It's Still Black History Month: Preliminary Report on 1860 Census (Private Collection)

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These are scans from a hardback Preliminary Report on the U.S.census from 1860, summarized (and supervised) by Jos. C.J. Kennedy at the beginning of the stirrings of our Civil War. I found it in a Lancaster, Pa, bookshop.

It's a fragile and degraded book, but it's a treasure. It was the first U.S. census which counted Indians; but only those who had 'renounced tribal rules'.

Joseph Camp Griffith Kennedy (April 1, 1813 – July 13, 1887) of Pennsylvania, was a 19th century Whig politician, lawyer and journalist who supervised the United States Census for 1850 and 1860. Initially a prosperous farmer and journalist from a prominent Pennsylvania family, Kennedy was appointed to supervise the Census because of his political activism in the 1848 Pennsylvania election.

. . . by the time the 1860 census returns were ready for tabulation, the United States was moving toward the American Civil War. As a result, Superintendent Kennedy and his staff produced only an abbreviated set of reports, which included no graphic or cartographic representations. As the war began, however, Kennedy and the Census staff used the new statistics to produce maps of Southern states for Union field commanders. These maps displayed militarily vital topics, including white population, slave population, predominant agricultural products (by county), and rail and post-road transportation routes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_C._G._Kennedy

The first slave schedules were completed in 1850, with the second (and last) in 1860.

Most notable in the opening pages I provided is the discussion of the state of slavery; including projections on slave populations in the future, discussion of and accounting of Indian tribes which held slaves, and general history of slavery as these officials understood it. There's also an interesting look at population totals overall, broken down by states and new territories.































...what will become of these histories? I once believed their existence had become immutable. I don't know, anymore.