Although you seem to think that the census questions were inherently defeating the gathering of primary information on per capita wealth, some primary economic historians such as George Tucker were among the first economists to compute per capita income as means of statistical analysis in 1843. Subsequent refining occurred in 1848 and 1854.
http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decenni...s/1860e-05.pdf
Data From the below is also interesting: http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/colle.../php/state.php
Historical Census Browser, Geospatial and Statistical Data Center
University of Virginia Library
Charlottesville VA 22904
As a group slaveholders were extremely wealthy in the South. Their average wealth in 1860 was $24,748, almost fourteen times greater than that of nonslaveholders ($1,781). They accounted for 26 percent of the white population in 1860 and they owned 93 percent of “agricultural wealth.”
As you can see, if the averages include the standard per capita family dependents per household, then the data produces the 1860 individual per capita income in the South as being $3,978, and in the North it was $2,040. Of course the data varies between regions in the Northeast, North Central, and Midwest according to household count. http://www.mcgill.ca/files/economics/ferrie.pdf
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/dward/cla...nequality.html
http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcom...T1970p1-07.pdf
http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcom...T1970p2-13.pdf
http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1860e-05.pdf
Some of these locations are difficult to feed into. If you have problems, advise and I will aid your entrance.
First of all -- I always appreciate it when posters maximize the data input and minimize (better yet: eliminate, thanks!) ridiculous insults.
Second, please understand, the only thing we are "debating" here is whether 1860 era ANNUAL PER CAPITA INCOMES were grossly outside the range of about $100 to $200. Nothing I've seen suggests they are.
Yes, of course, if you take a prosperous southern FAMILY of maybe 10 members, living on hundreds or even thousands of acres, with dozens or hundreds of slaves, then you could no doubt compute: this FAMILY has an income in the range of thousands of dollars per year. No debate there.
But it's not what the words "annual per capita income" mean, and that's what I've argued.
Further, who even cares about what the various regions' per capita income might have been -- except in context of questions such as:
I don't see per capita income as very relevant to secession -- perhaps you do? But economics, especially the North's overwhelming industrial power was hugely important in the South's defeat.
The only of your links which I could get to work were ones I'd already found.
But understand, we have nothing to debate, as long as it's understood that what's being compared are the incomes of prosperous southern slave-owning plantations with the average northern & mid-western family farm. I grant you the South's relative prosperity.
But in terms of industrial output, there was almost no comparison -- the North outproduced the South in order of magnitude ten to one. That's why there is today a 50 state United States.