The1840 United States census was the sixthcensus of the United States. Conducted by U.S. marshals on June 1, 1840, it determined the resident population of theUnited States to be 17,069,453 – an increase of 32.7 percent over the 12,866,020 personsenumerated during the1830 census. The total population included 2,487,355 slaves. In 1840, the center of population was about 260 miles (418 km) west ofWashington, D.C., nearWeston, Virginia (now inWest Virginia).
This was the first census in which:
A state recorded a population of over two million (New York)
A city recorded a population of over 300,000 (New York)
Multiple cities recorded populations of over 100,000 (New York,Baltimore, andNew Orleans)
This was the last census conducted by U.S. marshals, as starting in 1850 a temporary office would be set up for each census under the purview of the Department of the Interior. This was due to the Northern members of theWhig Party opposing the controversial claim in the 1840 census that freeBlack Americans in theNorthern United States suffered from a higher degree of "insane" or "idiotic" behavior compared to enslaved Black Americans.[1]
Controversy over statistics for mental illness among Northern blacks
The 1840 census was the first that attempted to count Americans who were "insane" or "idiotic". Published results of the census indicated that alarming numbers of black persons living in non-slaveholding States were mentally ill, in striking contrast to the corresponding figures for slaveholding States.
Pro-slavery advocates trumpeted the results as evidence of the beneficial effects of slavery, and the probable consequences of emancipation.[2] Anti-slavery advocates contended, on the contrary, that the published returns were riddled with errors, as detailed in an 1844 report byEdward Jarvis of Massachusetts in theAmerican Journal of the Medical Sciences, later published separately as a pamphlet,[2][3] and in a memorial from theAmerican Statistical Association to Congress, praying that measures be taken to correct the errors.[4]
The memorial was submitted to the House of Representatives byJohn Quincy Adams, who contended that it demonstrated "a multitude of gross and important errors" in the published returns.[5] In response to the House's request for an inquiry, Secretary of StateJohn C. Calhoun reported that a careful examination of the statistics by the supervisor of the census had fully sustained their correctness.[6][7] The returns were not revised.[8]
^Hephzibah V. Strmic-Paul, Brandon A. Jackson, and Steve Garner, “Race Counts: Racial and Ethnic Data on the U.S. Census and the Implications for Tracking Inequality,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 4, no. 1 (2018): 1–13.
^abLeon F. Litwack (1958), "The Federal Government and the Free Negro, 1790–1860",Journal of Negro History,43 (4):261–78,263–68,doi:10.2307/2716144,JSTOR2716144,S2CID150261737, and sources there cited.
^John Caldwell Calhoun; South Carolina General Assembly (1859). Richard K. Crallé (ed.).The Works of John C. Calhoun: Reports and Public Letters. Vol. V. New York: D. Appleton and Company. p. 458. RetrievedMay 31, 2013. Calhoun engaged William A. Weaver, the superintendent of the 1840 census, to review the figures and check them against related data from the 1830 census.Ibid. Weaver reported that he had examined "each specification of error" and concluded that the memorialists had themselves erred in their claims. While there doubtless had been minor errors, he said, there had been no glaring methodological mistakes as charged.See William Edwin Hemphill, ed.,The Papers of John C. Calhoun: 1845, Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1993, vol. 21, p. 156.
^The District of Columbia is not a state but was created with the passage of theResidence Act of 1790. The territory that formed that federal capital was originally donated by both Maryland and Virginia; however, the Virginia portion wasreturned by Congress in 1846.
1840 U.S. Federal Census - Online Records and Indexes on www.cyndislist.com (21 Links) Includes links to sites with any or all of the following: digitized images, indexes, transcriptions, extractions, abstracts, and partial or whole copies of census materials.
32.7%)