The 1790 census was the first performed under the new Constitution. George Washington was the first President and John Adams was Vice President. Congress had met; James Madison had proposed his amendments; but the Bill of Rights was yet to be ratified. Benjamin Franklin, in his eighties, published his last article: an ironic, and effective, parody of the arguments justifying the slave trade (see Slave Trade article). The French Revolution was in its second year.

Population and Growth

The census revealed a total United States population of 3.9 million with 3.2 million free population and 700 thousand slaves. It is estimated that 77% of the White population was of British descent (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) while those of German descent were next at 7.4% (Bogue, page 348). Today we look at these data and think that these people are all northern European, and thus must have lived together without prejudice and discrimination. Not so. The other colonists looked askance at the later arriving Scotch-Irish and Germans. Even the tolerant Benjamin Franklin, 250 years ago, complained of the German-Americans in way that is very familiar to us today:

"Why should Pennsylvania founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language and Customs…?" (Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, Etc., in Jorgenson, page 223. This passage was dropped after the first edition.)

Population growth had slowed during the Revolution, but since the war population growth had resumed its explosive rate of 3% per annum. The next census (1800) would report 5.3 million people — more than twice as many as at the outbreak of the Revolution.

Reproduction, not immigration, continued as the growth engine. The population was young with about half under 16 years of age, and men and women were evenly balanced in number with slightly more men than women. The family was an economic unit: people lived in large households in rural settings. The average household size (persons living in the same housing unit) was 5.8 persons. (Bogue, Table 11-1, page 444.) Ninety-five per cent of the population was rural: only 200 thousand people lived in the 24 places with a population of 2,500 or more (Bogue, Table 3-9, page 110). There were only four "cities" with a population greater than ten thousand: Baltimore, 13.5 thousand; Boston, 18.2; Philadelphia, 28.5; and New York, 49.4 (Bogue is using the modern boundaries of these cities. Thus other sources may show smaller populations).

Political Boundaries

With the end of the Revolution, the United States had gained from England nominal control of the lands east of the Mississippi, south of Canada, and north of Florida. As the individual states relinquished their claims to the western lands, territories and eventually states were formed (see map showing the political boundaries as of 1790). Spain claimed Florida and the lands west of the Mississippi. The Northwest Territory was comprised of what were to become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and part of Minnesota. The Southwest Territory was comprised of what was to become Tennessee and major parts of Alabama and Mississippi. Kentucky was growing fast with ambitions to become a state, and Virginia has renounced her claims. Vermont was claimed by New York, but the aristocratic ways of New York were not acceptable to the Vermonters who issued their own Declaration of Independence in 1777. The New Yorkers lacked the will to assert their claims against the opposition of Vermont's "Green Mountain Boys," and Vermont for more than a decade was a de facto state. The political elite in Maine, by way of contrast, was happy to be part of Massachusetts.

With Kentucky, a slave state, pressing for statehood, the U.S. Senate looked for a new free state for balance. Ohio, facing British and Native American opposition, was growing too slowly. The Senate turned its attention to Vermont. In an early and quieter version of the Missouri compromise, Vermont would become the 14th state in 1791 and Kentucky the 15th state in 1792 . The Senate's attention was focused on the differences between Vermont and Kentucky, but in one important way they were very similar. Both were frontier communities with all that implied. The 13 original states all had property or tax paying qualifications for the vote: Vermont and Kentucky entered the Union without them. The Jacksonian Revolution was years away, but this was a first, hardly noted step.

Settlement Patterns

Following the Revolution, settlers were moving across the Appalachians into the fertile Valley of the Ohio. Most came in through Southwest Virginia via Boon's Wilderness Trail and settled south of the Ohio River in what was to become Kentucky and Tennessee: the 1790 census reported more than 100 thousands person in these soon to be states west of the mountains. However, Britain refused to give up its forts in the Northwest Territory, and an alliance of Ohio Valley Nations who still claimed the territory had formed to contest U.S. expansion. In 1794, however, the British abandoned their Native American allies who suffered a major defeat at Fallen Timbers and the influx resumed. By 1800 Kentucky and Tennessee were states with a combined population of 326 thousand (the combined population these two states west of the Appalachians was far greater than the combined population of all the colonies 100 years earlier). The pattern of settlement in 1800 is shown in map.

Louisiana Purchase

A large U.S. population west of the Appalachians with fully formed states voicing their interests pushed to the forefront a long simmering issue: the navigation of the Mississippi. The rivers in the original colonies flowed into the Atlantic. The Ohio flowed into the Mississippi and then south into the Gulf of Mexico. The settlers in the Ohio Valley needed free navigation of the Mississippi for the shipment of goods, but Spain claimed the river and also New Orleans which controlled the mouth of the Mississippi. In 1795, in the Lorenzo Treaty, Spain granted the U.S. the free navigation of the Mississippi, a diplomatic coup for Washington's administration (Wright, page 213).

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison were to take a critical step with the purchase of Louisiana Territory from the French (who had secretly acquired it from Spain) further securing free navigation of the Mississippi. (The purchase of Louisiana represented a major compromise for Jefferson and Madison: their narrow interpretation of the Constitution and its necessary and proper clause provided no right to make such a purpose. See map showing the extent of the purchase). However, there is a large difference between claiming the territory, which almost doubled the land area of the U.S., and holding it. The settlement map for 1800 shows that there were very few Americans anywhere near Louisiana or New Orleans who would be available to mount a defense against a foreign claimant.

Transportation Infrastructure

Efforts to provide transportation links between the East Coast and the Valley of the Ohio continued and were viewed as critical to the unity of the country. In 1783, George Washington, the tireless proponent of canals, visited the Mohawk Valley in upstate New York and in the 1790s short canals were built along the Mohawk River. Washington's personal efforts continued to focus on the Potomac. In 1785 the Patowmak Company was formed with Washington its first president:

"The objective of the company was to develop a series of river improvements designed to extend the effective navigation of the Potomac to the highest possible point…Channels in the river were deepened and boulders removed. Skirting canals were dug on either the Virginia or Maryland shoreline opposite the five falls of the Potomac. To overcome elevation changes locks were built in two of the skirting canals…" (Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park).

By 1802, 220 of the Potomac's 287 miles were made navigable. A boat carrying 15 tons of cargo could deliver flour, corn, whiskey, tobacco, furs, timber and iron ore from the interior to the ports of Georgetown and Alexandria. The work on the Potomac was only a portion of the river improvement effort as parallel improvements were made on other rivers of the East Coast and their tributaries. Looking at these rivers today it is hard to imagine that they were ever navigable by commercial travel. Port Republic, Virginia, is a small, seemingly landlocked town in the Shenandoah Valley, today most famous for its role in Stonewall Jackson's Valley Campaign. In its heyday it was a busy port, made possible by improvements to the South Fork of the Shenandoah River which linked it to the Potomac.

These river improvements, however, only went into the interior on the eastern side of the mountains or such mountain valleys as the Shenandoah. They stopped short of the Valley of the Ohio. Moreover, they provided uncertain and usually downstream transportation. The Potomac, for instance, defied efforts to make it consistently navigable:

"Some years there were only about 45 days when the water level was sufficient for travel. It seemed as if the river was either too shallow due to drought or overflowing because of flooding…Although the boats could be poled upstream against the current, they were often dismantled in Georgetown and sold for lumber. The crew would then walk 200 miles home and build another boat…" (Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park).

Since river improvements alone could not link the Ohio Valley with the East, plans began for a National Road to complete the link. Albert Gallatin, who became Jefferson's Secretary of the Treasury, was an advocate of a road "from the navigable waters emptying into the Atlantic to the Ohio, and afterwards continued through the new states." Again, the Democratic-Republican philosophy of Jefferson and Madison opposed expenditure of federal funds on internal improvements; so Gallatin came up with a scheme for state funding, but with a federal mandate. Enabling legislation for the new states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois would provide for the sale of federal land in these states to fund the road. However, work on the road was not to begin until the Madison presidency.

Other less ambitious roads were privately built. In 1792 a private company was chartered by the state of Pennsylvania to build a stone and gravel road from Philadelphia to Lancaster. Completed in 1794, the toll road was an instant success paying its investors as high as 15% in some years. Other turnpikes followed (Chamberlain, page 65).

State Population: Free and Slave

Looking at state populations, Virginia with 19% of the total population, or almost three fourths of a million people, literally towered over the other states. The next largest states, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and North Carolina had 12%, 11% and 10% of the total population respectively.

Looking at the free population only, differences are less pronounced. Massachusetts was the largest with 15%, but closely followed by Virginia and Pennsylvania with 14% and 13% respectively. Each sector of the country, South, Central, and North, could claim one of the three largest states. The differences in population among states were less than one might expect given the intensity of big state-small state controversy at the Constitutional Convention. It would have required four states drawn from all regions of the country to establish even a narrow majority of either total population or free population. However, the small states did have genuine concerns. Several of these states — Delaware, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey — were already settled with no contiguous western lands for further expansion. They were already static or declining in population relative to the other states and could only anticipate further relative decline. A power distribution based on population held little promise for them.

The slave population in 1790 provides a marked contrast to the free population. Slaves were about 19% of the total population and were concentrated in the South. One state alone, Virginia, held 42% of the total slave population. Slavery, the institution, was vulnerable. The Virginia elite rejected the theory, if not the practice, of the institution. Washington died in 1799 providing for the manumission of his slaves. Moreover, the institution no longer seemed profitable: It may have been no accident that Jefferson, Madison and Monroe all died in reduced circumstances. However, in 1792, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. This simple invention eventually was to make cotton growing profitable in the deep South and to provide a profitable market for Virginia's slaves. Perhaps an opportunity to eliminate slavery peacefully had passed. The cotton gin would commit the South to agriculture and slavery.

Nascent Industrialization

The North was going in a different direction. Samuel Slater, who brought his knowledge from Britain, opened the first American mill producing cotton thread in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1790. Slater brought the production process into such simple steps that a child could outproduce a skilled artisan. Unhappily they did, as Slater employed a labor force of young children. The thread produced by Slater's mill still had to be woven into cloth by hand looms. The power loom would come later.

The same Eli Whitney who had invented the cotton gin won a federal contract to manufacture 10,000 muskets. It would be impossible to manufacture so many muskets in the traditional way: a gunsmith fashioning each unique gun with its unique, non-interchangeable parts. Whitney "invented moulds and machines for making all pieces of his musket locks so exactly equal, that take one hundred locks to pieces and mingle their parts, and the one hundred parts could be put together as well by taking the first pieces that come to hand." (Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, quoted in Miller, pages 115-116.) Whitney manufactured the muskets in a factory near New Haven, Connecticut, and in 1801, delivered the first muskets to President Adams. Standardization and mass production had begun in the United States. The hills and mountains of New England became an asset as the rapid descent of the rivers provided the energy to drive the machinery.