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ANNALES DE DÉMOGRAPHIE HISTORIQUE 2003 n° 1 p. 23 à 38
THE MISSOURI DEBATES, SLAVERY
AND STATISTICS OF RACE:
DEMOGRAPHY IN SERVICE OF POLITICS
by Margo ANDERSON
INTRODUCTION
Scholars have dated the emergence of
scientific racism and the practice of
defining different human ancestry
groups as “races” to the late XVIIIth and
early XIXth century (for example, Jordan
1968; Fredrickson 1971; Fredrickson
2002; Horsman 1981; Stanton 1960;
Gossett 1963; Hudson 1996)1. They
also explore a paradox, namely how in
an increasingly democratic and egalitarian age, such ideas flourished and served
to justify slavery, imperialism and
national conquest.
My project draws on much of this
analysis. The early national U.S. state
generated and supported an egalitarian
and democratic ideology and political
practice and the emancipation and
political participation of poor, propertyless men. It also fostered a racist ideology that excluded the possibility of such
emancipation and participation for the
African ancestry population. The U.S.
Congress embedded these ideologies in
the race classifications of the federal
statistical system2. I suggest that the
racist implications of these older debates
about African American emancipation
and participation linger even today,
sometimes in the new guise of culturalism (Fredrickson, 2002, 141).
FROM INTELLECTUAL CONCEPT
TO STATE PRACTICE
Intellectuals are all too aware that political, economic or social leaders
frequently pay scant attention to their
work. It is not obvious that a particular
analytic framework or theory will be
“applied” outside the scientific realm. So a
key question for intellectual and political
history is how the intellectual arguments
which came to be characterized as “scientific racism” were linked to actual political
processes, so that the ideas were institutionalized in state practices. Others have
shown how court decision making, for
example, draws on intellectual analysis
and defines the nature of social relations,
for example in the family, of citizenship,
or of employment. But state sponsored
statistical practices, classifications, and
data collections also concretize such relations and practices. Once institutionalized, they become invisible and seemingly
objective descriptions of the way the
world works. They are naturalized. And
once deployed in state statistical practice,
they can be incorporated into legal decision making, legislation, and eventually
even come to be internalized by the populations they were originally invented to
define or organize. One learns that one is
“white,” “black” or “colored” and what
that means in society.
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MARGO ANDERSON
The invention of particular official
statistical practices is generally not recognized as a political process. In fact, it is
often so cloaked in the trappings of
science that both the official statisticians
and the consumers of the data, conceptions, and practices do not see or do not
acknowledge the political process that
creates the particular practices. Detailing
the origin of a particular practice reveals
the politics underneath, restores the
contingency of the invention of the practice, shows how it might have been otherwise, and identifies the moment before
the practice is frozen into permanent
form.
The work of Alain Desrosieres (1998)
and Bruce Curtis (2001) provide models
of such analysis. Curtis’ study of state
formation and statistical practice in mid
nineteenth century Canada reveals how
“science in the making” became what he
calls “made science”. Procedures for
census making in Canada literally defined
the new state and had to be invented,
authorized, consolidated and what he
calls “black boxed” into procedures and
classifications which could no longer be
undone (Curtis, 2001, 17, 23, 305).
Similarly, Desrosieres draws from
French traditions of the social analysis of
cognitive forms. Desrosieres thinks of
the concepts, methods and practices of
statistics as “making up things that
hold”. Desrosieres is keenly aware of the
technical or scientific and the administrative “investment” needed to develop a
statistical concept or data series.
“Unemployment”, “poverty”, “fertility”
at the hands of statisticians become
“objective phenomena” to be measured,
which in turn permit political action in
relation to the phenomena measured.
Desrosieres wants his readers to be
aware of the process of “objectification”.
24
He wants us to “think simultaneously
(emphasis in original) that the objects
being measured really do exist, and that
this is only a convention” (Desrosieres,
1998, 1). He thus deploys his analysis of
the invention of the categories, codes,
concepts and techniques of statistics at
the same time that he traces the history
of the mathematics. The problems that
present themselves to be solved, understanding patterns of suicide, or determining the best decision rules for
judges, or counting a population, are
political and social problems, and thus
the history of the statistics is inseparable
from the larger social and political
history of the societies from which they
come.
SLAVERY AND THE AMERICAN
STATE: BEFORE OFFICIAL
STATISTICS ON RACE OR COLOR
Slave labor was an essential element of
the economic system in most of the
colonies of British North America and
their successor states from the early XVIIth
century to the middle of the XIXth century,
a period of almost a quarter of a millennium. In roughly the middle of that
period, in the 1770s and 1780s, some of
those colonies staged a successful revolution against Britain and established the
United States. They wrote a new Constitution on the basis that “all men are
created equal” and entitled to a republican government, but they did not abolish
slavery (Morgan, 1988; Wood, 1969,
1992; Bailyn, 1967). In fact, they embedded the recognition of slavery in the tax
and representational provisions of the
new state through a clause of the 1787
Constitution known as the Three Fifths
Compromise. That clause provided that
political representation in the House of
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Representatives and direct taxes were to
be apportioned among the states according to a formula based on the sum of a
state’s free population and three fifths of
its slave population (Ohline, 1971;
Rakove, 1979; Anderson, 1988; Balinski
and Young, 1982).
The Constitution required the federal
government to count the population
every ten years, so that seats in the
House could be reapportioned among
the states. The Constitution also
required the identification of the slave
and the free population for the formula
to apportion seats in the House among
the states.
In 1790 Congress wrote the enabling
legislation for the first population census
and debated whether to collect any information beyond that required for the
House apportionment. James Madison
proposed additional questions, notably
about the occupations of the people, and
the identification of adult white males to
determine militia potential. Congress
rejected the occupational inquiry, but
agreed the militia information would be
useful and thus asked each household to
identify the number of white males 16
and over (Anderson, 1994). Having
agreed to collect information on militia
potential, they then decided to specify
three related distinctions of the free
population. They asked each household
to identify the number of white males
under 16, the number of white females,
and the number of other free persons in
the household. Finally, heeding the
constitutional requirement, they asked
for the number of slaves in the household
(Wright and Hunt, 1900; Anderson and
Fienberg, 1999; Fliss, 2000).
In the censuses of 1800 and 1810
Congress expanded the information
about the age and sex distribution of the
white population but not for slaves or
“other free persons”. Congress required
the enumerator to classify the members
of each household into five age cohorts
for white males and white females.
There was continuing debate about
using the census to measure the
economic capacities of the nation.
Congress debated additional proposals
to ask questions about the economic
interests of the population, and instituted a manufacturing census in 1810
(Fliss, 2000; Anderson, 1994).
By contrast, Congress showed little
interest in the demographic characteristics of the slave population or the “other
free persons” in the first three censuses.
Through the 1810s, such disinterest
reflected a hope that slavery would
wither away as an institution. Congress
banned the slave trade in 1808. Northern states were in the process of gradual emancipation (Melish, 1998;
Robinson, 1971). The American Colonization Society had been formed in
1817. And Southerners in Congress had
yet to mount a formal defense of the
institution of slavery. That would
change as Congress debated the admission of Missouri to the union in 1819
(Fehrenbacher, 1995; Moore, 1953) and
the 1820 Census.
THE MISSOURI DEBATES
From the 1790s through the 1810s, as
I have discussed elsewhere (Anderson,
2002), there were proposals to amend
the Constitution to remove the slave
population from the apportionment
count and base the apportionment on
the free population only. Such an apportionment rule would have eliminated
the need to count slaves in the census,
akin to the provision which excluded
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MARGO ANDERSON
“Indians not taxed” from Congressional
apportionment and thus the census.
These proposals, often couched in the
hyperbolic political rhetoric of the age,
came primarily from New England
Federalists who complained that Jefferson’s margin of victory in the presidential election in 1800 was determined by
“slave representation” in the Electoral
College (Dwight, 1812; Drake, 1999;
Sigler, 1966; Simpson, 1941). As time
went on, it became clear that the “direct
taxes” provision of the Constitution was
a dead letter, and that the balancing of
the burdens of taxation with the privilege of representation envisioned by the
Three Fifths Compromise would not be
implemented in tax policy. Relatedly,
the dramatic population growth of the
United States revealed that volatile
political shifts could be expected in
Congressional delegations each decade,
and that those states that grew slowly
would see their influence reduced in the
national government. Thus when
Missouri, the first Louisiana Purchase
territory north of the Ohio River and
west of the Mississippi asked for statehood, Northern Congressmen forced
the issue of the future of slavery, political representation, and statehood on to
the public agenda (Richards, 2000;
Robinson, 1971).
By the time the debate finished,
Missouri had been admitted to the
union as a state with slavery, but more
importantly for our purposes, Congress
had taken its first step in producing
statistics on racial groups in the census.
The trigger of the Missouri debates
was an amendment to the Missouri
statehood bill proposed by New York
Congressman James Tallmadge in early
1819. The amendment would have
banned the introduction of slaves to the
26
state and mandated gradual emancipation at the age of 25 of children born to
slaves. The amendment “provided [...]
that the further introduction of slavery
or involuntary servitude be prohibited,
except for the punishment of crimes,
whereof the party shall be duly
convicted; and that all children of slaves,
born within the said state, after the
admission thereof into the Union, shall
be free, but may be held to service until
the age of twenty-five years” (Journal of
the House of Representatives of the United
States, 15th Congress, 2nd session, February 16, 1819, 272)
Tallmadge and supporters of the
amendment made it plain they opposed
the extension of slavery into the new
states of the west, and opposed “slave
representation” in principle. They were
willing to concede the Three Fifths
Compromise to the original states that
had fought to free the country from the
British. But they were unwilling to
extend the principle to new states and
sought to “protect ‘the rights of freemen
against further abridgement by the
virtual representation of slaves’” (quoted
in Simpson, 1941, 336). The amendment passed the House, was struck from
the bill in the Senate. The two houses
deadlocked on further action, and
Congress adjourned in March 1819.
The Tallmadge amendment set in
motion two years of impassioned rhetoric about the constitutional authority of
Congress, the future of slavery in the
west, and the likelihood of ultimate
conflict between North and South over
slavery. Jefferson called the Missouri
debates “a fire bell in the night”, and
they are generally seen as the beginning
of the sectional conflict which led to the
Civil War. The debates also represented
the first time that Southerners responded
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to the attack on “slave representation”,
and defended slavery as an institution
and the three fifths ratio broadly. The
attack on the ratio and its defense hardened conceptions on slavery and representation on both sides of the issue and
forced to the fore a new conceptual
framework for discussing slavery and
emancipation. Legislators on both sides
of the debate framed their arguments in
terms of the “race” of the slaves and the
differences between “whites” and “people
of color” (Simpson, 1941; Moore, 1953;
Fehrenbacher, 1995).
One line of argument treated the
implications of the Three Fifths
Compromise on the apportionment of
Congress. Supporters of the Tallmadge
amendment argued that Congress
should extend the principle banning
slavery that governed the Northwest
Ordinance. Since Missouri would be a
“new sovereignty”, and “slavery ought to
be extinguished in the limits of every
sovereignty, if it can be effected without
dangerous consequences”. In response
to claims that “slaves are as happy as the
lower class of white people”, Congressman Joseph Hemphill responded that
“it must be in consequence of the degradation to which they are reduced; their
faculties are not allowed that expansion
which nature intended; they are kept in
darkness, and are unacquainted with
their true situation...” (Annals of
Congress, 16th Congress, 1st session,
February 20, 1820, 1133-34).
And he continued by making the
political argument: “Independent of any
considerations of humanity, many of a
political character exist. The balance of
power between the original States will
be disturbed; as, according to the mode
prescribed by the Constitution, the
owner of one hundred slaves has as
much influence in the representation as
sixty-one freemen; and as direct taxation
is but seldom resorted to, it is by no
means an equivalent. This may often
give a minority of the freemen a control
over the politics of the country. This
unquestionably is a hard bargain, but it
one what has not been made with the
inhabitants of Missouri.”
Supporters of banning slavery in
Missouri also saw that the principle of
expanding slavery westward would
come up when statehood was debated
for future states, or future territories
acquired. Congress had eyed additional
territory in the Caribbean and Spanish
Florida. Congressman John W. Taylor of
New York asked rhetorically:“Are the
millions of slaves inhabiting these countries, too, to be incorporated into the
Union and represented in Congress? Are
the freemen of the old States to become
the slaves of the representatives of
foreign slaves?” (Annals of Congress, 16th
Congress, 1st Session, January 27, 1820,
966). And Congressmen were quite
willing to consider as primary the
impact of Congressional decision
making on white Americans. “Preference out to be given to a white population over a black population, as it
regards the strength and prosperity of
the nation. Slaves have no ambition;
they can never become expert as
soldiers, sailors, or artificers; in time of
war, the country would be weakened by
them... In time of peace, slavery has a
pernicious tendency on the industry of
white people...” (Annals, 1134).
Southerners responded by opening a
second line of argument. They recognized that Tallmadge amendment
supporters were ambivalent in their
support for political and economic
rights for free people of color. They thus
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shifted the grounds of the debate by
claiming that the real issue was not the
evil of the institution of slavery but the
problem posed by racial identity of the
slaves. They recognized that the Tallmadge amendment supporters’ defense
of “white people” could be exploited to
conjure up a worse evil of political
participation by people of African ancestry if the institution of slavery were
confined to the original states or ended
altogether.
So, Southerners pointed to the situation of free blacks in northern states
that had abolished slavery: “There is no
place for the free blacks in the United
States—no place where they are not
degraded. If there was such a place, the
society for colonizing them would not
have been formed; their benevolent
design never known. A country wanting
inhabitants, and a society formed to
colonize a part of them, prove there is
no place for them.”
Senator Nathaniel Macon of North
Carolina pointed to the convulsions in
Haiti. “And are you willing to have black
members of Congress? But if the scenes
of St. Domingo should be reacted (reenacted), would not the tomahawk and
scalping knife be mercy?” (Annals of
Congress, 16th Congress, 1st session, January 20, 1820, 227-28).
Southerners also challenged the claim
that slaves should not be represented
because they had no political rights
(Annals of Congress, 16th Congress, 1st
session, February 1,1820, 356-7). In
what way, I would ask, is the just principle of representation violated, by
taking three-fifths of the slaves in the
calculation? The answer is given,
because slaves have no political rights.
And what political rights have the
female and the minor? And how many
28
free persons of full age are excluded
from the exercise of the elective franchise in the different states? Yet all are
taken into the enumeration as the basis
of representation...
If Northerners found the three-fifths
rule and slavery wrong, Southerners
were perfectly willing to drive home
the logic of emancipation (Annals of
Congress, 16 th Congress, 1st session,
January 20, 1820, 229): “Emancipate
them and they stay where they are; and
two-fifths of their number will be
added to the representation, though
they are not permitted to enlist in our
army.”
The resolution to the controversy over
slavery and the admission to Missouri to
statehood was another sectional compromise. Ultimately, Northerners and Southerners in Congress admitted Missouri as a
slave state, Maine as a free state, and set a
line at 36 30' latitude to determine territory where new states could be created
with slavery. The rhetoric on both sides
was agonized and stilted, with Northerners emphasizing the illegitimacy of slavery
as an institution, but emphasizing that
illegitimacy was a threat to white freemen
and the republic, while saying less about
the future of the slave population once
freed. Southerners by and large continued
to deplore the institution, but claimed it
could not so easily be reformed. The escalating rhetoric on both sides obscured the
issues Tallmadge originally posed, and
which in hindsight one can see needed to
be addressed, namely how to determine a
way to end slavery and provide for the
emancipation and economic integration
of the enslaved population and their
descendants into American life as
freemen.
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NEW QUESTIONS IN THE 1820
CENSUS
As the Missouri debates continued,
Congress took up the legislation for the
1820 or Fourth Census. The legislative
debates of earlier decades had firmly
established the principle that the decennial census could serve additional functions beyond the bare population count
required for reapportionment. Hence
Congress discussed what new questions
they might wish to add to the census,
and by January 1820 were debating
adding ambitious new questions on the
demography of the slave and free black
population.
Throughout the Missouri debates, the
Three Fifths Compromise made
members on both sides well aware of the
underlying of the issues of population
growth embedded in discussions of
admitting new states to the Union. Both
sides resorted to analysis of population
patterns to support their point of view.
While supporting the original proposal to
admit Missouri, House Speaker Henry
Clay claimed that allowing slavery in the
new state would permit slaves could be
“diffused” or “dispersed” over a wider
geographic area, which in turn would
improve their social and economic condition, lessen the danger of a slave rebellion,
and eventually lead to the end of the institution of slavery (Moore, 1953, 46).
James Tallmadge’s original amendment to
the statehood bill was a challenge to such
theories, designed to force the issue of
emancipation onto the immediate legislative agenda. Rather than rely on a vague
claim that “natural” population dynamics
would eventually put an end to slavery,
Tallmadge and his supporters argued,
simply legislate an end to the institution
as the state was admitted to the union.
Other supporters of the Tallmadge
amendment made an additional point,
that abolition would occur more
predictably in the South if slaves were
constrained to the states where slavery was
legal. To prove their points, advocates of
diffusion and the advocates of legislative
measures banning slavery from the territories enlisted the emerging scientific
theories of population dynamics, particularly those of Malthus.
By late 1819, newspaper reports of the
legislative debates and pamphlet literature
discussed the population growth patterns
for the slave population in the U.S. in the
first three censuses. The data were meager,
since Congress had not mandated the
collection of any information beyond the
number of slaves and “other free persons”
in households. There was no information
on the age or sex distributions of the slave
or free black population, nor even accurate information on whether “other free
persons” were free blacks, Indians, of
mixed ancestry, or simply not “white”.
But the lack of information did not stop
the analyses. Writers freely made the
conceptual leaps and compared the
growth patterns of the slave population to
those of the white population and “other
free people”, redefined as free people of
color. As the months wore on, writers
developed elaborate theories of population competition between slaves and
whites, and considered whether opening
Missouri to slavery would simply
rearrange the existing slave population
geographically (Clay’s diffusion argument), or whether it would lead to an
increase in the slave population, and
perhaps even constrain the growth of the
free population.
The most prominent of the antislavery
analyses of population dynamics came
from Daniel Raymond, a Baltimore
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attorney and political economist.
Raymond published a pamphlet, The
Missouri Question in late 1819 (Raymond
1819). He claimed that the laws of population proved that the only way to guarantee an end to slavery and the ultimate
dominance of the free population in the
U.S was to prevent the expansion of slavery to the new states in the West and
support gradual emancipation in the rest
of the country. Raymond constructed
complex arguments and calculations
from census data designed to show differential population growth rates on the
slave, free white and other free population
in different states. Raymond used
“science” to shift the argument against
the expansion of slavery away from
humanitarian issues of human exploitation and made an appeal to the self interest of the slave holders. He claimed
that slaveholders faced ultimate insurrection from their slaves because the laws of
population and the empirical data from
the census showed that the trajectory of
population growth would lead to numerical dominance of slaves in the South.
Eventually, Raymond argued, the
outnumbered slaveholders would face
rebellion of their slaves. His solution was
voluntary gradual emancipation. He
confronted the issue of the integration of
the freed population into the nation,
dismissing colonization schemes as unrealistic. He also dismissed the arguments
of those who were reluctant to integrate
manumitted slaves into the larger society,
and considered if the so called “mischiefs
of a parcel of idle, vagabond, pilfering
blacks” would be a threat to society. “The
mischiefs [...] are only for a generation or
two at most, for the idle vagabond blacks
do not raise families, or comparatively
none.” “The character of manumitted
slaves, materially changes in the course of
30
one or two generations”, he claimed. He
was confident that the freed black population would, within two generations,
acquire the “habits of the whites, and
make equally as good citizens” (Raymond
1819, 27-8).
Southerners reacted angrily to
Raymond’s pamphlet and similar arguments about the necessity of constraining slavery, and hence slaves, to the
older states of the union. In February
1820, for example, South Carolina
Senator William Smith attacked
Raymond on the Senate floor, noting
that most anti slavery tracts attacked
slaveholders for their “severe and cruel
treatment” of their slaves. In contrast, he
noted, Raymond’s objection is, they are
treated so humanely that they will
shortly overspread the whole land. If
these people increase to the extent
supposed, it is uncontrovertible evidence that they are well fed, well clothed
and supremely happy. There is no class
of laboring people on the globe […]
who are more happy... This Mr.
Raymond, and some other gentlemen
[…] have all concurred on the same
opinion, that it is better to condense
these people within the limited space of
the old states, and by that means to
reduce their numbers by a state of starvation and oppression. Heap cruelty on them
to destroy the race (Annals of Congress,
1820, 267).
It was in the context of these debates
of population dynamics that Congress
took up amendments to the 1820
census bill. The original bill for taking
the 1820 census was introduced in the
House of Representatives in the second
session of the 15th Congress in December 1818. H.R. 239 provided for the
same questions asked in 1810, and was
introduced at about the same time as the
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original Missouri statehood bill, but
well before Tallmadge introduced his
amendment for gradual emancipation
in February 1819. H.R 239 envisioned
no new inquiries into the demographic
characteristics of the population by race.
Congress did not act on the census bill
so when Congress adjourned in March
1819, the bill died. One year later, in
the first session of the 16th Congress, in
December 1819, the substance of H.R.
239 was introduced again. H.R. 22 also
proposed using the same questions
asked of the population in 1810.
By the time members of the House of
Representatives took up the bill in
discussions of the Committee of the
Whole in January 6,1820, the Missouri
debates raged. The representatives
considered a variety of new questions,
including a question on the foreigners
not naturalized in each household, the
number of individuals engaged in agriculture, commerce and manufacturing
in each household, the number of
dwelling houses in the area, the number
of “free married persons” in each household. On the surface, there was little
connection between the census bill and
the vexing questions of the extension of
slavery. The House voted to add questions on occupation to the schedule.
They also approved the question on
naturalization of the foreign-born to the
population schedule and mandated a
census of manufactures, while rejecting
the questions on free married persons
and the number of dwelling houses.
In the midst of the debate on these
amendments, Rep. Charles Rich of
Vermont proposed an amendment to
add an extensive new set of questions on
the characteristics of the slave and free
black population. Rich “moved that free
colored persons be enumerated, and
returned separately, with their ages
classed in the same manner as slaves”
(Annals of Congress, 1820, 880). There
were four proposed age categories,
under fourteen, 14-25, 26-44, 45 and
older. Rep. Samuel Smith of Maryland
challenged Rich and asked “to know the
policy of thus informing, by official
enumeration and publication, that class
of population of their strength and
numbers. What good was to grow out of
it?” (Ibid.)
House Speaker Henry Clay, the advocate of the diffusion theory of population
dynamics, then responded, noting that
“the amendment had been offered partly
on his suggestion, and he could see no
possible mischief in the provision. As to
its policy, it would effect more completely
one of the objects of taking the census,
which was to show the comparative
increase in all classes of our population,
and enable to Government to carry into
effect more perfectly the purposes of the
periodical enumeration”. (Ibid.)
In other words, the data would speak
to the issues of “diffusion”, “dispersion”
and population growth that were at the
heart of the Missouri debates.
Debate continued and Rep. John
Campbell of Ohio proposed expanding
the age cohorts to specify children under
10, one of the same age cohorts used for
the white population. Clay and his
supporters opposed this proposal, and
after further discussion, the original
amendment was was approved. The
amended H.R. 22 passed the House on
January 21 and went to the Senate. The
Senate approved the bill on March 8. It
was signed by President James Monroe
on March 14.
Congressional documents are silent
on whether there was any further debate
on the expansion of the census questions
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on the slave and free black population,
and the meager record of debate leaves
many questions unanswered3. The brief
record of January 6, 1820, for example,
is silent on exactly how to revise the
population schedule for the new questions, particularly since the amended
bill made distinctions not only of age, as
discussed in debate, by also of sex. The
amended schedule also left the column
for “all other free persons, except Indians not taxed” without further specification about who was intended to be
listed in that column. The four age
cohorts Rich proposed added 16 new
columns to the population schedule,
four for each sex for slaves and the free
colored. To that point, Congress had
strenuously resisted such elaborate
expansions of the census schedule (Fliss,
2000). The schedule had expanded from
6 questions in 1790 to 14 in 1810. The
1820 census had 34, 16 of which were
the new questions on the age and sex of
the slave and free colored population.
Generally when proposals for controversial census questions were proposed,
they did not find majority support in
the House. Without a roll call of the
vote on Rich’s amendment, we are left
without definitive information on
whether antislavery representatives
voted for the bill. Yet it is not hard to
see that the new data might also be
useful to the antislavery advocates,
because they would permit the identification of the slave and free black population under 26 and 26 and over, thus
provide data for arguments on proposals
for gradual emancipation such as Tallmadge’s. Yet because Congress refused to
make the questions for the slave and free
black population the same as those used
for the white population, the new questions also firmly conceptualized the
32
population dynamics of the free black
population in comparison with the slave
population, rather than in comparison
with the free white population. The civil
status of slave vs. free was still visible in
the census questions, but the new
systematic classification of the population by color presented a rival understanding of the dilemmas posed by race
based slavery. In short, at the census of
1820 “color” or “race” became an
analytical category in the census, rather
than an attribute to be inferred about
the residual groups left after Congress
had exhausted its affirmative legislation
(Rodriguez, 2000; Nobles, 2000).
PATHS NOT TAKEN
The Three Fifths Compromise and
the legislation for the first three censuses
made it possible to conceptualize the
American national population dynamics
in racial terms, but the full implications
of a racial understanding of population
remained latent. With the changes made
to the census form in 1820, Congress
embedded an official “race” classification in the statistical practice of the
American state and made such understanding the normal framework for the
analysis of population change. At the
same time, Congress did not expand the
census to inform questions of slavery
and emancipation. To see the implications of this step it is useful to explore
alternatives. If Congress had been interested in emancipation, rather than racial
definition and analysis of the “colored”
population, they could, for example,
have asked for identification of manumitted slaves. This question would have
illuminated a number of issues that were
on the public agenda at the time. They
included what happened to recently
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THE MISSOURI DEBATES, SLAVERY AND STATISTICS OF RACE: DEMOGRAPHY IN SERVICE OF POLITICS
emancipated slaves, where they lived,
what occupations they pursued.
Admittedly, asking Congress to stand
above the emerging racialist and racist
discourse4 may be asking too much. Yet
if one is going to strip away the ideological baggage that surrounds this statistical classification, one must be able to
envision alternatives, and consider
briefly the possible implications of the
racial statistics in the U.S. statistical
system today (see also Anderson and
Fienberg, 2001; Perlmann and Waters,
2002).
The decision to inaugurate statistical
data collection on the “colored” population fostered further demographic
analysis of the growth and trajectory of
the American population in racial terms.
As Cocks (1967) and Hodgson (1995)
have shown, a series of scholars, North
and South, continued to argue within a
Malthusian tradition over whether a
“white” population would be “degraded” or threatened by slavery, whether
“colored” slaves, if freed, could “compete” with “whites”. Eventually, statisticians predicted (quite incorrectly) that
the black population would “follow the
fate of the Indians”5. In later years, additional census questions were added to
specify divisions of the population by
“race”, or “color”, and led to data analyses supporting elaborate theories of
racial difference. The 1840 census, for
example, asked for the number of insane
and idiotic at public charge and at
private charge for whites and colored.
When the tabulated results seemed to
show a higher rate of insanity for the
northern black population than for the
southern black population, defenders of
slavery argued that the data proved that
blacks went insane if freed, and hence
slavery was the appropriate civil status
for blacks (Cohen, 1982; Nobles, 2000;
Schor, 2001). Though Massachusetts
physician and statistician Edward Jarvis
demonstrated that the census tabulations from these questions were in error,
a militant Southern supporter of slavery
was Secretary of State and in charge of
the administration of the census. John
C. Calhoun was not about the change
the data. The 1850 census was deployed
to test the theory of the polygenesis of
human origins, as Congress debated
whether “mulattoes” were infertile and
akin to mules. Such population analysis
by “race” or “color” gave the appearance
of providing policy guidance on the
“peculiar institution”, but in fact tended
to deflect analysis of the situation of
slaves and the institution of slavery
(Williamson, 1980; Nobles, 2000;
Anderson, 2002).
In short, U.S. statistics on “race”, as
currently conceptualized, may deflect
attention from rather than providing
support to a project of eradicating domination, exclusion or extermination on the
basis of “race”. Fredrickson distinguishes
racism, including scientific racism, from
ethnocentrism and other forms in ethnic
intolerance because it precludes the possibility of assimilation or conversion.
Because biology in this view really is
destiny, the statistical classification of
“race” carries the understanding that
individuals or groups belong to coherent
and permanent social groups. People
cannot change their own “race”, nor can
the “society” through law, or individuals
or social groups through their actions
(e.g., intermarriage) assimilate individuals
to a different “race” or convert someone’s
“race”. This leaves little room to avoid a
“racist” framework.
The “racial” classification of individuals is pervasive in official data systems
33
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MARGO ANDERSON
in the United States, including health
care records, employment records, law
enforcement records, and census and
survey records. Other sensitive ethnic or
ancestry classifications, including nativity for the foreign born, or language
spoken, mark an individual and are
embedded in the statistical data systems
of the nation, but they do not function
as the permanent markers as “race” does.
For public policy purposes, foreign born
status is a proxy for alien status, which
can be changed through naturalization.
The native born children of the foreign
born are citizens by birth whether the
parent is a citizen or not. English
language ability can be acquired.
As a result, unlike other ethnic demographic categories, “race” statistics exist
for the entire 210 year trajectory of the
American republic6. Data analysts tend
to like such stability of classification
systems because they seem easier to use.
One doesn’t need to fuss with the changing meaning of categories in the classification (Is a Prussian the same as a
German?), or the origin or elimination
of the classification altogether. By way
of comparison, statistics on aliens are
remarkably variable in the United
States, with no official classification
system akin to the Office of Management and Budget Directive 15, “Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and
Presenting Federal Data on Race and
Ethnicity” (Smith, 2002).
In 2000, the U.S. census question
permitted an individual to “select one or
34
more” races. The question is a first step
in attenuating the unidimensional and
essentialist conception of race, but it is
merely a first step, because “race” categories are so limited and so embedded in
the historical fact of slavery, exclusion
and exploitation. The problem with
“race” as a statistical classification is that
it does not do the work of revealing the
complexity of social statuses which are
really the items of interest to policy
makers. Two examples illustrate the
problem.
First, in current U.S. statistical practice, a 21st century immigrant to the
United States from Africa is an “African
American” and thus classified in the
same racial population group as a
descendant of a slave brought from the
West Coast of Africa to XVIIth century
South Carolina. Relatedly, a refugee
from the former Yugoslavia, Iraq or
Afghanistan is classified in the same
racial population group as descendants
of the English Puritans of the XVIIth
century. And closer to the time period of
the subject of this paper, the way that
the 1830 census taker in Charlottesville,
Virginia acknowledged Sally Hemings’
recent emancipation after Thomas
Jefferson’s death (in 1826) was to list her
as “white” (Gordon Reed, 1997).
Margo ANDERSON
Department of History
University of WisconsinMilwaukee
Milwaukee WI 53201
414 229 3969; 414 229 2435 FAX
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NOTES
1. By scientific racism I mean the conception,
grounded in scientific knowledge, that some
humans are physically or biologically different
from and inferior to other humans, and that one
can reliably identify such different and inferior
humans through physical traits and group them
together into identifiable “races” that evolved
from human settlements in different parts of the
globe. The most powerful scientific grounding of
the conception lay in the emerging natural
sciences, particularly the biological sciences
which embedded their analysis in the same techniques and analytic tools developed for the analysis of the animal world. Secondarily the social
sciences provided scientific justification for scientific racism.
A corollary of such a conception is that political,
economic and cultural leaders of human society
must acknowledge these biological realities and
develop institutions that accommodate the
capacities and needs of these different and inferior humans and integrate them into the larger
human world. Scientific racism, in this view, as
Fredrickson (2002) argues, differs from other
forms of ethnic chauvinism and intolerance, by
not allowing for a mechanism of eradicating such
differences through conversion (as with religiously defined groups), or assimilation, most
notably intermarriage. Racial domination, exclusion or extermination of the inferior group then
becomes an acceptable social policy.
2. I am indebted to the recent work of Nobles
(2000), Rodriguez (2000) and Schor (2001), who
have done recent important work on these issues,
though I am not sure they would support much of
the analysis here. See also (Zuberi, 2001).
3. Verbatim transcripts of House proceedings
were not recorded in the early national period.
The surviving record was compiled between the
1830s and 1850s from newspaper accounts and
published as the Annals of Congress.
4. I am following Fredrickson’s terminology here.
See (Fredrickson, 2002, 153-54).
5. For the latter phrase see (Fredrickson, 1971,
252), quoting Walter Willcox, Chief Statistician
in the Census Office at the 1900 Census.
6. Official statisticians went back to the data from
1790 to 1810 and republished the data on slaves
and other free persons as data on “race” or “color”.
See for example, U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975,
3,14. A useful further contrast with the ubiquity of
“race” statistics is the absence of data collected on
religious identity in the American statistical system.
There have been many proposals to ask questions
on religion in official statistical inquiries, but they
have all run afoul of the First Amendment ban on
state interference with freedom of religion. Thus
the United States cannot reliably identify Catholics
and Protestants, Jews or Muslims in official statistics. See for example, (Perlmann, 2001 ; Foster,
1961).
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SUMMARY
In 1819, the U.S. Congress debated the
admission of Missouri to the union as a new
state. Missouri was the second state created
from the Louisiana Purchase, and was the
first state admitted in the Northern part of
the territory. Rep. James Tallmadge of New
York offered an amendment to the statehood bill to ban the introduction of slaves to
the new state and mandate gradual emancipation at the age of 25 of children born to
slaves already there. The amendment was
not enacted, but it began a debate about the
constitutional authority of Congress to
regulate slavery. In the 1820 census taken
one year later, Congress began to collect
data on the age and sex distributions of the
slave and the "free colored" population.
These data inaugurated official statistics on
“race” or “color” in the federal statistical
system. The paper raises questions about the
impact of these data on the understanding
of American population dynamics and
abolition.
RÉSUMÉ
En 1819, le Congrès américain se mit à
discuter de l'admission du Missouri comme
nouvel État de l'Union. Le Missouri était
alors le second État créé depuis l'achat de la
Louisiane et le premier admis au sein de la
partie septentrionale du territoire. James
Tallmadge, représentant de l'État de New
York, proposa un amendement au projet de
loi interdisant l'introduction d'esclaves dans
le nouvel État et rendant obligatoire une
émancipation progressive des enfants nés des
esclaves déjà présents lors de leur vingtcinquième anniversaire. Cet amendement ne
fut pas promulgué mais il lança le débat
38
concernant le droit constitutionnel du
Congrès de réguler l'esclavage. Dans le
recensement effectué l'année suivante, le
Congrès commença à recueillir des informations sur les distributions par sexe et âge des
esclaves et des populations « libres de
couleur », inaugurant les statistiques officielles sur la « race » ou la « couleur » au sein
du système statistique fédéral. L'article s'interroge sur l'impact de ces nouvelles données
sur la compréhension des dynamiques de
la population américaine et le processus
d'abolition.