Data Literacy for Social Studies, Tobacco Production per State, 1850 vs. 1860

Along with cotton and sugar cane, tobacco was an important cash crop in the United States during the 19th century. As the series of bar graphs produced from 1860 U.S. Census data on this spreadsheet shows, tobacco was grown in many parts of the country. However, as both the bar graphs and the tree map on the spreadsheet illustrate, tobacco growth was dominated by Virginia and Kentucky, both slave states (note that the graphs use a log scale, so one line on the vertical axis is ten times more than the one below it). A labor-intensive crop to grow, tobacco had helped fuel the growth of slavery early in the country's history, but as slavery became less profitable for tobacco farmers, they sold many of their slaves to cotton growers in the deep south, where the enslaved population became more concentrated leading up to the Civil War. Notably, the major western and middle tobacco-growing states, including the slave-holding states of Kentucky and Missouri, did not secede from the Union, whereas the major tobacco-growing southern states did. However, in Virginia, disputes between westerners, where terrain made plantation farming impractical, and easterners, who owned most of the plantations with enslaved labor, resulted in the secession and formation of the state of West Virginia in 1861.