This View of Life 
The Politics of Census 
Although the latest United States census contains 
systematic but honest errors, some nineteenth- 
century counts may have been fraudulent 
by Stephen Jay Gould 
In the Constitution of the United 
States, the same passage that pre- 
scribes a census every ten years also 
includes the infamous statement that 
slaves shall be counted as three-fifths 
of a person. Ironically, and however 
different the setting and motives, 
black people are still being under- 
counted in the American census. In 
Detroit, on September 25, 1980, fed- 
eral judge Horace W. Gilmore invali- 
dated the 1980 census because poor 
people in inner cities — primarily 
blacks and Hispanics — had been sys- 
tematically missed. 
The census has always been con- 
troversial because it was established 
as a political device, not as an ex- 
pensive frill to satisfy curiosity and 
feed academic mills. The constitu- 
tional passage that ordained the cen- 
sus begins: “Representatives and di- 
rect taxes shall be apportioned among 
the several states which may be in- 
cluded within this union, according 
to their respective numbers.” 
Political use of the census has often 
extended beyond the allocation of tax- 
ation and representation. The sixth 
census of 1840 engendered a heated 
controversy based upon the correct 
contention that certain black people 
had, for once, been falsely over- 
counted. This curious tale illustrates 
the principle that copious numbers do 
not guarantee objectivity and that 
even the most careful and rigorous 
of surveys are only as good as their 
methods and assumptions. It should 
also help us to understand why, con- 
trary to common sense, even an honest 
attempt to count everyone may be one 
of the worst ways to determine our 
population. (William Stanton tells this 
story in The Leopard’s Spots, his ex- 
cellent book on the history of scientific 
attitudes toward race in America dur- 
ing the first half of the nineteenth 
century. I have also read the original 
papers of the major protagonist, Ed- 
ward Jarvis.) 
The 1840 census was the first to 
include counts of the mentally ill and 
deficient, enumerated by race and by 
state. Dr. Edward Jarvis, then a young 
physician but later to become a na- 
tional authority on medical statistics, 
rejoiced that the frustrations of in- 
adequate data would soon be over- 
come. He wrote in 1844: 
The statistics of insanity are becoming 
more and more an object of interest to 
philanthropists, to political economists, 
and to men of science. But all inves- 
tigations, conducted by individuals or by 
associations, have been partial, incom- 
plete, and far from satisfactory. . . . They 
could not tell the numbers of any class 
or people, among whom they found a 
definite number of the insane. And there- 
fore, as a ground of comparison of the 
prevalence of insanity in one country with 
that of another, or in one class or race 
of people with that in another, their re- 
ports did not answer their intended pur- 
pose. 
Jarvis then praised the marshals of 
the 1840 census as apostles of the 
new, quantitative order: 
As these functionaries were ordered to 
inquire from house to house, and leave 
no dwelling — neither mansion nor cabin 
— neither tent nor ship unvisited and un- 
examined, it was reasonably supposed 
that there would be a complete and ac- 
curate account of the prevalence of in- 
sanity among 17 millions of people. A 
wider field than this had never been sur- 
veyed for this purpose in any part of 
the earth, since the world began. . . . Never 
had the philanthropist a better promise 
of truth hitherto undiscovered. . . . Many 
proceeded at once to analyze the tables, 
in order to show the proportion of lunacy 
in the various states, and among the 
two races, which constitute our popu- 
lation. 
As scholars and ideologues of vary- 
ing stripes scrutinized the tables, one 
apparent fact rose to obvious promi- 
nence in those troubled times. Among 
blacks, insanity struck free people in 
northern states at a vastly greater fre- 
quency than it afflicted slaves in the 
South. In fact, one in 162 blacks was 
insane in free states, but only one in 
1,558 in slave states. But freedom and 
the North posed no mental terror for 
whites, since their relative sanity did 
not differ in the North and South. 
Moreover, insanity among blacks 
seemed to decrease in even gradation 
from the harsh North to the congenial 
South. One in 14 of Maine’s black 
population was either insane or idiotic; 
in New Hampshire, one in 28; in Mas- 
sachusetts, one in 43; in New Jersey, 
one in 279. Reaching Delaware, how- 
ever, the frequency of insanity among 
blacks suddenly nose-dived. As Stan- 
ton writes: “It appeared that Mason 
and Dixon had suveyed a line not only 
between Maryland and Pennsylvania 
but also — surely all unwitting — be- 
tween Sanity and Bedlam.” 
In his first publication on the 1840 
census, Jarvis drew the same conclu- 
sion that so many other whites would 
advance: slavery, if not the natural 
state of black people, must have a 
remarkably beneficent effect upon 
them. It must exert “a wonderful in- 
fluence upon the development of 
moral faculties and the intellectual 
powers.” A slave gains equanimity by 
“refusing many of the hopes and re- 
sponsibilities which the free, self- 
thinking and self-acting enjoy and sus- 
tain,” for bondage “saves him from 
some of the liabilities and dangers of 
active self-direction.” 
The basic “fact” of ten times more 
insanity in freedom than in slavery 
was widely bruited about in the con- 
temporary press, often in lurid fashion. 
Stanton quotes a contributor to the 
Southern Literary Messenger (1843) 
who, concluding that blacks grow 
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