"Knowing that a person was a slave is not the end of the story, it is the beginning." - Ira Berlin

Introduction 

Only two antebellum United States censuses employed what were called "slave schedules" - 1850 and 1860. These documents can be tricky to decipher and interpret, and because of their flaws, they have flummoxed historians and genealogists for generations. Using the 1850 census for Johns Hopkins' Clifton estate as an example, this essay provides a brief history of the slave schedule and explains why it is important to understand its limitations. 

What Is a Census?

A census is a full count of a population on a given date within a defined place - one day in the life of a territory and its people. Since 1790, the decennial American census has attempted to enumerate every person living in the United States at his or her “usual place of abode," defined as the location where the individual lives or sleeps most of the time. To maximize the consistency and comparability of the data collected, every census employs a reference date, the exact day to which the information collected refers. The reference date for the 1850 census was the first day of June. "Who lived in this dwelling or at this property on June 1, 1850?" was the question asked at every home, hotel, hospital, boarding house, poorhouse, plantation, or mansion, regardless of whether the census taker – also known as a field marshal or assistant marshal – arrived on June 1st of the census year, on any other day of the same year, or even sometime during the following year as occasionally happened. 

From 1790 to 1840, the census enumeration method was simple and straightforward. Resident heads of free households, who could be property owners or tenants, were recorded by name. All other individuals in each household were represented as counts (ticks or numbers) in pre-set categories, defined in varying ways over the years but always in a manner that would allow the census taker to separate those who were free from those who were enslaved and those who were white from those who were Black, “colored,” or Native American. These early censuses made no claims about the ownership or occupations of enslaved people as the singular goal was to record the American population by residence location as mandated by the U.S. Constitution in order to apportion legislative districts and taxes. The census documented where people resided, regardless of why a person lived where they did and no matter what the relationships were between co-residents.

The Census Reform of 1850

A significant reform of the U.S. census was undertaken in 1850 that changed the way the government counted free and enslaved residents, and it proved to be controversial.[1] In that year, the Census Board, a new federal entity created in 1849 and led by Joseph Kennedy, a lawyer and journalist from Pennsylvania with a knack for numbers, proposed an enlargement of the census to include six new and distinct census forms.[2] Two of these instruments would cover the population count while the other four were designed to collect economic and social statistics. 

Joseph Kennedy recommended other important changes to the census in 1850. For the first time, the census would record the name of every free resident of the United States along with certain information about each individual - age, sex, race, occupation, place of birth, whether a fugitive or manumitted, and if “deaf and dumb, blind, insane, or idiotic.” This crucial change meant that the census shifted from the household level to the individual level of data collection, significantly expanding the amount of information gathered in order to allow for a finer degree of analysis.

Kennedy also proposed altering the way that slaves were enumerated. Beginning in 1850, enslaved people would be recorded separately from other individuals living in a specific household or on a given property. Schedule One, known as the "free inhabitant census,” would record all free residents regardless of race or national origin, while Schedule Two, known as the "slave inhabitant census" or simply the "slave schedule,” would record all enslaved residents.

As with Schedule One, on Schedule Two Kennedy intended for census takers to record the name of every slave and to collect individual-level data about each person. But when the census reforms were brought before Congress for debate, pro-slavery politicians blocked this proposal. Some legislators contended, disingenuously, that it would be too burdensome to require slave masters on large plantations to recall the names of all their human property. “There is not a man in the South owning a hundred negroes who knows scarcely any more of the names of the slave children than I do,” exclaimed Alabama Senator Jeremiah Clemens.[3] The opposition won the day, and the requirement to list the names of enslaved people was dropped from the Census Act of 1850. All free residents would be listed by name on Schedule One as proposed; but on Schedule Two, enslaved people would be enumerated only by sex and age, anonymizing the entire unfree population of the United States.

The final version of the Schedule Two instrument for the enumeration of enslaved people also included a column titled "Names of Slave Owners." Again, Southern Congressmen, who opposed many of the other census reforms, challenged this detail of the new form. During the House debate, Representative Joseph A. Woodward, a Democrat from South Carolina, argued that listing the names of slaveholders in the census was obviously designed “to procure and circulate over the country themes for abolition declamation.”[4]  Woodward’s fellow Senators reminded him, however, that individual names and records would not be made public, and thus he need not worry that the information would be exploited by abolitionists.[5]  

Flawed Wording

The title of the column was retained, but the wording was problematic. What if the head of the household did not own the enslaved residents, which was a frequent reality in and around urban areas like Baltimore? To address this possibility, the census of 1850 included the following clarifying instructions for the completion of the slave schedule form:

The person in whose family, or on whose plantation, the slave is found to be employed, is to be considered the owner – the principal object being to get the number of slaves, and not that of masters or owners.[6]  

As this guidance makes clear, the enumerators were directed to record the name of the head of the family or the owner of the property where the enslaved people worked and not to focus on the legal or occupational relationship between that person and the unfree tenants. In other words, a person listed as a “slave owner” could be a landlord or an employer, or even a caretaker, rather than the title-holder of the resident slaves. The primary goal was to “get the number of slaves” and not the number of “masters or owners.”

The Census Act of 1850 was passed by Congress on May 23rd, and preparations for the collection of data commenced immediately. Of paramount importance was the selection, training, and certification of thousands of assistant census marshals who would carry out the painstaking work of visiting every place of residence in the United States. For the Second District of Baltimore County, where Johns Hopkins lived on June 1st, that person was a 33-year-old Catholic bachelor named Elbridge Gerry Hall.[7] And among the many residences Hall was required to visit was a large property called Clifton.

The Census Comes to Clifton

On Schedule Two for Clifton, Hall recorded four enslaved men, aged 50, 45, 25, and 18 years.[8] Turning to Schedule One, a wider view of Clifton comes into focus. Including the four men listed on Schedule Two, thirty-two people resided at the estate. In addition to Johns, his sister Hannah Hopkins, and his niece Jane Janney, there were gardeners and carpenters, laborers and servants, and the children of many of these people, all living together in a compound-like setting.[9] And during the summer of 1850, these regular residents were joined by a small army of architects, artisans, contractors, and itinerant construction workers who were tasked with transforming Clifton from a stately Georgian home and ample but unremarkable farm into a sumptuous Italianate mansion surrounded by manicured grounds, an artificial lake, fruit orchards, greenhouses for oranges and grapes, an immense vegetable garden, and dozens of marble statuaries.[10]

Knowing that the column titled "Slave Owners" included the names of people who may have had a different relationship with the enslaved than owner, what can we conclude about Johns Hopkins' relationship to the four men recorded by Elbridge Gerry Hall? Most importantly, the slave schedule of 1850 does not, in fact cannot, establish that Johns Hopkins owned the four men. It also cannot tell us whether Hopkins employed the four men, though he may have. However, the men could have been employed, even owned, by many of the other people working or living at Clifton during the summer 1850, when major building renovations and landscaping improvements were in full swing. The hiring of enslaved laborers for temporary projects was extremely common in Baltimore before the Civil War. For example, enslaved men often worked in the construction trades, where projects were discontinuous and seasonal, and builders often preferred to hire rather than own their laborers.[11] Along with carpentry and blacksmith shops, shelters were frequently erected at large-scale building sites to house temporary workers. (One of the architects overseeing the Clifton renovations during this period, John Rudolph Niernsee, supervised enslaved laborers in the building of the South Carolina Statehouse and had enslaved people in his household while he lived in Columbia. He later joined the Confederate Army as a military engineer.)

Or maybe there is another explanation. Quakers like Johns Hopkins, for whom slaveholding was forbidden (except under certain circumstances), often sought to assist enslaved people by giving them money to petition for or purchase their freedom, by helping them reunite with loved ones, by offering to instruct them in useful trades, or by sheltering them temporarily as they traveled north to the free states. 

Conclusion 

Sadly, the exact relationship between the four men Hall recorded on Schedule Two of the 1850 Census and Johns Hopkins may never be known. Lacking their names and without any corroborating evidence of ownership or employment, we are left to make educated guesses about their identities, their occupations, and their origins. 

It is also possible that the men were misenumerated as slaves when they were actually free Black laborers. Measurement errors of various kinds plagued all the antebellum censuses, and these errors may have been more common in 1850 than before. The division of the census into six separate instruments was widely considered a mistake. “The adoption of so many schedules, whatever merits they individually have,” wrote the Census Board in a report published in 1852, “was calculated to make the work unnecessarily cumbersome and expensive, without securing by any means greater or more certain results.” In fact, the division of the population count into free and enslaved forms “precluded the possibility of some very valuable comparison, and made unattainable information easily secured by another arrangement.” (For a relevant example of another common type of error in the early censuses, see my blog post on Chloe Dodson.)

The forms completed by Elbridge Gerry Hall for Clifton illustrate these problems. For instance, the slave schedule is dated Wednesday, August 14th, while the free inhabitant schedule for Clifton is dated Saturday, August 17th. Did Hall visit Clifton twice, or did he merely complete the forms on different days? How are we to compare the two instruments? And whether Hall visited once or twice, it is unknown whether Johns Hopkins was even present. According to the Census Act of 1850, field marshals were not required to consult with the head of the household, but rather any free white man aged 20 or older who was at hand at the time of the enumeration. If Hall did not speak with Johns Hopkins, or someone else with full knowledge of the estate’s residents and employees, he may have received inaccurate information. There were at least eight white men over the age of 20 living at Clifton during the summer of 1850 who could have been interviewed by Hall. Johns Hopkins also had a history of employing free Black laborers at Clifton.

While census data can be a rich source of information, researchers must be careful not to overinterpret individual-level data. A census is merely a snapshot, a day-in-the-life picture of a place and the people who lived there. Antebellum census records provide a singular glimpse into a house, a family, or a property. They do not tell us what life was like the day before or the day after the census reference date. They do not reveal anything about the personalities involved, their likes or dislikes, nor about the nature of the relationships that existed between those who occupied a space or place, whether they lived there voluntarily or involuntarily.

Postscript - The Census of 1860 

The 1850 and 1860 slave schedule forms are virtually identical, and enslaved people are listed without names on both documents. Congress did not pass a new census bill in 1860 - it was occupied with other issues - and thus the Census Bureau was limited by what was spelled out in 1850. But the 1860 enumerator instructions were revised in order to eliminate the ambiguity over slave ownership that became clear after the 1850 census was completed and the data tabulated. This more structured enumeration method for the 1860 census clearly indicated slave ownership versus employment, not merely the ownership of a property on or at which enslaved people resided.[12]  And in 1860, neither Johns Hopkins nor anyone living with him at that time was recorded on Schedule Two of the federal census as an owner or an employer of enslaved people.

Footnotes

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*A version of this essay was presented at the Universities Studying Slavery Spring 2022 Symposium, “Pandemics, Protests, and the Legacies of Slavery,” Guilford College and Wake Forest University, March 31, 2020. See also "Seeking the Truth: Johns Hopkins and Slavery" at https://osf.io/zra5f/. 

[1] See David E. Paterson, "The 1850 and 1860 Census, Schedule 2, Slave Inhabitants," AfriGeneas, https://www.afrigeneas.com/library/slave_schedule2.html. 

[2] See https://www.census.gov/history/www/census_then_now/director_biographies/directors_1840_-_1865.html. 

[3] Transcripts of the Senate and House debates on the Census Act of 1850 (31st Congress) can be found here: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwcglink.html#anchor31. 

[4] Ibid.

[5] Until 1978, the federal government did not release the individual forms collected for the decennial census. This changed in 1978 when the "72-Year Rule" was implemented. Now, the census forms, and all of the individual-level data, contained in them, are released 72 years after the census was conducted.

[6] See https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/technical-documentation/questionnaires/1850/1850-instructions.html. 

[7] Baltimore Sun, Obituary of Elbridge Gerry Hall, January 7, 1878. Hall was a descendent of Elbridge Gerry, a Founding Father, anti-slavery advocate, and the person for whom the term “gerrymandering” is named. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbridge_Gerry. 

[8] United States Census (Slave Schedule), 1850,” FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:HR7R-KMMM), Johns Hopkins, Baltimore County, Baltimore, Maryland.

[9] United States Census, 1850, Family Search, (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MD43-VPG), Johns Hopkins, Baltimore County, Baltimore, Maryland. 

[10] Baltimore Sun, February 5, 1852. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/77779791/improvement-at-clifton-park-feb-1852/ and also, for a later article about Clifton, see https://www.newspapers.com/clip/74434552/hopkins-park-article-balt-sun-14-feb-189/. 

[11] See T. Stephen Whitman, "Diverse Good Causes: Manumission and the Transformation of Urban Slavery," Social Science History, Autumn, 1995, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 333-370. See also Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

[12] The 1860 instructions to enumerators for Schedule Two: “(1) Owners of Slaves. Under heading No.1 insert, in proper consecutive order, the names of all owners of slaves. When slaves are the property of a corporation, enter the name of the corporation. If held in trust for persons who have attained to their majority, whose names as owners do not elsewhere appear, the name of such persons may be entered, or their number, as "John Smith and two others,” always provided that the “others" do not appear as owners in other places. If held in trust for minors, give the number of such minors. The desire is to obtain a true return of the number of owners. (2) Number of Slaves. Under heading 2 … insert, in regular numerical order, the number of all the slaves, of both sexes, and of every age, belonging to the owner whose name you have recorded. In the case of slaves, numbers are to be substituted for names. The description of every slave, as numbered, is to be recorded, and you are to enumerate such slaves as may be temporarily absent, provided they are usually held to service in your subdivision. The slaves of each owner are to be numbered separately, beginning with the older at No.1. The person in whose charge, or on whose plantation the slave is found to be employed may return all slaves in his charge, (although they may be owned by other persons,) provided they are not returned by their proper owner. The name of the bona fide owner should be returned as proprietor, and the name of the person having them in charge as employer.”

CENSUS-TAKING & CENSUS HISTORY SOURCES

• Census Bureau history website: https://www.census.gov/history/ 

• Anderson, Margo J. The American Census: A Social History. Yale University Press, 1988

• Paterson, David E., "The 1850 and 1860 Census, Schedule 2, Slave Inhabitants," AfriGeneas, https://www.afrigeneas.com/library/slave_schedule2.html. 

• Schor, Paul. Counting Americans: How the US Census Classified the Nation. Oxford University Press, 2017.

• Whitby, Andrew. The Sum of the People: How the Census Has Shaped Nations, from the Ancient World to the Modern Age. Basic Books, 2020.

Revision History

7/15/22: Made minor stylistic changes.

9/16/22: Added the parenthetical phrase "except under certain circumstances" to clarify that there were instances in which Quakers could own slaves, such as when an enslaved person was elderly or infirm and/or the law did not permit manumission.  "Or maybe there is another explanation. Quakers like Johns Hopkins, for whom slaveholding was forbidden (except under certain circumstances), often sought to assist enslaved people by giving them money to petition for or purchase their freedom, by helping them reunite with loved ones, by offering to instruct them in useful trades, or by sheltering them temporarily as they traveled north to the free states."