I actually wrote one of my master's theses about the politics of demography, circa 1870 and 1880. Southern white supremacists played all sorts of games with Census results to promote their policies, including a bizarre episode in the mid-1880s.
The Ninth Census in 1870 severely undercounted black Americans, largely due to dislocation from the war and emancipation. As a result, a straight-line extrapolation from 1860 suggested a collapse in the black population.
Southern politicians said former slaves faced "extinction," and this became a recurring rationale for inaction. The former slaves were "tragically" unfit for civilization, would vanish regardless of efforts to help them, and therefore nature should be allowed to take its course.
The undercount was mostly corrected in the Tenth Census, in 1880. But that wasn't the end of it.
A Boston physician named Edward Gilliam analyzed black population change in Popular Science in 1883, this time extrapolating from the too-low 1870 figure to the correct 1880 one.
He found that the black population had grown 30 percent in ten years, something he attributed to "the remarkable fecundity of the African." He projected this figure forward, and decided by 1980, the South would contain 96 million white people and 192 million black people.
He argued that the black population would never leave, because it was "climatically suited" to the South. But he also said black Americans would always remain "distinct" and "alien" - a "laboring class" that is "in every political virtue . . . still vastly below the whites."
Gilliam's statistics were amateurish and sloppy, in more ways than one. But it didn't stop his Malthusian panic from leaking into the politics. Many newspapers reported his projections as fact - and his recommendation that black Americans be deported for Africa immediately.
Even Frederick Douglass addressed Gilliam in a ceremony commemorating emancipation: "I have very little interest in his ethics or his arithmetic. It may or may not come to pass. A hundred years is a little further down the steps of time than I care to look, for good or for evil."
