The visible differences that slavery made in the arrangement of the landscape were apparent to many observers, but Northerners and Southerners interpreted them differently. Northerners focused on land value per acre and Southerners on the dollar value of their crops.

There were 1,552 farms in Augusta in 1860 or 1.6 farms per square mile. In Franklin, by contrast, there were 3.26 farms per square mile. The visible differences in population led many visitors to Augusta to assume that the slavery-based economy was less productive, or worse inefficient. Northerners observed lower farm values on the larger farms typical of Augusta. Indeed, the largest farms had farm values of less than half the value ($21.8 per acre) of the smallest farms ($46.9 per acre) in Franklin. But Augusta farmers and planters understood the greater productivity that resulted from the use of enslaved labor. Across all farm sizes and values Augusta farms outproduced their Franklin counterparts in the dollar value of corn--the most labor-intensive crop planted in these counties. On the largest farms using slaves Augusta farmers nearly tripled the dollar value of the corn crop of Franklin's largest farmers. Slaveholders, in particular, benefited from the dollar value of their crop, not the land value per acre, and might have seen it as the key measure of slavery's success and efficiency.

Land Values in Augusta and Franklin Counties (table)

Percentage Increase in Total Population, 1860 (graph)

Regional Comparison (table)

Road Networks, Franklin and Augusta Counties, 1860 (table)

Slaveholders and Agricultural Productivity (table)

Total Population as a Percentage of Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1860 (graph)

Wheat and Corn Production in Dollars (table)

Related Historiography

Thomas B. Alexander, "Antebellum North and South in Comparative Perspective: A Discussion," American Historical Review 85 (1980): 1150-1154.

Vernon O. Burton, In My Father's House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985)

Stanley L. Engerman, "Antebellum North and South in Comparative Perspective: A Discussion," American Historical Review 85 (1980): 1154-1160.

William W. Freehling, The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).