The Louisiana Slave Database

SOWK 300 Computer Applications in the Social Sciences Spring 2011 Winston Wright Section 2 TTH
African Region
Figure 1 is dealing with the African regions from where the slaves were taken from and brought to Louisiana. A large number of the slaves did not have a location of where they were taken from. Senegambia has the next largest percent of slaves that was brought over to Louisiana. Looking at this information that is provided we can see that a large number of slaves came over from the coastal region of Africa. We can conclude that the Africans were taken from this region because it was closest to the Americas. It would take a lot more time to go deep into Africa to get people and heading back to the coast then sailing to America.

Origin
Figure 3 covers the various origins of the people brought over to Louisiana from Africa. Once again the largest percent in this graph is the missing or unidentified portion. Following that is the Africans being the next highest portion of the pie of people transported into Louisiana. Then comes the creoles coming in after the Africans to show the third largest origin. The data in the graph shows the origins of those people that came into Louisiana. As in the first two figures the largest sum of the people was unidentified. This shows that yeah there was a lot of people transported in but nothing is really know about these people. We can also conclude that Africans were not the only people that were imported in to Louisiana in this slave database.

Conclusions
After viewing all of this information for this project and being of African descent I feel that this assignment was very informative. Even though the records were not very accurate I still got a sense of the amount of people that were imported into Louisiana. The information that was obtained from this project was still very educational even though most of the data in the database was not completed. I picked up some new information about a lot of things especially about the slaves in the Louisiana region. For the people that are from the Louisiana region can narrow down their origin from the information that is given from the Louisiana slave database. We can now see that not only Africans were imported into Louisiana but so were creoles, people from the Caribbean, Indians, and others. In all the variables the largest percent of most of the variables were unidentified. Some of that unidentified that could play a big part in some other unknown origins, ages, and African regions that are listed in this study. Overall, this assignment was very informative and I enjoyed doing it and liked the new information that I obtained from it.

Age
Figure 2 describes the age of the individuals that were taken from the coastal region of Africa and imported into Louisiana. Like in the first figure a lot of the ages of the African people were not known when they were imported to Louisiana. There were a large number of people whose age was not known that were captured. When reading this data you can see that the majority of the ages were not known. However you can also see that a lot of the African people brought over were adults. A higher percent of the African that were brought over were adults probably because they wanted people that they knew would be able to work. The younger the person the more difficult it would have been for them to complete the jobs that needed to be done.
Figure_1 African Region Figure_2 Age

Gender
Figure 4 is dealing with the sex of the slaves imported into Louisiana. As you can see the majority of the importees are male. The graph shows that half of the people that were imported were males. It also shows that there is a small amount of the peoples gender that was unidentified. This chart shows that males were more sought out then females. You can also conclude that the males were more sought out because they were strong and capable of getting the work done that the owners wanted done out in the fields. Even though half the people imported were males a large number of females were brought in as well. I believe that the large numbers of females were brought in to complete house work, also work out in the fields and care for children.

References
1. http://ibiblio.org/laslave/Acksandintro.html 2. http://ibiblio.org/laslave/downloads/Slave_DB_Codes.txt 3. http://ibiblio.org/laslave/downloads.php