Hidden Patterns of the Civil War

Fugitive Slave ads: Figure 1. Fugitive slave advertisements as a percentage of newspaper items in the Richmond Daily Dispatch, 1861-1865. Robert K. Nelson, Mining the Dispatch, accessed June 8, 2010. Nelson has adapted MALLET, a text-mining program, to develop a "topic model" of the Richmond Daily Dispatch during the Civil War. One of these topics is composed entirely of fugitive slave ads.

Global Cotton Market: Figure 2. Charles J. Minard, "Carte Figurative et approximative des quantités de Coton en Laine importées en Europe en 1858 et en 1861", and "Carte Figurative et approximative des quantités de Coton Brut importées en Europe en 1858, 1864, et en 1865", alt., Courtesy the Library of Congress. These maps show the dramatic decline in the cotton exports from the Confederacy to Europe (represented in the darkest hue), beginning in 1861 and continuing to the end of the war.

Zones of Emancipation: Figure 3. Approximate Zones of Emancipation, June 1864. The map draws inspiration from Mark Swanson and Jaqueline D. Langley, Atlas of the Civil War, Month By Month: Major Battles and Troop Movements (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004) and Steven V. Ash, When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in The Occupied South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

Layered Emancipation: Figure 4. Legal, military, and demographic layers of emancipation, June 1864. This map shows the geographic dimensions of three processes pivotal to emancipation, held at a constant scale. It draws inspiration from exploded axonometric diagrams, which have often been used by architects and engineers to visualize simultaneously the parts of a whole and the relations of those parts to each other.

Migration and Marriage: Figure 5. Migrations of married Augusta County freedmen and women, recorded 1866. Black familial networks and migrations show a level of action that cut across multiple scales. This map displays the birth places of those men and women listed in the Register of Colored Persons cohabiting together as Husband and Wife, 1866 Feb. 27. Transcription of these records comes courtesy of the Valley of the Shadow project. The Digital Scholarship Lab, using transcriptions from the Library of Virginia, has produced maps of the migrations of thousands of freedmen and women to 12 Virginia counties. Marriage, Migration, and Emancipation.

Armies and Escapes: Figure 6. U.S. military movements and select, documented escapes from slavery in Virginia, June 1864. This map shows that in many cases, enslaved men and women ran away as Union army units came near, though not all escapes from slavery were concurrent with Union arrival in a neighborhood. Information on emancipation represented in figure 6 comes from the Staunton Vindicator, the Richmond Daily Dispatch, and the War of the Rebellion for June 1864. We also consulted Ira Berlin and others, eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation 1861-1867 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985-2005) and other sources. This map lays the groundwork for Visualizing Emancipation; a project funded by an NEH We the People Digital Start-up grant, through the Office of Digital Humanities. Visualizing Emancipation.