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1860 Census

The 1860 census data and its use in calculating the mean number of enslaved people per slaveholder.

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Feb 2, 2026

What was the average number of slaves owned by slaveholding households in 1860?

The simplest, defensible answer is that the mean number of enslaved people per in 1860 was roughly — about 3.95 million enslaved people divided by roughly 394,000 recorded slaveholders, yielding an av...

Feb 2, 2026

How did county-level percentages of enslaved populations vary across the Deep South in 1860?

The in showed extreme local variation in the share of county populations that were enslaved: many river-valley and coastal counties were majority‑enslaved—frequently exceeding 50–70 percent—while inla...