Klu Kluxers in Northeastern Spartanburg: The Republican Party in Limestone

Chart showing the locations of people in the 1870 census

The Reconstruction-era Klu Klux Klan attacks generally targeted Republican politicians and their supporters. Who represented the Republican party in northeastern Spartanburg County? Not many people! With its large white majority and well-organized political leaders, all elected officials and a majority of voters were conservative. Throughout Reconstruction, the county was a stronghold for state conservatives. Northeastern Spartanburg was twice marginalized. The region was only weakly represented within the county Republican party. Of the four Republican candidates for legislative seats, none came from the northern part of the county.

In the townships of Limestone and Cherokee, the presence of the Republican government was largely limited to officials serving in positions that were appointed by the (Republican) governor. These consisted of the election managers and the trial justices. Election mangers were responsible for the mechanics of voting on Election Day. They set-up the ballot box, monitored voting, and then brought the ballot box (with the ballots) to Spartanburg village for counting. This was an important and often difficult position as Reconstruction was a time when there was widespread election misconduct (voter intimidation, ballot stuffing, etc) by both political parties. 

Trial justices were low-level judicial officials. They handled minor criminal and civil offenses. They also handled the initial stages of major criminal cases. A jury trial for a major offense like murder would be handled by circuit judge, but a trial justice would handle the early stages of the legal process, doing things like issuing arrest warrants and taking bond. 

Trial justices typically were not legal professionals, but they were educated men of some standing in the community. The office of trial justice was only created in February 1870, and it drew heavy criticism from conservatives. The common complaint that the men appointed as trial justices were incompetent men of low character. I'm not sure what to make of this. A position similar to a trial justice, justice of the peace, existed in the antebellum but with the crucial difference that a trial justice was appointed by the governor while a justice of the peace was elected by the local community. For Spartanburg, this meant that the trial justice was a prominent local Republican in a predominantly conservative community. Conservatives generally deplored all Republican officials, but it was also the case that Republicans qualified to serve in legal positions were hard to find as virtually all antebellum legal professionals had supported secession and the Confederacy.

I have not been able to find any information about the election managers and trial justices for Cherokee township, but I think I have a complete list of people for Limestone township. The trial justices were P. Quinn Camp and William Champion. Both were white southerners. Camp was an old man in his mid-sixties who had spent his entire life in Limestone County. He was never a member of the planter class, but he did run a successful small farm. By the time the Civil War broke out, he was farming one-hundred acres of land with help from nine people he enslaved. He appears to have been a respected member of the community served as federal postmaster for several year.

Camp experienced incredible misfortune during the war. His sons John J. and William E. both served in the Confederate army, and William was killed in battle at the tail end of the war. Camp's personal finances also collapsed. When the war broke out, he was in debt, and he lost his farm during the war. 

Despite his family's support of the Confederacy, Camp was allied with the Republican Party during Reconstruction. It is unclear how Camp became involved in politics. In testimony before the Congressional investigative subcommittee, Camp said that he had always been a Republican, but he had never been active in politics. He had accepted the appointment as trial justice, he said, because his neighbors had asked him to take on the position because his predecessor had "abused" it. 

Camp's claim to have been uninvolved in politics seems inconsistent with his actions. He not only served as trial justice, but he was also an active member of the local Republican party, regularly attending party meetings. His Republicanism caused conflict between him and his white neighborhood. He was accused of being a "hidden radical" and treated with contempt.

Camp's son John J. was one of the election managers for the 1870 election. By this time, John was in his late twenties and was working on his father's farm. John turn to the Republican Party is striking in light of his service to the Confederacy. He not only served in the Confederate army for almost the entire war, but he was serious injured in battle.

William Champion was one of the other election managers. He had also served as a trial justice, but he was no longer serving in the position by 1870. (He may have been the man that P. Quinn Camp replaced.) Champion was a white man in his fifties. He was originally from North Carolina, across the state border, but he  had lived in South Carolina for over a decade. He made a living from milling and farming. Like Camp. he had supported the Union during the war and was active in the local Loyal League. 

Champion received a great deal of criticism from conservatives, even more than Camp. One man told a Congressional investigative subcommittee that he was "a very stupid, ignorant creature, and a drunken fellow." A particular complaint was that he was agitating the freedpeople, especially on the issue of landownership. This was a touchy political issue as many freedpeople want to become landowners, and many white landowners feared that their property would be seized by the federal government. Conservatives accused Champion of telling freedpeople who rented farmland that they were entitled to stay after their rental lease expired because they would soon be given a legal title to it. He was also rumored to have told white people that they should extend full social equality to freedpeople because, if they didn't, they would be forced to at "bayonet point" by the federal government.

The other election manager was Clem Bowden. Like Champion and Camp, Clem was an old man; he was sixty years old. Unlike them, he was a Black man who had been enslaved during the antebellum. He had grown up in the area. Clem did not say who had enslaved him before the war, but by 1870, he was leasing a farm near the plantation of Major Lee Linder. 

At the time that Ku Klux Klan violence broke out, the state government was trying to form a state militia that could help curb political violence. On paper, Spartanburg County was the home to two regiments (approximately two-thousand militia members), and the regiments were equipped with almost one-thousand rifle muskets. Conservatives were outraged by all this, but it is unclear if the muskets were even distributed, and certainly the Spartanburg state militia was not anything resembling a functioning military force.

The Republican voters were organized into a local Union (or Loyalist) League. Conservatives accused the Union Leagues of being the Republican counterpart of the Ku Klux Klan, but nobody in Spartanburg made a credible accusation that the Leagues engaged in any political violence. The Union League was, however, a clandestine organization, so it is unclear exactly what they did. The extent records indicate that they socialized freedmen into the voting process and politics more generally. Union leaders certainly promoted political positions that conservatives felt were beyond the pale, but this was hardly justified breaking the organization up.

And breaking up the Union League, and all significant Republican activity, is what was achieved by the Ku Klux Klan. In a later post, we'll take a look at what exactly took place. 

Klu Kluxers in Northeastern Spartanburg: What happened after the war?

Being an isolated, rural area, far away from the battles of the Civil War, the consequence of the Union victory over the Confederacy came slowly to northeastern Spartanburg. Union troops passed through the county in April 1865, in pursuit of Jefferson Davis and other important Confederate political figures. That fall, a small garrison of troops was stationed in the county seat of Spartanburg Court House. By this time, it was obvious to all observers that the Confederacy had lost the Civil War and, with it, the institution of slavery. The official end came that summer when a Union officer issued a public proclamation at Spartanburg Court House that all slaves were now free.

Residents of northeastern Spartanburg had to decide for themselves what the emancipation of slaves meant. Civil institutions had collapsed, and South Carolina was now governed by the Union army, but the army's presence in Spartanburg was minimal. A small garrison (never more than seventy soldiers) was stated at Spartanburg Court House, twenty miles away from Limestone Springs, and in any case, the garrison was removed entirely by the summer of 1866.

The defeat of the Confederacy was a shocking psychic blow for many white southerners, and emancipation was the realization of greatest hopes for many formerly enslaved people, but the practical implications were small. Many newly freed slaves continued to work on the farms of white land-owners, but now they, at least ostensibly, had the choice of who to work for. 

A labor contract signed by the white farmer Saul A. Camp and a freedman described only as "Bill" provides insight into relations. Prior to emancipation, Camp was one of the few planters in the area. He and an enslaved workforce of twenty-seven enslaved people grew food provisions on a three-hundred acre farm.

The contract is undated, but it was probably signed in early 1866, only a few months after emancipation. The terms of the contract were that Bill would farm on part of Camp's land in exchange for one-eighth of the crops he grew as well as eight-dollars for each month when he was not engaged in farmwork. The contract gave Camp considerable authority over Bill. Bill agreed to "obey all reasonable orders" and "not absent himself from the plantation without the permission of S. A. Camp." These were work conditions not that different from those Bill had experienced under slavery.

Census statistics also show that life after emancipation, in many ways, was not that different. The 1870 census did not record the location of residences, but we can still use it to get a sense of the geographic Census-takers created their records as they visited homes, so the numerical order in the census is a rough measure of distance. Families that appear in consecutive entries are usually neighbors, while people who were distant from each other tend to have distant entries in the census.

Most pages of the census contain entries for twenty people, so plotting the number of Black people on a page provides a crude but useful graphic showing the racial distribution. The plots for the townships of Limestone and Cherokee are displayed below. 

Plot of the census page vs. % of Black people in Limestone township

Plot of the census page vs. % of Black people in Limestone township

One thing that is visually clear is that the Black population of Cherokee was smaller than the population in Limestone. Numerical statistics bear this out: approximately one-third of the residents of Limestone are Black, but Black people only make up only 18% of Cherokee. 

The distributions are also different. Cherokee township has two regions where few Black people live (pages 2 to 4 and pages 25 to 31). No similar regions appear for Limestone township. Limestone township has several pages where a majority of people are Black. Some of these pages can be identified with major plantations. For example, the planter Saul A. Camp was recorded on page 30. Black people make up 65% of people recorded on that page of the census, and nearly 50% on the neighboring pages. Most of these people were likely laboring on Camp's land, and many were formerly enslaved by him.

Enlarged display of pages around 30 on Limestone township census

The figures show several regions where a majority of people are freedpeople, for example pages 35 to 37 of the census for Limestone county. Many of these can be identified as the area around a former planter, so the people living there likely had been enslaved by him. 

Similarly, Lee Linder, the largest enslaver during the antebellum, was recorded on page 56. Many Black people were recorded on pages 56 and 57, while the numbers are much lower on pages 55 and 58. 

The densest concentration of Black residents occurs around page 36. I can't identify this location with a plantation, and I'd be interesting to get more information about what is going on here. 

The village of Limestone Springs seems to correspond the location around page 25. The village is not explicitly indicated in the census, but the people recorded around page 25 are disproportionately skilled professionals (rather than farmers).

Another useful graphic is the Lorenz curve of the racial distribution. The curve is generated by first computing the percentage of Black residents on each page and sorting this list from highest to lowest. Then, for each term in the sorted list, compute the cumulative percentage of Black residents and white residents. The Lorenz curve is the plot of these cumulative percentage values. 

Lorenz curve for racial makeup of Limestone township

Lorenz curve for racial makeup of Cherokee township

The Lorenz curve would equal a line with slope +1 if the Black and white populations were equidistributed, so the deviation from this line is measure of how racially segregated the populations are. The all-white regions in Cherokee township show up clearly in the Lorenz curve for Cherokee township. 

Two numerical measures of segregation are the Gini coefficient and the index of dissimilarity. For Limestone township, the Gini coefficient is .52, and the dissimilarity index is .38. The indices are respectively .61 and .44 for Cherokee County. These numbers indicate that Cherokee township was more segregated than Limestone, something also indicated visually by the all-white regions that we saw earlier. To put these numbers in context, the median dissimilarity index for UA metropolitan areas in 2000 was .648. Thus southeastern Spartanburg was less segregated than most of the United States today. This is not a reflection of a lower level racial prejudice but rather a lack of mobility. Under slavery, Black people lived in close proximity to the people who enslaved them, and many people were living in the same places in 1870.

What does the census show about the economic situation? The vast majority of people living in these townships were famers, and the few exceptions were people who provided services to farmers (e.g. medical doctors, teachers, and merchants). The census data about farms provides a closer look at the situation for farmers in the area.

Census-takers recorded fairly detailed information about the farms in Limestone and Cherokee. For each farm, they recorded the acreage as well as the livestock and crops. Below are histograms of the sizes of the farms. The height is the amount of "improved acres" or the number of acres that was cleared and used for farming or grazing. (Many farmers owned a significant of land that was wooded or otherwise unused for farming.) The census data only includes farms larger than two acres.

Many of the farms were run by men who paid rent or were sharecropping. One thing that we see from the histograms is the poverty of the region. The median farm size was 15 acres. This was small. In contrast, the median farm size for both South Carolina and North Carolina was somewhere between 20 acres and 50 acres. 

Even the wealthier farmers were men of relatively modest means. The largest farms were approximately 100 acres. This represented uncommon local wealth (only twenty-three of the nearly seven-hundred farms in the area were 100 acres or larger), but nothing exceptional by state-wide or national standards. The largest farm in northeastern Spartanburg was the size of only an average Upcountry farm during the antebellum. In his book Origins of Southern Radicalism, Lacy Ford computed that the average farm size for the Upcountry to be 136.9 acres in 1860.

These census statistics provide a snapshot of northeastern Spartanburg shortly before Ku Klux violence broke out. The census was recorded in July 1870, and the first major Ku Klux Klan attack took place three months later, in October. 

The statistics reveal northeastern Spartanburg to have been a poor rural area populated by small farmers who simply tried to raise enough crops to feed their families. The Civil War and emancipation had led to limited changes in race relations. While they were no longer legally bound to enslavers, most newly freedpeople were farming land owned by the men who had enslaved them, and they had few prospects of improving their lot.

In the next blogpost, I will give a narrative account of what happened in the townships of Cherokee and Limestone three months after the census, when Ku Klux Klan attacks broke out.

Klu Kluxers in Northeastern Spartanburg: the situation before the war

On January 31, 1872 at 3:20 pm, a train carrying a highly unusual cargo arrived in Charleston, South Carolina. Escorted by thirteen army soldiers were forty-nine Ku Kluxers who were being sent to prison. Approximately half of the them were to be imprisoned in the Charleston jail, while the rest were being sent by ship to the federal prison in Albany, New York.

The fact that these men were facing imprisonment for Ku Klux activities was the outcome of extraordinary efforts by the federal government. Traditionally, responding to criminal violence is the responsibility of state governments, but the government of South Carolina (as well as many other governments in the south) had shown itself incapable of effectively curbing the Ku Klux Klan. Congress, with the support of President Grant, responded by passed new legislation to enable the federal government to act. Only nine months earlier, the president had signed into law the Reconstruction Acts which enabled the Justice Department to prosecute people who denied citizens the right to vote. The idea was that this would allow the Justice Department to prosecute Ku Kluxers without encroaching on the authority of state governments. The prosecution of South Carolina Ku Kluxers was an early test case of the new law, and the imprisonment of the forty-nine Ku Kluxers was a major success.

After they disembarked from the train, the Ku Kluxers were marched under army escort through the city. They attracted a great deal of attention. For years, Americans had heard horrifying and fantastic stories of the activities of the Ku Klux Klan. In South Carolina, Ku Kluxers had terrorized the Upcountry for much of the previous year. In popular imagination, Ku Kluxers were demonic figures who, disguised in elaborate costumes, attacked freed slaves in the dead of night and then disappeared before law enforcement could react. The ex-Confederate general, Nathan Bedford Forrest, claimed the Ku Klux Klan formed a paramilitary force half a million strong that served in defense of white Southerners. For most residents of Charleston, this was their first chance to see a Ku Kluxer.

What did Charleston residents see? A very different sight than the mental image they had formed. A reporter for the Charleston News described the Ku Kluxers as follows:

a more forlorn woe-begone looking crew could hardly be got together. Many were imperfectly clad, some had gaping shoes, and their persons and clothing seemed to have declared eternal war with such domestic appliances as soap and water.

In an upcoming series of blogposts, I will take a look at these Ku Kluxers. I will focus on the men who were from Spartanburg County. While the South Carolina Ku Klux Klan has been the subject of a great deal of study, the focus has largely been on Union County. There is good reason for this. Union County was the site of some of the most ambitious Ku Klux Klan actions: two jail raids that resulted in the murder of twelve Black men who served in the state militia. The Ku Klux Klan did not pull off any comparable operations in Spartanburg, but they were a powerful force that left Black families in many parts of the county paralyzed with fear. 

Northeastern Spartanburg

Let's begin by taking a look at the part of Spartanburg where the Ku Kluxer were active. The 1872 convicts were from two townships: Limestone Springs and Cherokee. This region is now part of Cherokee County. It lies in the Upstate, along the border with North Carolina. The population center is the town of Gaffney, then the small village of Limestone Springs.

Map showing the location of the town of Gaffney
Google Maps

Northern Spartanburg has been populated since the 1700s. The Battle of Cowpens, an important Revolutionary War battle, was fought there. Despite its long history, the area was largely underdeveloped at the outbreak of the Civil War. The village of Limestone Springs was the only population center. The village originally was a resort town which planters from the Lowcounty would visit during the summer to escape the punishing coastal heat and enjoy nearby mineral springs. By the time the Civil War broke out, the village's most prominent feature was the Limestone Springs Female High School. This was a private woman's college run by the Englishman Thomas Curtis. The student body of approximately one-hundred students was a large presence. Beyond their numbers, the students brought a level of culture and sophistication to what was otherwise primitive country backwoods. Most of the students had come from other parts of the South Carolina, although a few were from other southern states, and one student (Elena N. Booth) had come all the way from Cuba. The village also supported a small number of people in the professional and commercial classes, a doctor, a few merchants, a shoemaker, and so forth.

Life was very different away from the village. One freedman described the area as a "pretty wild country." Approximately four-thousand people lived in the area, with somewhat more than had living in Limestone township and the rest living in Cherokee township. The area supported iron manufacturing, but the industry's local impact was limited. The ironworks were largely run by enslaved labor and owned by men living in Spartanburg village. Most people in the area were famers.

Like all of South Carolina, Cherokee and Limestone Springs were slave societies, but the slave population was relatively small, perhaps a quarter of the population. The typical enslaver was not a wealthy planter with a large workforce but rather a small farmer who enslaved a single family. No more than twenty residents had gained planter status by enslaving a large workforce. The largest enslaver was D. B. Ross, a farmer in Limestone Springs who enslaved approximately sixty people. He was exceptional. Most of the planters only enslaved twenty-some people, putting them on the bottom rung of planter society.

D. B. Ross ran a successful cotton farm, but most farmers grew little or no cotton. The planter with the second largest enslaved workforce (forty-two people), Lee Linder, grew no cotton and instead grew food provisions and raised sheep for wool. Others grew tobacco as a cash crop. Compared to planters in other parts of the state, the planers of northeastern Spartanburg were men of modest means, but they and other landowners wielded a great deal of influence. Many small famers were landless and rented land from planters, making them economically dependent on them. 

Life for small farmers was difficult. In other parts of the Upcountry, a farmer of modest means could hope improve his lot by growing cotton, but in northeastern Spartanburg cotton grew poorly and most people were subsistence farmers, growing corn and raising hogs. They could expect a lifetime of struggling to feed their family. 

Map showing the locations of the counties of Cherokee and Limestone in 1887
Spartanburg Public Library

When the war broke out, northeastern Spartanburg was cushioned from the impact by the area's impoverishment. Wartime conditions cut off access to international markets, so cotton growers struggled both to sell cotton and to purchase food provisions.In contrast, subsistence farmers in northeastern Spartanburg could lead lives during wartime that were largely the same as their lives during peace,  especially if their families members were able to avoid military service, 

Nevertheless, the community was presented with a tremendous challenge at the end of the Civil War. A quarter of the population was freed from bondage, and it was unclear how everyone would adjust to their new status. Much of the white male population had served in the Confederate army, and a number had been killed or permanently disabled. On top of this, the state government was being reformed after a few years of military government.

In the following series of blogposts, I will try to unpack what happened in the townships of Cherokee and Limestone in the years after the Civil War.  One thing is clear. Whatever happened, it was a disaster. In 1871, six years after the end of the Civil War, the region was plunged into barbarous violence. Virtually every Black family was subject to horrific violence, most often whippings but also sexual violence and mock executions. Many white families were implicated in the violence, and large numbers of people – including some of the most prominent and influential men – fled the area to escape law enforcement. Rather than recovering from the chaos of war, northeastern Spartanburg sunk further into poverty and disorder.

Map of the townships of Limestone and Cherokee, c. 1875
From South Carolinians Library

Source

1.  "The Convicted Ku Klux." The Anderson intelligencer., February 1, 1872, p. 1.

2. "Editorial Correspondence." Yorkville enquirer. [volume], July 26, 1860, Image 2

3. "Limestone Male Academy." The Carolina Spartan. [volume], December 20, 1866, Image 4

How long is a book chapter?

This blogpost will be an exercise in reviewing some ideas that I learned when teaching the history of mathematics. A basic challenge is the field is to research non-literate culture. Professors in the social science and humanities are very familiar with this issue and possible solutions: use linguistic data or archaeological data or. . . . How can we use archaeological data to study how a culture does mathematics? 

Alexander Thom used archaeological data in an intriguing way in his study of Neolithic England. England contains a number of megalithic structures believed to have been built during the Neolithic period (c. 4500 BC–1700 BC). The most famous of these is Stonehenge. Among his other claims, he argued that measurements of these structures show that people during the Neolithic period had a standard unit of length, which he termed the "megalithic yard." Moreover, he estimated this unit to be about 2.72 feet. 

The manner in which we derived this claim involves an interesting statistical idea. Thom spent decades measuring the lengths of various Megalithic structures. If Neolithic people used a standard unit, then most of these lengths should be integer multiples of a standard unit. Here I want to explain the methods Thom used.

To illustrate the statistical ideas, I want to look at a more familiar problem that involved similar statistical issues: do books have a standard chapter length? We could try to answer this question by looking at a large number of books and recording the length of each chapter. I do not want to do this. Instead, I want to answer this question using only knowledge of the page lengths of many books. This is similar to the problem facing Thom. He did not have a large number of measurements that he believed to be approximations to the "megalithic yard;" he only had measurements that he believed were integer multiples of the "megalithic yard."

The basic mathematical idea is simple but powerful. Let X_i = the page length of a randomly chosen book. The pages are divided into some number of chapters together with things like a title page, an author's biography, etc. If a chapter length was standardized to "q" pages, then we would have X_i = Y_i * q + E_i for Y_i equal to an integer and E_i an error term, a small random number. 

Now consider cos( 2 π X_i / r). If r=q, then we have cos (X_i / q) = cos( E_i/q) is approximately equal to "+1." If we sum cos( 2 π X_i / r) over a large number of books, then we will get a large number.

What if there isn't anything like a standard page length for a chapter? Then cos( 2 π X_i / r) should be a random number between -1 and +1, so if we sum over a large number of books, then we will get a number close to 0. A similar thing will happen if there is a standard length q, but r is a different, unrelated integer.

This suggests a strategy. Record the page lengths of a large number of books, compute the sum of cos( 2 π X_i / r) for various values of r, and then check if there are any values of "r" for which the sum is large. It is convenience to modify this idea slightly by dividing the sum by the square root of (number of books)/2. (This is to normalize things to be independent of the number of books chosen.)

I implemented this idea by looking up the page lengths of 257 books that appeared on New York Times Best Seller list or were read by Opera's Book Club. These books are a mix of popular fiction, literary fiction, and nonfiction, but all books were published by mainstream publishing houses. I did not make any effort to randomize my choices; I just looked up books on Wikipedia and Amazon.

What did this experiment produce? It produced the following chart:

The x-axis measures the different possible values of "r", a possible page length for a chapter. The y-axis measure the sum of cos( 2 π X_i / r). Thus most y-values should be close to zero; the other values should be large and correspond to a standard chapter length.

What do we see? Two standard chapter lengths clearly stand out: 16 pages and 8 pages. There is a natural explanation for why we see two different values: presumably, the 16 page chapters were printed with double spacing, while the 8 page chapter were printed with single spacing. 

Notice also that the values r=8 and r=16 stand out, but r=16 has a noticeably higher y-value than r=8. An explanation is that I happened to select more books that were with printed double spacing than single spacing.

How does this compare with the advice to aspiring writers? There are a lot of advice webpages, and many says that a typical chapter is approximately 1,000 to 5,000 words. This corresponds to 2 to 10 single spaced pages. Eight pages fits into this range, but our statistical analysis suggests that it very uncommon for writers to deviate from a 8 page single-spaced chapter.

This exercise is a nice illustration of the statistical ideas that Thom used. It is also indicates that we should be cautious in interpreting this type of statistical analysis. Thom argues that his data indicates that "Megalithic yard" functioned like a modern meter. Until the late 20th century, a meter was defined to be the length of a prototype meter bar kept by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures. 

A prototype meter bar
From the Science Museum Group

Thom argued that there was something like a Megalithic Bureau of Weights and Measures in England. There was a centralized body that determined and recorded standard measures as well as a specially educated class of people who used these standards to make measurements. This is a bold claim as archeologists do to believe that Megalithic societies in Western Europe maintained anything like this level of organization.

Our analysis of book chapters suggests an alternative to Thom's claim. Our analysis shows there is a very standard chapter length: 16 pages double spaced or 8 pages single spaced. But there certainly is not anything like an International Bureau of Publishing Measures, and certainly authors like Stephen King and William Faulkner do not write with a view to producing standard length chapters. Instead, these standard lengths were produced by a complicated, decentralized manner involving the commercial needs of publishers, the training of authors, and the desires of readers.

I am far from an expert on Megalithic culture, but as best I can tell, Thom's claims (which date to the 1960s) have become mired in controversy over statistical significance of his data. Also important, it seems to me, is exploring the different ways in which a culture can develop and maintain a standard system of measurements. The case of chapter lengths demonstrates that we should think beyond maintaining an International Bureau of Standards.

Update

Jordan Ellenberg pointed me to this webpage for an explanation of what is happening with book page counts. The fact that book page lengths tend to be multiples of 8 or 16 is an artifact of printing press technology, not editorial practices. As the webpage explains, books are printed by printing multiple pages to a sheet and then folding the sheets into pages. Pages are printed on both front and back of the sheet, and each time the sheet is folded, the number of pages is doubled. So a printer can naturally produce 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 or.... pages per sheet. The number of pages per sheet depends on size of the pages relative to a sheet, and it is most common to print 8 or 16 pages per sheet.

I took another look at the data I collected with this printer information in mind. The published page length appears to be the number of pages with text on it, rather than the number of pages. Every page has both a front and back, so the number of physical pages is always even, but roughly a quarter of the books I looked at have an odd number of pages. Presumably, someone involved in the publishing process tries to come up with enough printed text so that all of the physical pages get used, but often don't have enough material.

With this information in mind, an interested exercise for someone who wants to explore further would be to collect page counts for oversized art books and see if multiples of 4 show up. Another direction would be to look at eBooks.

In any case, I think I inadvertently demonstrated my point that interpreting this type of evidence is tricky. Statistical analysis clearly shows that book page counts tend to come in multiples of 8 and 16, but explaining why this is case requires going beyond the statistics and exploring how book publishing functions.