The decennial census data has its own set of problems. Even today, the Census Bureau undercounts the black population of the United States, along with other racial minorities, in spite of considerable effort otherwise. (The reasons for contemporary undercounting, and the efforts to correct it, have been the subject of considerable political debate and some academic study.) It is entirely reasonable to assume that the antebellum censuses undercounted blacks (both free and slave) as well. Besides the problems the Census Bureau encounters today, antebellum censuses suffered difficulties peculiar to slavery. Runaway slaves would have been reluctant to identify themselves to census officials for fear of being returned to their masters. Even before the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, runaway slaves in the North were at considerable risk of being returned to slavery. Even blacks who were born free, or whose masters had lawfully freed them, were at risk of being kidnapped and enslaved by slave catchers.

Another cause of census undercounting is that before 1790, and again after 1820, most slave states severely restricted the authority of masters to free their slaves. For a variety of reasons, masters sometimes freed slaves anyway, or sold or willed slaves to a trustee, who treated them as free. We would certainly consider these quasi-free slaves to be "free," as many considered themselves to be, thus leading to their misclassification by the census. But because of their illegal status, these quasi-free blacks would also have done their best to avoid the census officials for fear that their illegally freed status might land them back in bondage. For these reasons, Ira Berlin asserts, "[I]t is my belief that the census underestimates the Southern free Negro population by at least 20 percent."[3] But Berlin gives no statistical evidence for that belief.

Another interesting variant of slavery that might influence the accuracy of the censuses was "term slavery." Primarily a quirk of the District of Columbia, masters sometimes granted slaves their freedom contingent on reaching a certain age or completing a particular term of service. In some cases, masters advertised term slaves for sale with a specified period of years remaining.[4]

Some blacks sought to escape legal and societal restrictions by passing as white or Indian. If they had successfully misled their neighbors, it seems unlikely that the census marshals would receive a more accurate statement. It would have been relatively easy for some light-skinned blacks to move into a community and be accepted as white. William Lincoln, a student at Oberlin College in Ohio, made a series of journeys into the Upper South in the late 1850s preaching abolitionism. On one such journey: "Lincoln was asked to guess the race of the male parishioners as they entered the church. `I made 11 mistakes in 15 minutes,' Lincoln acknowledged. Apparently, work outdoors in the sun and wind had tarnished the face and hands of the men. `One case, were I put on oath, I [should] still affirm to be colored,' Lincoln said."[5]

An additional source of confusion in recording racial statistics is the ambiguous local definitions of "black." Most Southern states used Virginia's 1785 statutory definition: that even one African ancestor in the previous two generations made one a "Negro." Other states went back to the third or even fourth generation looking for black ancestors. A short-lived Ohio statute prohibiting black voting defined race as the "visible admixture" of black blood--an imprecise definition at best. An 1850 California statute prohibited blacks and Indians from testifying in cases involving whites, and defined blacks as "one eighth part or more of Negro blood." South Carolina, however, never drew the color line by statute, though judges "generally drew the line between white and black at somewhere between a quarter and an eighth Negro ancestry." But if a person of mixed race appeared to be white, and was socially accepted as white, South Carolina judges often treated him as white. Many blacks of mixed Indian and African ancestry benefited from being able to call themselves Indian.[6]

One especially extreme example of the problems of trusting the census racial definitions (which were usually based on local usage) is Jack Coon of Alabama. In 1850, a federal census marshal listed him as white. A state census the same year listed him as a mulatto freeman. The 1860 federal census listed Coon as an Indian.[7]

Another problem was the confused racial origins of many Americans. Consider the Sumter Turks of South Carolina. Perhaps of Middle Eastern origin, they settled in South Carolina in the eighteenth century. In 1790, they petitioned the state legislature to be treated as whites, and not as blacks, insisting they were "subjects of the Emperor of Morocco." While they insisted that they were white, whites of European origin in the region did not share this opinion, and the 1830 census recorded a number of them as free blacks.[8]

Would there have been incentives to intentionally underreport the number of free or slave blacks? No, because the census numbers determined the number of representatives each state received in the House of Representatives. Free blacks counted the same as whites for this purpose, and slaves (euphemistically referred to in the U.S. Constitution as "all other persons") counted as three-fifths of a free person.[9] At the same time, each state was master of who was allowed to vote. Free blacks and slaves could be safely counted for purposes of representation, with no danger of them voting. Thus, states both North and South would have sought to maximize their count of both free and slave blacks.

Statistics have a tremendous power over the human mind. Many people will accept the most bizarre assertions if these assertions are backed up by a sufficiently impressive body of statistics. This is no surprise; part of what distinguishes natural science from many other fields that call themselves "sciences" is quantifiable experimental data.

At first glance, the statistical information that comprises the latter three-fourths of this book gives a similar illusion. It is important to remember, however, that unlike physics, or even physiological psychology, survey data are not experimental data. The act of surveying a population, and for what purpose that survey is taken, can affect the accuracy of the data. Historians must always remember that in human affairs, volition makes all survey data less than perfect.

[1] Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 46-47.

[2] Hyman Alterman, Counting People: The Census in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1969), 163-171. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1975), 1169-1171 (hereinafter, Historical Statistics of the United States) for a list of colonial censuses. A more detailed source (but a bit harder to find) is Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932; reprinted Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1966).

[3] Berlin, 49, 145, 175; Marina Wikramanayke, A World in Shadow: The Free Black in Antebellum South Carolina (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1973), 39-42.

[4] Letitia Woods Brown, Free Negroes in the District of Columbia: 1790-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 87-89.

[5] Nat Brandt, The Town That Started the Civil War (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 9-11.

[6] Berlin, 97-99, 163-164. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 286; Rudolph M. Lapp, Afro-Americans in California, 2d ed. (San Francisco: Boyd & Fraser Publishing Co., 1987), 7-8. As Jefferson noted in 1815, a person might be white under the law, and yet still be a slave, because slavery depended "on the condition of the mother." Thus, many of the Hemings children on the Jefferson estate were legally both white and slave. Lucia C. Stanton, "`Those Who Labor for My Happiness': Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves," in Peter S. Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 152-153.

[7] Berlin, 161.

[8] Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1984), 145-147; Wikramanayke, 20-21.

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