The Southern Economic History Project was established in 1969, with financial assistance from the National Science Foundation and the University of California, to collect and analyze several large bodies of data from unpublished archival material. In this appendix we wish to describe each of the major collections of data gathered by the Southern Economic History Project. We also wish to define more precisely the geographic and temporal limitations we have used to restrict our attention for the purposes of this book.

Our desire has been to examine the implications of economic freedom for the ex-slave and the steps by which the southern economy reorganized itself after the Civil War. The eleven states that together formed the Confederacy against the Union, and that harbored the bulk of American blacks at the time of emancipation, incorporated a wide variety of regional differences and local problems. Nevertheless, and somewhat to our surprise, it proved possible to establish boundaries to a relatively large geographic region within which economic and social conditions were sufficiently homogeneous to allow accurate generalizations. Because of an association with cotton agriculture, we have, throughout the book, identified this region as the Cotton South. This area, outlined in the map facing Chapter 1, incorporates 337 counties from the eleven former Confederate States. Covering over 200,000 square miles, the Cotton South consists of a wide swath of territory running from the cotton-growing lands of the Carolinas through the black belts of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, including the alluvial valleys of the Mississippi and Red rivers, and the eastern prairies of Texas.