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1 
“more vicious in a state of freedom,” 
painted a frightful picture of Virginia 
should it ever become a free state, 
with “all sympathy on the part of the 
master to the slave ended.” He in- 
quired: 
Where should we find penitentiaries for 
the thousand's of felons? Where, lunatic 
asylums for the tens of thousands of mani- 
acs? Would it be possible to live in a 
country where maniacs and felons meet 
the traveler at every crossroad. 
But Jarvis was troubled. The dis- 
parity between North and South made 
sense to him, but its extent was puz- 
zling. Could slavery possibly make 
such an enormous difference? If the 
information had not been stamped 
with a governmental imprimatur, who 
could have believed it? Jarvis wrote: 
This was so improbable, so contrary to 
common experience, there was in it such 
a strong prima facie evidence of error, 
that nothing but a document, coming 
forth with all the authority of the national 
government, and “corrected in the de- 
partment of state,” could have gained 
for it the least credence among the in- 
habitants of the f ree states, where insanity 
was stated to abound so plentifully. 
Jarvis therefore began to examine 
the tables and was shocked by what 
he discovered. Somehow, and in a 
fashion that could scarcely represent 
a set of random accidents, the number 
of insane blacks had been absurdly 
inflated in reported figures for north- 
ern states. Jarvis discovered that 25 
towns in the 12 free states contained 
not a single black person of sound 
mind. The figure for “all blacks” had 
obviously been recopied or misplaced 
in the column for “insane blacks.” 
But data for 135 additional towns (in- 
cluding 39 in Ohio and 20 in New 
York) could not be explained so easily, 
for these towns actually reported that 
their population of insane blacks ex- 
ceeded their total number of blacks, 
both sane and unhinged! 
In a few cases, Jarvis was able to 
track down the source of error. Wor- 
cester, Massachusetts, for example, 
reported 133 insane in a total black 
population of 151. Jarvis inquired and 
discovered that these 133 people were 
white patients living in the state men- 
tal hospital located there. With this 
single correction, the first among 
many, black insanity in Massachusetts 
dropped from one in 43 to one in 129. 
Jarvis, demoralized and angry, began 
a decade of unsuccessful campaigning 
to win an official retraction or cor- 
rection of the 1840 census. He began: 
Such a document as we have described, 
heavy with its errors and its misstate- 
ments, instead of being a messenger of 
truth to the world to enlighten its knowl- 
edge and guide its opinions, it is, in re- 
spect to human ailment, a bearer of false- 
hood to confuse and mislead. 
This debate was destined for a more 
significant fate than persistent bick- 
ering in literary and scholarly journals. 
For Jarvis’s disclosures caught the ear 
of a formidable man: John Quincy 
Adams, then near eighty, and capping 
a distinguished career as leader of an- 
tislavery forces in the House of Rep- 
resentatives. But Adams’s opponent 
was equally formidable. At that time, 
the census fell under the jurisdiction 
of the Department of State, and its 
newly appointed secretary was none 
other than John C. Calhoun, the clev- 
erest and most vigorous defender of 
slavery in America. 
Calhoun, in one of his first acts 
in office, used the incorrect but of- 
ficial census figures in responding to 
the expressed hope of the British for- 
eign secretary, Lord Aberdeen, that 
slavery would not be permitted in the 
new republic (soon to be state) of 
Texas. The census proved, Calhoun 
wrote to Aberdeen, that northern 
blacks had “invariably sunk into vice 
and pauperism, accompanied by the 
bodily and mental afflictions incident 
thereto,” while states that had re- 
tained what Calhoun called, in genteel 
euphemism, “the ancient relation” be- 
tween races, contained a black pop- 
ulation that had “improved greatly in 
every respect — in number, comfort, 
intelligence, and morals.” 
Calhoun then proceeded to evade 
the official request from the House, 
passed on Adams’s motion, that the 
secretary of state report on errors in 
the census and steps that would be 
taken to correct them. Adams then 
accosted Calhoun in his office and 
recorded the secretary’s response in 
his diary: 
He writhed like a trodden rattlesnake on 
the exposure of his false report to the 
House that no material errors had been 
discovered in the printed Census of 1840, 
and finally said that there were so many 
errors they balanced one another, and 
led to the same conclusion as if they 
were all correct. 
Jarvis, meanwhile, had enlisted the 
support of the Massachusetts Medical 
Society and the American Statistical 
Association. Armed with new data and 
22 
