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Confederate sympathizers may claim the American Civil War was fought over states’ rights, but a cursory examination of results from an 1860 Census map makes it clear that the largest visible distinction between the North and South had its roots in race, not rights. More than 1,100 of the nation’s 2,100 counties had a white population of 90 percent or more, and according to a Social Explorer analysis, 85 percent were either in Northern states or essentially neutral territories.
Among the 211 counties that had no non-white Americans, 202 – almost 96 percent of the total – were located in either Northern states or neutral territories. Eight of the nine complete white Southern counties were located in Texas, with an additional one in Virginia. Examine the racial makeup of the United States on the dawn of the Civil War with Social Explorer’s award-winning, embeddable mapping tools.
White Population in 1860. Click here to explore further.
