Prior to the American Civil War, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio were the most populous states in the Union, each with between two and four million inhabitants. Industrialization in the north was one of the key drivers of population growth during this period, through both internal and external migration, and Illinois saw the largest population growth during the 1860s largely due to the expansion of industry around Chicago. The gradual industrialization of the north in the early 1800s also contributed to the decline of slavery in the Union states, and the economic differences between the Union and Confederacy was a key factor in both the build-up to the Civil War, as well as the Union's eventual victory in 1865.

This polygon shapefile contains county boundaries for the United States in 1860. Attributes include county and state names as well as FIPS identification numbers and county area estimates. Territories enumerated by the U.S. Census are also included. This layer is part of a collection of historical United States county boundary files (HUSCO), from each decade ranging from 1790-1999.

The Census Tree is the largest-ever database of record links among the historical U.S. censuses, with over 700 million links for people living in the United States between 1850 and 1940. These links allow researchers to construct a longitudinal dataset that is highly representative of the population, and that includes women, Black Americans, and other under-represented populations at unprecedented rates. Each .csv file consists of a crosswalk between the two years indicated in the filename, using the IPUMS histids. For more information, consult the included Read Me file, and visit https://censustree.org.

There were almost 700 thousand slaves in the US in 1790, which equated to approximately 18 percent of the total population, or roughly one in every six people. By 1860, the final census taken before the American Civil War, there were four million slaves in the South, compared with less than 0.5 million free African Americans in all of the US. Of the 4.4 million African Americans in the US before the war, almost four million of these people were held as slaves; meaning that for all African Americans living in the US in 1860, there was an 89 percent* chance that they lived in slavery. A brief history Trans-Atlantic slavery began in the early sixteenth century, when the Portuguese and Spanish forcefully brought captured African slaves to the New World, in order to work for them. The British Empire introduced slavery to North America on a large scale, and the economy of the British colonies there depended on slave labor, particularly regarding cotton, sugar and tobacco output. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century the number of slaves being brought to the Americas increased exponentially, and at the time of American independence it was legal in all thirteen colonies. Although slavery became increasingly prohibited in the north, the number of slaves remained high during this time as they were simply relocated or sold from the north to the south. It is also important to remember that the children of slaves were also viewed as property, and (apart from some very rare cases) were born into a life of slavery. Abolition and the American Civil War In the years that followed independence, the Northern States began gradually prohibiting slavery, and it was officially abolished there by 1805, and the importation of slave labor was prohibited nationwide from 1808 (although both still existed in practice after this). Business owners in the Southern States however depended on slave labor in order to meet the demand of their rapidly expanding industries, and the issue of slavery continued to polarize American society in the decades to come. This culminated in the election of President Abraham Lincoln in 1860, who promised to prohibit slavery in the newly acquired territories to the west, leading to the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865. Although the Confederacy (south) were victorious in much of the early stages of the war, the strength in numbers of the northern states (including many free, black men), eventually resulted in a victory for the Union (north), and the nationwide abolishment of slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Legacy In total, an estimated twelve to thirteen million Africans were transported to the Americas as slaves, and this does not include the high number who did not survive the journey (which was as high as 23 percent in some years). In the 150 years since the abolishment of slavery in the US, the African-American community have continuously campaigned for equal rights and opportunities that were not afforded to them along with freedom. The most prominent themes have been the Civil Rights Movement, voter suppression, mass incarceration and the relationship between the police and the African-American community has taken the spotlight in recent years.

Demographic, occupational and economic information for over 21,000 rural households in the northern United States in 1860 is provided in this dataset. The data were obtained from the manuscript agricultural and population schedules of the 1860 United States Census. Variables include farm values, livestock inventories, and crop production figures for the households that owned or operated farms (over half the households in the study), as well as values of real and personal estate, color, sex, age, literacy, school attendance, occupation, place of birth, and parents' nationality of all individuals residing in the sampled households.

PSID data extract for computing active saving rates of Black and white Americans during 1984-2019.

During the American Civil War, not only was the Confederacy made up of fewer states than the Union, but these states were also much less populous than many in the North. For example, in the final census before the war in 1860, the five largest states in the South had around one million inhabitants each, while the largest states in the North had three to four million. In addition to the Union's larger population, the fact that European immigration into urban and industrial centers in the North was much higher also gave the Union a steady supply of recruits that were drafted as the war progressed, which was vital to the Union's victory in 1865.

Data Represent Cumulative Weighted (Based On Number Of Wage Earners) Averages Of Hourly Wage Rates Of Laborers, Excluding Those Engaged In City Public Works. Data Cover 20 Establishments. Source: NBER Compiled Data From Figures Published In U.S. Senate Report No. 1394, The Aldrich Report, "Wholesale Prices, Wages, And Transportation, " Finance Committee, Second Session Of The 52Nd Congress, 1893.

This NBER data series a08139 appears on the NBER website in Chapter 8 at http://www.nber.org/databases/macrohistory/contents/chapter08.html.

NBER Indicator: a08139