Data Literacy for Social Studies, Growth of Enslaved and Free Black Population, 1790-1860

This area graph, which uses 1860 U.S. Census data published in an 1864 Census Report, illustrates the growth of both enslaved and free Black people in the United States from 1790 to 1860. The original data table, a recreated table (in which we use modernized language), and the area graph can be found in this spreadsheet. Another recreated table and a bar graph illustrating the rate of increase over each decade from 1790 to 1860 can also be found in the spreadsheet. Over these decades, there was a significant increase in the enslaved Black population, rising from 697,897 in 1790 to 3,953,760 by 1860, an increase of over 466%. At the same time, the free Black population rose from 59,466 in 1790 to 487,970 in 1860, an increase of over 700%. These tremendous increases were the result of natural population growth as well as continued importation of enslaved people (even after international slave trade became illegal in 1808), but westward expansion and the demand for plantation labor were also contributing factors. In 1864, when the final Census report with this visualized data was published, questions loomed about the role of freed people after emancipation, including employment and residency. As historian Margo J. Anderson writes in The American Census: A Social History, U.S. Census Superintendant Joseph C.G. Kennedy "sought to reassure Northerners that the problem of abolition was manageable" (p. 74). Therefore, he included in the report a data table of the "Probable future population of the United States" and argued the growth rate of Blacks had been decreasing in recent years (save for when Texas was added to the Union) and would "probably continue to diminish" (p. ix). So certain was Kennedy of his statistics, which, as Anderson points out, were highly flawed, that he claimed with "unerring certainty" that Black people faced "gradual extinction" (p. xi).