The 1860 Census in Newtown Township

On Sunday, January 1, 1860, an America consisting of 33 states welcomed the new year.  James Buchanan, the only Pennsylvanian to be elected president, was in the White House, but anxious to leave.  The country had been coming apart at the seams for the last 10 years, and he seemed to be powerless to stop the country from breaking apart. 

In his state of the union address, he noted that “no nation in the tide of time has ever presented a spectacle of greater material prosperity than we have done," and then asked, “Why is it, then, that discontent now so extensively prevails, and the Union of the States, which is the source of all these blessings, is threatened with destruction?” 

In the north, a small but noisy minority of Abolitionists clamored for an end to the slavery that was largely confined to the south.  The south, protective of their social institutions and way of life, threatened to succeed from the Union rather than yield to the demands of the Abolitionists. 

To the west, many territories were being filled with settlers from both the north and the south, and in places like Bloody Kansas, they took turns killing each other over the question of whether slavery would be allowed in the territories.  That issue had been settled once in 1820 when the pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in Congress agreed to the Missouri Compromise, permitting Maine to enter as a non-slave state, Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state, but prohibiting slavery in any other part of the Louisiana Purchase territory north of the Arkansas territory. 

As a result, the voting power in the Senate remained in balance, with 12 slave states and 12 free states.  An aged Thomas Jefferson saw that this was only a temporary solution:  “… this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.”

The compromise could not continue to hold because the country continued to grow. Vast new territories were acquired when Texas fought for its independence from Mexico and took with it the territories that became California, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada.  The Oregon territories were acquired, from which were eventually formed the states of   Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and parts of Wyoming and Montana. 

Each additional state threatened the political balance of power that had been crafted in 1820. By 1850, the issue came to a head again, and was sidestepped again in the Compromise of 1850, which extended some slavery rights, and strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act, but did not relax the ban on slavery in new most new territories. 

However, the Missouri Compromise and its prohibition against slavery in new territories were discarded in 1854.  In its place, the Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed those two states into the Union, one free and the other slave, and at the urging of Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, the Act permitted the residents of the territories to determine whether they would prohibit slavery or not, a choice called “popular sovereignty."  

The Act was not popular in the north, where the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was considered an abdication to the slave states.  These division between north and south began tearing apart the national institutions of the county.  Churches divided by section:  the Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian and Episcopal churches all split between north and south.  The two major political parties, the Whigs and Democrats, began to fracture along sectional lines; and northerners and midwesterners flocked to a new party, the Republican Party, dedicated to opposition to the expansion of slavery.  The Whig party ceased to exist after 1856. 

Going into the presidential election year of 1860, the Democratic party was divided between north and south.  By the end of the political conventions, four different men had been nominated for president.  The Democratic convention deadlocked after 57th ballots, and finally the southern delegation walked out.  The northern Democrats then nominated Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois as their candidate. 

The southern Democrats regrouped and nominated the sitting vice president, John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky as their candidate.  Former Whigs nominated John Bell, former Senator from Tennessee as their candidate.  The Republican party, meeting in Chicago, nominated a prominent Illinois lawyer, Abraham Lincoln.  By the end of June, 1860, the candidates were set, and election campaign began in earnest with election day a little over three months away on November 6, 1860.

Later that year, the country would vote for a president and Abraham Lincoln would win office on the splintered vote of a splintered country.  In Newtown, voting was done by paper ballots dropped into a ballot box at the Newtown Square Hotel.  In Pennsylvania, Lincoln captured all of the 27 electoral votes and a clear majority of the popular vote.  The Philadelphia Inquirer on the next day declared “Abraham Lincoln Elected President." 

In an era of no instant communication other than telegraph lines, the country knew the results of the election by the next day.  On November 10, the South Carolina legislature called for a special session to consider seceding from the Union.  On December 20, meeting in Charleston, they did just that, unanimously declaring, "We, the people of the State of South Carolina in convention assembled, do declare and ordain... that the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of 'the United States of America,' is hereby dissolved."

Over the next six weeks, six other states in the south seceded as well.  In February, 1861, South Carolina diarist Mary Boykin Chestnut wrote, "We are divorced, north and south because we have hated each other so."  It would be a bloody divorce: over the next four years of the war, over 620,000 men would die, and thousands more would come home crippled, without arms, legs, and eyes.  

 The year 1860, besides being an election year, was also a census year.  At the beginning of the year, census workers began fanning out across the country, paper forms in hand, to tackle the arduous process of counting every man, woman and child in the country.  The census form called for the names of each person, their age, sex, color, profession, the value of real estate and personal property they owned, their place of birth, whether they were married within the year, whether they attended school, whether they were a person over 20 who could not read and write, and whether they were “deaf, dumb, blind, insane, idiotic, pauper or convict”.   

The man who entered Newtown on Thursday, July 19th of that year to perform the count was William B. Flounders, a 54-year-old farmer from Springfield, Delaware County, with the official title of Assistant Marshal for the census. 

Coming from Marple along the West Chester Turnpike on July 19, 1860, he covered nine households along the Turnpike, including several saddle and harness makers, blacksmiths, a wheelwright, a shoemaker, the Dunwoody and Rhoads farms, with a stop at the Fox Chase Tavern. 

The  Tavern, then operated by Thomas B. Evans, was a midway stop for the two daily stage coach runs  between the William Penn Hotel at 38th and Market streets in Philadelphia and West Chester.  The road had originally been laid out in the late 1700s, and like most roads at the time, it had been simply a dirt road, dry and dusty in the summers, and muddy and rutted in bad weather. 

In 1848, the Pennsylvania legislature approved the construction of the West Chester Turnpike along the existing road.  The improvements to the road consisted of hemlock planks that were laid in the road bed to offer a better road surface for stage coaches and farm wagons traveling along the road.  Because the planks gave out over time, (and by 1860 were being replaced with crushed stone), tolls were charged to replace the planks:  one cent per mile for each horse or mule, with heavy wagons and stage coaches with three or more horses charged one and a half cents per horse per mile. 

Our census taker, Mr. Flounders, passed through the existing toll gate #5 at Larchmont that day, past Springfield Road but before crossing over into Newtown at Media Line Road.  At his last stop of the day, he met the president of the company that owned the Turnpike, William Rhoads, a local farmer and one of the richest men in the township.  Where Flounders stayed that night is unknown; his last stop was the Rhoads house, so he may have been offered a bed for the night. 

If the Philadelphia Inquirer for that day came out on the daily stage and made it to the Rhoads household, then  Rhoads and Flounders may have discussed the story on page 1 that noted that while the census was steadily progressing, the Marshals have been having some difficulty obtaining correct answers, as some manufacturers were unwilling to disclose how much money they had invested in their business, and sober-minded ladies were hesitant to disclose their ages, and “the census takers are subjected to all manner of evasions and prevarications”.  

[To be continued...]