We provide three different samples from the 1850 census slave schedules. Generally, once a slaveholding is selected for sampling, information on all enslaved persons within a selected holding is provided. The only exception is in the case of slaveholdings with 100 or more slaves in the urban/group quarters sample. I summarize some of the key information for each sample below; additional information is available on our user guide. We currently only provide this data as a .dat fixed-width file with command files to import the data into Stata, SAS, and SPSS. However, if you email us at ipums@umn.edu and request a specific sample, I should be able to share a .CSV Excel file of the data with you.
1850 Flat Sample
This sample contains approximately 1-in-20 sample of the slaves enumerated in 1850. To ensure that holdings had an equal probability of being included in the sample regardless of their size, a holding was entered only if a sample point (a randomly generated window of four consecutive lines on each 84 line page) fell on the line containing the holding’s first slave. When the sample point fell on any other line, the holding was skipped. If the holding was included, all slaves were entered.
1850 Urban/Group Quarters Sample
For most of the slaveholding United States, this sample is also an approximately 1-in-20 sample. Also included, however, is an oversample of cases from the counties that contained the South’s ten largest cities – Baltimore, Maryland, New Orleans, Louisiana, St. Louis, Missouri, Louisville, Kentucky, Charleston, South Carolina, Washington, DC, Richmond, Virginia, Mobile, Alabama, Savannah, Georgia, and Norfolk, Virginia. In these ten counties, the sampling rate is 1-in-4. While the same sampling rule from the flat sample is used for slaveholders with less than 100 slaves, if the sampling window fell within a slaveholding with 100 or more slaves, data would be recorded for all the slaves within the sampling window and regardless of whether anyone in the window was the holding’s first slave. This increases representation of large holdings.
1850 Linked Slave/Free Population Sample
This dataset is a 1-in-100 sample of the slave and free population in 1850 following a similar sample design to the one used in the 1850 flat sample . The dataset contains all persons present in the original 1850 IPUMS sample, regardless of whether or not they were slaveholders. For all free persons, there are variables identifying serial and person number in the original 1850 IPUMS data as well as slaveholder status. For all slave persons, there are variables indicating serial number of the slaveholding household in which they lived, location of the slaveholding on the slave schedules, and age, race, and sex of the slave. Using SERIAL and PERNUM, this data can easily be integrated with the 1850 Free Population data available at the IPUMS-USA website.