As everyone has learned lately, given the 400th anniversary of the event this summer, the first African slaves in the English colonies in America came ashore in 1619 at Hampton, Virginia sometime in the latter half of August that year.
Otherwise, slavery in the colonies, lands, and territories that today comprise the United States pre-dates that event to the 16th Century at the Spanish colony of St. Augustine, Fla.
But within the confines of the 13 English-speaking colonies that rebelled against Britain in 1776, the first record of African slavery is August 1619 when about 20 slaves were brought ashore and sold by a British privateer captain at Hampton, Va.
Many more would follow, many more, and generations would be born into slavery.
When the U.S. recorded its first census in 1790, it found Virginia the largest state with 747,610 population. That first census reported a Virginia slave population that had increased from those first 20 in 1619 to 292,627 — 39% of the people of Virginia in 1790 were slaves.
Kentucky, then still part of Virginia but counted separately, had 12,430 slaves among a total of 73,677 people.
The first census recorded total U.S population to be 3,893,635 across four categories, free white males over age 16 including heads of families, free white males under age 16, free white females including heads of families, all other free persons (mostly free black Americans) and slaves who were in fact so identified in the census.
The total 1790 population of 3.893,635 included 694,280 slaves.
After Virginia the largest slave concentrations were in South Carolina, 107, 094; Maryland, 103,036; North Carolina, 100,572, and Georgia, 29264.
Slaves were 37% of their combined populations, constituting more than 85% of all the slaves in the new United States, as the Constitution had newly named the nation.
There were slaves in all but one state. The first census reported the slave population of Massachusetts as zero as it did for the population of Maine, which though still part of Massachusetts was counted separately. Vermont though recorded as having 16 slaves likely had none, there is a historical dispute that favors a likelihood there were no slaves there.
Among the other first 13 states slave populations varied from a low of 948 in Rhode Island to a high of 21,324 in New York State. My state, New Jersey, had 11,423 slaves counted by the first census among its total population of 184,189 (6%).
Why did that first census count slaves? Because the Constitution directed so.
Article I, Section 2 in its third paragraph says (emph. added):
“Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included with this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding the to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years as they shall by Law direct…”
That paragraph goes on to establish the exact apportionment of representatives for each state until the first census could be taken to decide apportionment in the subsequent 10 years.
Then, just what does that part of the second section of Article 1 of the Constitution quoted above do?
First, it says there has to be a census every ten years starting with a first census three years after the first session of the U.S. Congress meets.
The Constitution was written and adopted in 1787. The first congress met in 1788. The third-year after was 1790, and that’s why the census neatly falls at 10-year intervals that coincide with the arrival of each new decade.
Secondly, it requires that “the whole number of free Persons” be counted. That translates today when there are no slaves to everyone and that is why the Trump administration failed in its attempt to subvert the Constitution by counting only citizens of the United States. Everyone in this nation today is a free person, whether citizen or not.
If the drafter and signers of the Constitution had meant count only citizens they would have so written because, though somewhat arcane, the language of the document is what it is but not something anyone would like it to be 232 years later. The Constitution wants to know the total number of people there are in the U.S. and in each and every state.
Thirdly, the quoted language did this: At its very first beginning it acknowledged slavery without using the word, calling slaves “all other persons”. They were not those described as “bound to Service” — those people were indentured servants.
No, those “all other persons” were slaves. Nowhere in the Constitution is the word slave or slavery found until the 13th Amendment adopted in January 1865 that abolished “the peculiar institution.”
Then the quoted language from Article I, Section 2 did one more thing. It said that although they were slaves without any voice at all in law, society, the nation — what the Romans called “instrumentum vocale”, tools with voice — for the purpose of deciding the number of each state’s representatives in the House of Representatives a slave, every slave, would count as three-fifths of a person.
Why? Just look at the populations then, of the slave states, which from the Constitutional Convention forward to the Civil War constituted a block intent on preserving and expanding slavery.
They simply would have walked out of the Constitutional Convention had this not been included and nearly did. The debate on the issue ranged from proposals not to count slaves at all, to counting each slave as a whole person or as three-quarters of a person.
Three-fifths was the resulting compromise.
There are two more places in the Constitution that address slavery without using the word or the word slave.
Article I, Section 9 permits the importation of “such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit…” up to the year 1808. What did it mean by “such Persons”? Slaves. In the same paragraph, the Constitution allows an import duty up to $10 per slave. Here again, the founders could not bring themselves to write the word slave, choosing instead to call them ‘such Persons”.
Article IV, Section 2 paragraph 4 says, “No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service of Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such service Labour may be due.”
In plain language a “Person held to Service of Labour” — a slave — can be hunted down by his owner in every state even in states that did not permit slavery.
Again we see deliberate absence of the word slave in the foundational government charter of a nation that had declared independence but 11 years before with the ringing cry “that all men are created equal…” is a “self-evident” truth.
But with nearly 700,000 slaves counted in the very first census, we can be sure the Constitution’s drafters and signers knew full well its place in the early United States, and understood the compromises with it required of them as they constructed the constitutional blueprint for American government.
Because of slavery, not despite it, they set down an immutable requirement for a decennial census with an equally immutable obligation to count everyone.
When they did that, counting everyone gave an advantage to five slave states. Today counting everyone assures some fairness in apportionment of the seats in the House, and determining so much that has to do with the distribution of federal revenue and the like.
Above all, the universal count required of and by the census recognizes in the larger modern sense that every person, citizen or not, has value, full value — not three-fifths value and that we, as a nation, yet strive to acieve the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence.
Peeling the Onion 