"Following Proportions": Numerical Information and State-Building from Revolutionary State Constitutions and Laws to the U.S. Constitution, 1776-1787

Edward Blum, San Diego State University

In 1787, the new Constitution made proportionality central to the organization and function of the federal government. Proportionality, based upon counts of inhabitants and mathematically altered by enslavement, became the foundation for representation in the House of Representatives, the allocation of electors in the Electoral College, and the assessment of direct taxation. The codification of proportionality, however, was not solely the achievement of the delegates at Philadelphia. It was the culmination of more than a decade of constitutional drafting and statutory experimentation within the states. This paper examines how state legislatures constructed proportionality in practice between 1776 and 1787. Revolutionary constitutions frequently invoked proportional representation and equitable taxation, yet such commitments required numbers. Legislators needed enumerations of inhabitants, valuations of property, and returns of militia eligible men. They had to determine what would count, who would count it, and how often counts would be revised. In response, states created offices of assessors and enumerators, standardized tax lists, required militia rolls, and enacted procedures for certifying and transmitting returns. Through these measures, proportionality was transformed from principle into administrative routine. The paper compares state approaches to legislative apportionment, fiscal assessment, and militia quotas, highlighting variation in methods of enumeration, verification, and revision. By the mid 1780s several states had institutionalized recurring systems that linked political representation, taxation, and military obligation to quantified returns. These state level information regimes made proportional governance workable locally even as the Confederation Congress struggled to enforce proportional requisitions at the national level. By situating the federal Constitution within these earlier state experiments, the paper demonstrates that the national census and apportionment system nationalized practices first developed in the states. Proportionality, in short, was built before it was codified.

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 Presented in Session 125. Beyond the Census I