Regional Variations in Antebellum Southern Agriculture

The economy of the nation (and of the South) in pre-Civil War times has attracted much attention. This project furthers work already completed by many professional historic economists by forming smaller regions within the South and analyzing these sub-economies. County-level 1860 Census data (agricultural data) was used to group counties into six major crop regions. The agricultural output for these regions was calculated in terms of gross farm product, transformed by a method previously employed by several economic historians. Some initial analysis was then conducted with the transformed data by examining shares of total output and average county production shares/standard deviations