{"id":50773,"date":"2025-07-24T03:00:31","date_gmt":"2025-07-24T09:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=50773"},"modified":"2025-07-24T09:02:45","modified_gmt":"2025-07-24T15:02:45","slug":"how-many-slaves-were-in-utah-compared-to-other-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2025\/07\/how-many-slaves-were-in-utah-compared-to-other-states\/","title":{"rendered":"How Many Slaves Were in Utah Compared to Other States?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

It’s a black mark on our history that early Utah allowed slavery. Other people more informed than I have more detail on the people involved and legal details (This Abominable Slavery<\/em> is on my to-read list, but I haven’t gotten to it yet), but I was curious about where Utah stood relative to other states. In 1850 and 1860 the US Census asked households whether they had any slaves, so I ran a weighted crosstab on % households with slaves.<\/p>\n

In 1850 the census reported on 37 states. Of those 19 reported some slaves. When we rank order the states by slaveholdings Mississippi was the most slave-holding state, with 45% of households reporting a slave. At the bottom of those with any slaves<\/em>\u00a0is Utah and New Jersey, which were both well under 1%.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Others have written about how legally Utah slavery was quite different from Southern chattel slavery<\/a>, and it looks like both qualitatively and quantitatively slavery in Utah shouldn’t conjure up the same pictures as large-scale plantation slavery. That is not to excuse it in the slightest of course, it is what it is.<\/p>\n

When we look at 1860 on the eve of the Civil War the picture is similar.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

By 1860, of states that had slavery Utah was the least slave holding state, with 99.9% of households not owning slaves. (Interestingly, the next least slave-holding state, Delaware was the last state to ban slavery and not, contrary to popular mythology, Texas). Again, this isn’t to excuse this black mark in slightest, but it’s interesting to see the cross-state variations and context.<\/p>\n

Credit to the amazing folks at IPUMS<\/a> for making historical decennial census data easily available.<\/p>\n

Code:<\/p>\n

library(pollster)<\/p>\n

if (!require(“ipumsr”)) stop(“Reading IPUMS data into R requires the ipumsr package. It can be installed using the following command: install.packages(‘ipumsr’)”)<\/p>\n

ddi <- read_ipums_ddi(“Location\/usa_00024.xml”)
\ndata <- read_ipums_micro(ddi)<\/p>\n

data_1850<-subset(data, YEAR==1850)
\nX_1850<-crosstab(data_1850, STATEFIP, SLAVEHH, HHWT)<\/p>\n

data_1860<-subset(data, YEAR==1860)
\nX_1860<-crosstab(data_1860, STATEFIP, SLAVEHH, HHWT)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s a black mark on our history that early Utah allowed slavery. Other people more informed than I have more detail on the people involved and legal details (This Abominable Slavery is on my to-read list, but I haven’t gotten to it yet), but I was curious about where Utah stood relative to other states. In 1850 and 1860 the US Census asked households whether they had any slaves, so I ran a weighted crosstab on % households with slaves. In 1850 the census reported on 37 states. Of those 19 reported some slaves. When we rank order the states by slaveholdings Mississippi was the most slave-holding state, with 45% of households reporting a slave. At the bottom of those with any slaves\u00a0is Utah and New Jersey, which were both well under 1%. Others have written about how legally Utah slavery was quite different from Southern chattel slavery, and it looks like both qualitatively and quantitatively slavery in Utah shouldn’t conjure up the same pictures as large-scale plantation slavery. That is not to excuse it in the slightest of course, it is what it is. When we look at 1860 on the eve of the Civil War the picture is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":50800,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3027],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-race"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/2ab0f91e-56b3-4f79-92ca-f7e583c114d8.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50773"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50819,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50773\/revisions\/50819"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}