I think that for my final project I will compare the average amount made from from each of the different occupations of the Maine State Seminary occupations, with the amounts made by the cotton brokers from cotton exports. This would require the MSS dataset, particularly the donor occupation dataset. From there, I would need to find the average amount made for each of those occupations during the relevant time period, and convert those amounts to 2021 dollars. I would then need to get the Bates Mill Company financial information and calculate the amount made from the cotton exports using the cost per pound, total weight, and number of bales. I would then do this for each of the different brokers and compare the two to see the difference in wealth accumulation. I think this could be conveyed with a combination of dataset visualizations, with a more visceral illustration that would show how much the cotton brokers made for every bale of cotton, compared to how much the donors made. To take this a step further, it would be valuable to also compare these amounts to the amounts enslaved people made for each bale of cotton.
