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Census Categories
The Constitution stipulated a decennial census and that the first enumeration was to be completed “within three years after the first meeting of the Congress of the United States.” Congress debated the census in its second session, and “An Act providing for the enumeration of the Inhabitants of the United States” became law on March 1, 1790. James Madison had pressed for the census to include queries about respondents' occupations “for ascertaining the component classes of the society, a kind of information extremely requisite to the legislator.” He proposed five demographic categories - free white males (above 16 ), free white males (under 16), free white females, free blacks, and slaves. His original bill stated enumerators should distinguish, “ages, sexes, colors, conditions, and occupations,” and the descriptors were “much wanted for the science of political economy.” Madison’s categories connected legal rights with race, gender, and age. The “slaves” category fulfilled the constitutional requirement of counting black-skinned slaves for apportionment, while he divided “free whites” into categories with different legal and political rights. Out of all Anglo-Saxon Protestants, men above the age of 16 had the most legal rights (they were taxed, served in the military, and had possibility of suffrage), then white males under the age of 16 (taxed), white women (if they were the head of household, then they paid taxes on male members), and “free blacks” (which included men, women, and children). Overall, except for “free blacks” (who had no place in America’s constitutional system), Madison’s categories corresponded to rights-holding Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
Madison’s bill was ultimately amended so that “free blacks” was first changed to “negros and mulattos,” and then to “all other free persons.” Without debate historians will never know why the changes were made. However, the broad concept “free blacks” may have been unable to capture America’s growing number of non- Anglo-Saxon Protestant free human beings - “free negroes,” “mulattoes,” as well as children born free from Native Americans and West Africans. To better understand their own country, Congress included language which instructed the enumerators to distinguish the “colors of free persons.”