Abstract (en): This data collection provides a preliminary subsample of the 1880 Public Use Sample drawn from census enumeration forms. The file contains two types of records: family and person. Each household record is followed by a record for each person in the family. This collection contains information about size of family, number of persons and families in dwelling, and geographic location of each household. Information on individuals includes demographic characteristics, civil condition, occupation, health, education, and nativity. Manuscript census records from 1880 for the 38 United States, the District of Columbia, and the Dakota Territory. This collection is a nationally representative--although clustered--1 in 1000 preliminary subsample of the United States population in 1880. The subsample is based on every tenth microfilm reel of enumeration forms (there are a total of 1,454 reels) and, within each reel, on the census page itself. In terms of the Public Use Sample as a whole, a sample density of 1 person per 100 was chosen so that a single sample point was randomly generated for every two census pages. Sample points were chosen for inclusion in the collection only if the individual selected was the first person listed in the dwelling. Under this procedure each dwelling, family, and individual in the population had a 1 in 100 probability of inclusion in the Public Use Sample. The complete sample, which will be released by the principal investigators in December 1993, will contain approximately 500,000 individuals living in 100,000 families, or 1 percent of the United States population in 1880. Funding insitution(s): United States Department of Health and Human Services. National Institutes of Health (HD25839). (1) This dataset has two levels. The first level ("F" Record Type) contains 29 variables for each of 10,126 families. The second level ("P" Record Type) contains 45 variables for each of 48,786 individuals residing in those families. (2) The data contain blanks and alphabetic characters. (3) Users will note some differences in code frequencies between certain variables in this collection and the totals listed in the documentation. (4) This collection is superseded by CENSUS OF POPULATION, 1880 [UNITED STATES]: PUBLIC USE SAMPLE (ICPSR 6460).

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.

This dataset offers a comparative snapshot of the social composition in two transatlantic port districts by documenting over 5,000 individuals who lived in the main thoroughfares of Antwerp (Schippersstraat, Vingerlingstraat, and Oudemansstraat, located in the Schipperskwartier) and Boston (North Street, situated in the North End) in 1880 and 1900. Based on Belgian population registers and U.S. census records, it includes data on name, sex, year of birth and age, birthplace, marital status, relationship to the household head, occupation, race, and birthplaces of parents. As the two sources sometimes contain different variables or use differing classifications, the available data may vary between the Belgian and American cases.

The dataset was created in the context of the postdoctoral research project at the University of Antwerp (Belgium), Rethinking “Sailortown:” Comparing the Socioeconomic Dynamics of Harbour Districts in Antwerp and Boston, 1850-1930, funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders, grant number 12X1822N. It was used in the peer-reviewed article 'Unpacking the Town within Sailortown: The Port District Neighborhoods of Antwerp and Boston, c. 1880-1900', Journal of Urban History (forthcoming).

Further details on the dataset's structure, methodology and use can be found in the accompanying data paper: Kristof Loockx, 'Residents of Late Nineteenth-Century Port Districts: A Comparative Dataset from Antwerp and Boston, 1880-1900', Journal of Open Humanities Data 11, no. 39 (2025): 1-9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.335