A Snapshot of Slavery in Lawrence County, Tennessee

By Clint Alley

The Federal Census serves as a snapshot of community life across America. One has been taken in Lawrence County every ten years since 1820. Genealogists rely on census data to trace family migration patterns, show names and vital data of ancestors, and to help solve puzzles left by gaps in other records. For this reason, they are fascinating and useful documents. But the data returned from these population surveys can also give us a wonderful sense of context for what life was like in Lawrence County during those ten-year intervals.

I chose to use data from the 1860 census to tell the story of a group of people whose history is often overlooked or glossed-over in our community: African-American slaves. We know that they were here, but because they left few written records of their existence, we know scarcely little about them.

Census data can’t complete the puzzle. It can’t tell us exactly who these men and women were, or exactly what became of them. But, it can give us a great deal of context for what life was really like for them here. How many of them were there? How old were they? What were their living conditions? What happened to them after their liberation? This infographic seeks to answer some of those questions using data collected from the 1860 Federal Census.

(c) 2014, Clint Alley