The 1860 Slave Schedule for St. Louis County: A Searchable Transcription

Why enslaved people were counted

The Constitution's Three-Fifths clause required the census to count the nation's enslaved people, and three-fifths of them — 60 percent — were added to the population used to apportion seats in Congress. As slavery faded in the North, the clause gave the slave states of the South extra representation.

The slave schedules

The 1850 and 1860 censuses added a separate "Slave Schedule." It listed enslavers by name and counted the people they claimed to own — but left the enslaved people's names off, recording them in effect as property to be bought, sold and taxed under state law.

The St. Louis County transcription

Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site has transcribed, word for word, the complete 1860 Slave Schedule for St. Louis County. Many prominent St. Louis names appear, among them Grant's father-in-law, Colonel Frederick F. Dent, listed as enslaving seven people at the White Haven estate.

The schedule records ten kinds of information:

• location;
• name of the enslaver;
• number of enslaved people;
• age;
• sex;
• color — "B" for Black, "M" for mulatto (mixed race);
• fugitives from the state;
• number manumitted (freed);
• "deaf & dumb, blind, insane, or idiotic," in the census's own terms;
• number of slave houses.

The dataset is searchable and can be downloaded: download the 1860 transcription (CSV). The work was finished in August 2024 by Railey Crews, an interpretation intern at the site.

More in the series The History of Slavery in St. Louis: the 1850 slave schedule and slavery-related property taxes in St. Louis County, 1840–1858.

Sources

Based on "United States Census Slave Schedule for St. Louis County, 1860," Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The source says the enslaved count was "divided by three-fifths"; it was multiplied, so that 60 percent was counted, as the source's own figure shows.