Economic and Political Connections between
Lowell and Southern States
Document 8c

Document 8c: Manufacturing Production, The North and The South: A Statistical View of the Condition of the Free and Slave States, 1856

The authors of this book used data from official state and federal documents (circa 1850) to compare the condition of the slaveholding and non-slaveholding states as to territory, population, industry and wealth, education and intelligence, religious and moral advancement, and general progress.

This excerpt compares manufacturing outputs and farm values of Northern and Southern states.

Vocabulary

Annual Product of Manufactories: Dollar value of products produced in all the county’s factories in one year
Average Product of Manufacturers per head of entire population: The annual product value divide by the number of people in the county

Text-Dependent Questions

What is the difference in total value of the four farms in Massachusetts and the three Slave-State counties?
What is the difference in total value of the four Massachusetts counties’ manufacturing and that of the three Slave-State counties?

Discussion Questions

What do you think accounts for the differences in farm and manufacturing values between the Massachusetts counties and the three Slave-State counties? How might this have influenced people’s views on slavery?
Refer to Documents 8a and 8b. How does this document support the argument made by the authors that “slavery is a curse”?

Print document and transcript

CitationThe North and the South: A Statistical View of the Condition of Free and Slave States. By Henry Chase, A.M. and Charles W. Sanborn, M.D. Compiled from Official Documents. Boston: Published by John P. Jewett & Co. 1856. Pg 66. https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_North_and_the_South/VmwFAAAAQAAJ?hl=en

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