A "Supposititious Enumeration": The Role of Population Estimates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention

Abstract

abstract:The delegates to the Federal Convention of 1787 needed to know the population of the United States in order to distribute representation. They faced problems, however, in doing so. They had only fragmentary and often outdated census estimates. Some delegates unhelpfully withheld information from their colleagues about their state's population. The legacy of the Confederation Congress influenced them to be more concerned about the relative rather than the absolute size of states' populations. For whatever reasons, the population estimates of states which circulated among them disagreed among themselves. Furthermore, skepticism about quantification remained strong, and the ability of the delegates to do numerical analysis was limited. Consequently, the population estimates they put in the Constitution were significantly revised by the Census of 1790, but because of ambiguities in the Constitution about apportionment, Congress struggled to reallocate representation. In sum, numbers were malleable agents in shaping Constitutional affairs in transactional ways, not precise yardsticks to resolve conflicts. The gradual introduction of quantification into public affairs in the late-eighteenth century, represented by the creation of the United States census, increased contentiousness rather than resolved differences. These events remind Americans in the twenty-first century that counting the nation's population has always been a difficult and contentious endeavor.