Just glancing at the maps, it’s easy to see that slave labor correlated strongly with the overall amount of crops harvested in each county. This correlation seems to be the strongest when it comes to cotton. The darkest areas on the cloropleth map line up almost perfectly with the cotton output. But while cotton was the biggest contributor, it’s also evident that the other crops were harvested using slave labor; every county with a high slave population outside of the cotton-growing areas correlates with another crop. For example, tobacco affected populations of enslaved people heavily in the northeast and in central Missouri. Sugar farming accounted for high numbers in southern Louisiana.
If any of these crops weren’t harvested via slavery, it was wheat. Corn, while certainly not correlated as strongly with populations of enslaved people, does seem to have motivated slavery in northern Kentucky. Wheat doesn’t show a clear pattern, but because the patterns for other crops are so strong, I find it hard to believe that wheat just wasn’t harvested with slave labor. Wheat was mostly harvested further north and west, if I remember correctly. It’s likely that the amount of wheat being grown was just so low that it didn’t contribute significantly to the population of enslaved people.
Got it.