Complete federal census data for Augusta County, Franklin County, Virginia, Pennsylvania, the South, the North, and the United States, from 1820 through 1860, has been incorporated into this project in order to allow users to investigate the historical evolution of Franklin and Augusta counties, as well as the larger jurisdictions and regions of which they were part.

The figures reported in the census tables are absolute numbers. Such data are useful, but are often difficult to use in a meaningful way (see, for example, the case of Hinton Helper). The fact that Augusta County contained 5,616 slaves in 1860, for example, does not give us a sense of the density of the slave population nor does it allow us to place Augusta in the context of other counties, states, or regions. Rather, it is more useful to compute the number of slaves as a percentage of the total population. Doing so, we find that slaves constituted 20.2 percent of Augusta County's total population in 1860. This gives us a greater feel for the number of slaves compared to free persons. It also permits us to compare Augusta County with other jurisdictions of varying populations, such as Virginia or the South, when similar statistics are computed for those regions.

The Trends button listed alongside several of the census topic headings presents graphs made from federal census data to contrast the development of Augusta and Franklin counties between 1820 and 1860, with respect to each other and the states and regions of which they were a part. You may want to use the raw census data to compare the counties in terms of other characteristics, such as literacy, manufacturing output, or the size of farms and type and quantity of crops produced. Be aware that a significant problem in assessing long-term change is the discontinuous nature of the variables from census to census. With the exception of basic population counts, it is often impossible to trace a given variable over several decades. Nevertheless, these records offer the fullest accounting we have of nineteenth-century America. Used with care and imagination, and in conjunction with other sources, they can help us to understand these complex communities.

The Case of Hinton Helper

Even if the census data is presumed correct for the purposes at hand, historians must take care not to use it in erroneous or misleading ways. Consider, for example, the case of North Carolinian Hinton Helper. In his study The Impending Crisis of the South (1857), Helper used aggregated data from the 1850 census to show that the North surpassed the South in agricultural production, wealth, commerce, literacy, and virtually every other measure available. Helper used these figures to persuade Southerners that slavery was the ruin of the South. Only by voluntarily emancipating their slaves and instituting a free labor system, he contended, could Southerners reverse their declining status vis-a`-vis the North. Helper's publication generated a vitriolic debate which deepened sectional animosity. His most prescient critics, however, pointed out that the amateur statistician had not adjusted his figures to account for differences in the total population of the two regions. When Helper's figures were recomputed on a per capita basis, the South actually surpassed the North in many of these same categories!