As part of the Telling All of Our Stories project, Oatlands created a dataset to record every reference to a named enslaved person. The goal was to provide a source for locating ancestors or certain individuals and learning more about the people who were enslaved at Carter plantations Oatlands and Bellefield in Virginia. The first phase consists of names extracted from George Carter's will, written in 1842, and Elizabeth O. Carter's diary, kept from 1860 through 1873. The database contains over 900 entries, and there are approximately 120 distinctly different names. Information from or questions raised by Oatlands researchers are recorded in the Notes column. “List of slave expenditures kept by B. Grayson,” part of a Works Progress Administration Historical Inventory Project conducted in 1937, also provided some details for the dataset.

Lincoln's election produced Southern secession, war, and abolition. Using a new dataset on slave sales, we examine connections between news and slave prices for the period 1856-1861. By August 1861, slave prices had declined by roughly one-third from their 1860 peak. That decline was similar for all age and sex cohorts and thus did not reflect expected emancipation without compensation. The decision to secede reflected beliefs that the North would not invade and that emancipation without compensation was unlikely. Both were encouraged by Lincoln's conciliatory tone before the attack on Fort Sumter, and subsequently dashed by Lincoln's willingness to wage all-out war. (JEL D72, D74, D83, G14, H77, N31, N41)

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.

The dataset transcribes the information of over 300 enslaved people documented in the Slave Account Book of Charles Benedict Calvert of Prince George’s County, Maryland, which can be found in Special Collections at the University of Maryland library. Calvert was an enslaver and politician and one of the founders of what is now the University of Maryland, then called the Maryland Agricultural College. The account book documents enslaved people primarily in contemporary Prince George’s County, Calvert County, and Montgomery County, Maryland. There is no specific date recorded in the account book, but it is assumed to be written between 1831 and 1864.

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. This data set contains information of farm production and population residing on farms in the major cotton producing counties of the southern United States. Variables include: county code number; soil type in county; no. farms sampled in county; detailed commodity production of each farm, including acreage, value of farm and machinery, numbers of head of livestock, value of livestock, production of field crops, value of orchard products, wine production, value of market garden products, production of dairy products, production of 'textile' crops, value of home manufactures, value of animals slaughtered; numbers of farm residents by age categories, sex, and status, including free, slave, farm laborer, overseer, non-farm worker.