The 1870 Census was the first decennial count of the nation’s population following the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment on December 6, 1865, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States. The nation’s population grew from 31,443,321 in 1860 to 38,558,371 in 1870, including 4,880,009 Black, Mulatto, American Indian, and Chinese.

Jump to:

Slavery had been a deeply divisive issue in the United States for decades. Vermont (1777) and Massachusetts (1783) were early proponents of the abolition of slavery. Southern states resisted attempts to end or limit slavery since their agricultural economies were heavily dependent on slave labor. Although bitter disagreement over slavery led to a split between states aligned with the northern Union and southern Confederate states, President Abraham Lincoln's primary goal at the start of the American Civil War in 1861 was to return the seceding states to the Union. 

As the war progressed, President Lincoln recognized that making the abolition of slavery a primary objective of the war would aid the Union by weakening the Confederate economy and win international support. On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The executive order freed enslaved people in Confederate-held territories, authorized the Union Army to enforce emancipation as it advanced, and allowed Black men—including those recently freed—to join the Union Army and Navy. The order was limited in scope as Lincoln intended it to hasten the end of the war. Nationwide abolition required an act of Congress, so the order only applied to southern territory not under the control of the Union Army, which excluded some areas in Virginia and Louisiana. It also did not apply to the border states (Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland) or any other territories outside of the Confederacy. 

Beginning in late 1863, lawmakers including James Mitchell Ashley (R-OH), James F. Wilson (R-OH), John B. Henderson (R-MO), Charles Sumner (R-MA), and Thaddeus Stevens (R-PA) introduced proposals for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery nationwide. Lyman Trumball (R-IL) merged several of these proposals into a version that the U.S. Senate passed on April 8, 1864. However, a vote on the amendment in the U.S. House of Representatives fell thirteen votes short of passage on June 15. 

During the 1864 presidential election campaign Lincoln vowed that the Republican Party would pass an abolition amendment, whereas his challenger General George B. McClellan prioritized preservation of the Union and did not support emancipation. Lincoln easily defeated McClellan and almost immediately instructed his administration to cajole, patronize, and bribe representatives in return for support of the Senate-passed. After more than two months of intense pressure, the House voted in favor of the amendment on January 31, 1865.

The proposed amendment required ratification by 27 of 36 states before it became binding. Illinois was first to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment on February 1 followed by 17 more states by the end of the month. Sadly, it did not pass that threshold before Lincoln's assassination in April. In the months that followed, the new President, Andrew Johnson, urged southern states to ratify the amendment with offers of fair treatment when readmitted to the Union and—more importantly—suggesting states would have the right to limit the rights of the newly freed slaves. Several southern states voted for the amendment on the condition that they were not surrendering rights to the federal government. Georgia became the 27th and deciding state to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment on December 6, 1865. Secretary of State William H. Seward certified that ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment was valid and was a legally-binding part of the U.S. Constitution. Over the next 130 years, the remaining 9 of the 36 states voted in favor of the amendment, with Mississippi being the last to ratify it on March 16, 1995.

You can learn more about the 13th Amendment using data and records collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. For example:

• The 1870 Census was the first decennial count of the nation’s population following the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. It was also the first to list every U.S. resident by name regardless of age, race, or sex. The total population grew from 31,443,321 in 1860 to 38,558,371 in 1870. The White population increased from 26,922,537 to 33,589,377, while the Black population rose from 4,441,830 to 4,880,009 during the same period.
• Between 1860 and 1870, the Black population in the United States grew from 4,441,830 to 4,880,009. Virginia and Georgia had the largest Black populations, though their trends differed: Virginia’s population decreased from 548,907 in 1860 to 512,841 in 1870, while Georgia’s grew from 465,698 to 545,142. Nearly every state that had been part of the Union during the Civil War saw its Black population increase, as many former slaves migrated north. Kansas experienced the greatest growth, with its Black population rising 2,628 percent, from 627 to 17,108, while Illinois saw an increase of 277 percent, from 7,628 to 28,762. Missouri was the only northern state to experience a slight decline, with its Black population falling from 118,503 to 118,071 during the decade.
• Land in farms fell in every former Confederate state between 1860 and 1870, as their agricultural economies reeled from the destruction of the Civil War and the loss of labor following the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery in 1865. In Virginia, farmland declined from more than 31.1 million acres in 1860 to about 18.1 million acres in 1870, and the average farm size dropped from 324 to 246 acres. In Texas, farmed acres fell from 25.3 million to 18.4 million, with the average farm size declining from 591 to 301 acres.
• In 1860, Virginia’s pre-Civil War, slave-dependent farms harvested more than 56.8 million pounds of tobacco. Five years after the abolition of slavery, production had fallen to approximately 37 million pounds in 1870. With the adoption of improved farming techniques, as well as sharecropping and tenant farming, Virginia’s tobacco harvest rebounded to more than 70 million pounds in 1880. Nearly a century after the Civil War, Virginia produced over 151.8 million pounds of tobacco in 1964, ranking it behind North Carolina (877.7 million) and Kentucky (396.1 million). By 2024, North Carolina still led the nation, producing more than 205 million pounds of tobacco, followed by Kentucky (77.4 million) and Virginia (25.4 million).
• Southern cotton harvests collapsed after the loss of slave labor, with Mississippi’s production falling from 1,202,507 bales in 1860 to 564,938 in 1870, and Alabama’s from 989,955 to 429,482 over the same period. Pre-war levels were not restored until 1890, when shifts to sharecropping and tenant farming, along with improved agricultural practices and strong global demand, enabled Mississippi and Alabama to produce 1,154,725 and 915,210 bales, respectively. Nearly a century after the Civil War, Texas (3.9 million), Mississippi (2.2 million), and California (1.8 million) were the nation’s leading cotton producers. By 2024, Texas remained dominant, harvesting over 4 million bales.
• President Andrew Johnson secured southern states' approval for passage of the Thirteenth Amendment by promising that the federal government would not infringe on states' rights to limit the rights of freed slaves. Despite passage of the Fourteenth (1868) and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments granting citizenship and equal protection of the laws to all persons and protection of the right to vote regardless of race or previous servitude, many southern states almost immediately began to segregate services and limit African Americans' rights. Learn more about segregation and the Civil Rights Movement using Census Bureau data and records from our pages about the 1909 Founding of the NAACP, 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling, and the 1960 Greensboro Sit-Ins.
• The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude—except as punishment for a crime. The Census Bureau counts prisoners as part of its group quarters population. In 2020, it recorded 1,780,724 men and 182,923 women aged 18 and older in federal and state adult correctional facilities. More recent data from the American Community Survey estimated that 1,850,595 people were incarcerated in adult correctional institutions. Most prisoners (59.5 percent) were between the ages of 25 and 44, and nearly 91 percent were male. Just a few of the infamous Americans who participated in the census while behind bars include John Dillinger, Clyde Barrow, Robert Stroud, Alvin Karpis, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, John Wesley Hardin, and the murderous duo Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.

On December 15, 1895, Herman Hollerith signed a contract with the Russian Central Statistical Committee to supply his mechanical tabulators for the First General Census of the Population of the Russian Empire in 1897—the first and only census conducted during the Russian Empire era.

Hollerith and his manufacturing partner, Western Electric, built the tabulating equipment and shipped it to St. Petersburg, where a Western Electric agent assembled and maintained the machines.

The Russian Central Statistical Agency hired approximately 150,000 enumerators who attempted to visit every household in the Russian Empire to collect data as of “Census Day,” January 28, 1897.

At its conclusion, the census recorded data for 125,640,021 people. Russian clerks tabulation and published the data over 8 years in 119 volumes of statistics plus a two-volume summary.

By comparison, the population of the United States was 62,979,766 in 1890 and 76,212,168 in 1900.

Russia conducted its most recent census in 2021, counting approximately 147.2 million people, whereas the United States recorded more than 331.4 million in its 2020 census.