ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Contested Categories: Disability, Enslavement, and the Making of Census Knowledge in the Antebellum United States

• In Event: Hidden Legacies of Slavery and Freedom in the History of Science

English Abstract

This paper examines the history of census and the construction of disability classifications in the antebellum United States through the enumeration of enslaved persons. Census-taking functions not only as a mechanism for understanding the demographic composition of the country and allocating political representation, but also as a technology for defining the nation’s social order. Throughout much of American history the census’s design has been contested. Until 1860, slaves were enumerated in the census, with enumerators instructed to record whether individuals were “Deaf & Dumb, Blind, Insane, or Idiotic,” categories presented as objective but rooted in nineteenth-century scientific, medical, and racial thought. Because enslaved individuals did not self-report, the data reflects the perceptions and incentives of enumerators, slaveholders, and the state, revealing how knowledge about the enslaved and the disabled was produced and distorted.

Using the published 1860 slave schedule tabulations alongside IPUMS full-count datasets for both the enslaved and free populations, this paper employs the disability question as an entry point into the practice and politics of antebellum enumeration. It situates these categories within the larger history of census classifications, controversies with reporting, and mid-century efforts to stabilize scientific and administrative authority. Engaging historiographies on the census, American state knowledge, and slavery’s bureaucratic infrastructure, the disability question emerges as a site where these domains converged. By treating the census not as statistical truth but as an administrative and ideological artifact, the paper reinterprets antebellum enumeration as a contested scientific enterprise that constructed an unequal world through measurement of the population.

Author

• Brayden J Rothe, University of Minnesota