The 1850 and 1860 Census, Schedule 2, Slave Inhabitants, are two of the fundamental documents we use to research the slavery period; perhaps only probate and deed records are used more often. Over the next few weeks I propose to post on a series of topics about the 1850 census, Schedule 2, Slave Inhabitants.

The topics will include:
• How the 1850 Census Schedule 2 was developed
• Enumerator’s Instructions for Schedule 2
• Differences between the 1850 and 1860 Schedule 2
• Implications for interpreting Schedule 2

I hope to excite discussion from all who have used Schedule 2, Slave Inhabitants, for genealogical or historical research, especially on the topic of interpreting the information in these admittedly problematic schedules.

Even professional historians have sometimes misunderstood and misrepresented Schedule 2 as a document that proves slave owners ignored the humanity of slaves. Edwin L. Ayers, on his educational documentary website, Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War (http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/govdoc/slave_census.html), calls Schedule 2 the “Slaveowners Census” as if this were the actual title of the schedule. In his description of Schedule 2, Ayers portrays white southerners, not as deeply conflicted and neurotic products of their own stubborn devotion to a peculiarly oppressive institution, but as cartoon-quality villains, monstrously devoid of any human recognition of the enslaved: “So important was slavery that the census takers maintained a separate book to list all the slaveowners and their property. Chillingly enough, the census takers were not interested in the names of individual slaves but only in their age, sex, and skin shade.”

The history behind the census of Slave Inhabitants suggests how representatives of the slaveocracy were fully conscious that naming each slave in the 1850 census would give public recognition to the humanity of each slave roughly on a par with the dignity afforded to whites who were all to be named in Schedule 1. By amending Schedule 2 to make it anonymous, southern senators deliberately obscured as much of the slaves' humanity as possible, for political reasons.

With all its flaws, it is no more appropriate to dismiss Schedule 2 as a “slaveowners census” than to call all U.S. censuses before 1850 “patriarchs censuses” because they only name heads of household, who were overwhelmingly men, while relegating wives, children, servants and slaves to numbers.

The 1850 (and 1860) Schedule 2, Slave Inhabitants, is an indispensable tool for the study of American slavery and for the search for ancestors who might be enumerated therein. Although Schedule 2 seems a shabby travesty when compared with Schedule 1, it does enumerate—no matter how inefficiently and how flawed the method—the enslaved population of the United States. Since it is the only census we have of those persons, we must overcome its limitations and use it to our best advantage by understanding how it was designed, how the data was collected, what it tells us and what it does not tell us.