by Kelly L. Schmidt and Cecilia Wright. Last updated July 2022.
1840 United States Federal Census, St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, 1840, National Archives and Records Administration.
About the record
Every ten years the federal government conducts a nationwide census. However, what information is collected in each census and how it is tabulated has changed over time. As shown in the example image and transcription of a page of the 1840 census in St. Louis above, the 1830 and 1840 United States Censuses counted people by household units, naming only the head of household. All other household residents, including family members, dependents, boarders, servants, and enslaved people, were enumerated as numbers within columns separated by perceived race, legal status, sex, and approximate age. Therefore, people held in enslavement were counted toward the general population within household units where they were enslaved, but their names were not recorded. Thus, while the censuses can help us determine how many enslaved people labored in an enslaver’s household or a given geographic region, and what their assumed sex and approximate age was, they tell us very little about the lives and experiences of enslaved people unless we place them in conversation with other historical records that supplement this quantitative data with more qualitative information.
This quantitative data itself can be misleading. While the contents of the census’s rows and columns may appear objective, this is far from the case. Both the act of census-taking and the resulting data have been contentious and highly political. Indeed, the census makes an argument about who was considered to count in, and make up, the United States in each decade the population was counted. From debates around the framing of the U.S. Constitution emerged a contentious concession regarding who really counts in America, or more specifically how they count. White male constitutional delegates bestowed upon themselves the power to create a framework of U.S. systems and governance that limited equality for the sake of protecting their own property and power. The framers compromised on the decision to demarcate enslaved Africans as representing three fifths of a person when accounting for a state’s total population to determine how many seats a state would have in the House of Representatives. This enabled Southern states to solidify political power and ensure slavery’s durability. Thus, although enslaved people enumerated in the census counted towards a state’s population, it was not for the purpose of building representation reflective of their interests in Congress, but, rather, to further the hegemonic power of the people and systems that held them in slavery. The way enslaved people were recorded in the census reflects how white people in power viewed them as sub-human—valued only for the profits, power, and other benefits and pleasures that were forcibly derived from their bodies and labor.
To read more about the functions of and motivations for these Census records, consult the following source:
- Margo J. Anderson, The American Census: A Social History (Yale University Press, 1988)
About the database
The 1830 and 1840 censuses have been scanned and are available on the Ancestry (1830, 1840) and Family Search (1830, 1840) genealogical sites. Although transcriptions of the record accompany these documents, they are riddled with errors (the transcriptions on Family Search and Ancestry are also notably different), especially when the historical handwriting is difficult to read. Ancestry.com allows user-submitted corrections to be added to transcribed names within the census, and, thus, it can sometimes more accurately reflect the contents of the census than transcriptions found on Family Search.
The SLIDE dataset
SLIDE uses the transcriptions from Ancestry.com to create the 1830 and 1840 census datasets for greater St. Louis. Therefore, many of the transcription errors on Ancestry have been reproduced in our dataset. Efforts are underway to review the original record and make corrections to the dataset.
Our dataset contains only households that have enslaved people ennumerated within them. Therefore, households in which no people were enslaved will not show up in SLIDE’s search results.
Our dataset does not currently contain data from all households of free Black St. Louisans or white-headed households with free Black residents within them. We plan to add free Black people counted in the censuses at a later date.
Cite this page
Kelly L. Schmidt and Cecilia Wright, “About the 1830 and 1840 U.S. Censuses,” The Saint Louis Integrated Database of Enslavement, July 2022, https://sites.wustl.edu/enslavementstl/1830-and-1840-us-censuses/.