Strange Maps: 1860s Cotton vs. 2008 Election

This was too interesting not to share. The site linked below shows that the voters for Barack Obama in the south this year is almost identical to the highest cotton production in the south in the 1860s. The theory goes that those cotton producing areas were heaviest with slaves in the 19th century, and that the density of the African American community stayed heavy there.

[Excerpt]

From Pickin’ Cotton to Pickin’ Presidents

. . .The link between these two maps is not causal, but correlational, and the correlation is African-Americans. Once they were the slaves on whom the cotton economy had to rely for harvesting. Despite an outward migration towards the Northern cities, their settlement pattern now still closely corresponds to that of those days. . .

Read more at: Strange Maps