David Waldron

The geography of slavery in the United States

Interactive maps of the concentration of enslaved people from 1790 to 1860.

David Waldron Sep 6, 2017

Similar visuals have been done before, but here, I’m focusing on two metrics: the density of the population (free and slaves), and the percent of the population that is enslaved. To do that, I use a two-color scale, where darkness (or opacity) represents higher density, and color (red) shows a higher percentage of slaves.

Slavery in the United States
Year:

Data is from NHGIS, a project of the Minnesota Population Center.

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