Joseph Fletcher, Thematic Maps, Slavery, and the Worst Places to Live in the U.K. and the U.S.

In 1847, Joseph Fletcher, a 30-year-old British barrister, published the first of several papers linking moral and educational statistics in England and Wales. A key player in the early Victorian statistical movement—he served as editor to the journal of the Statistical Society of London from 1842 until his death in 1854—Fletcher created works reflecting the group's sentiments, reformist in their own right, and relied on the preponderance of statistics to make his positions clear. Fletcher's first map appeared in his 1847 manuscript on moral and educational statistics and was not thematic, but a general map of British counties that required the reader to apply the theme by connecting tabular data to it. In 1857, Hinton Rowan Helper, a North Carolina native and son of a slave owner, called for the end of slavery in the United States, using every conceivable argument available to him to make the case that slavery was wrong for the South.