We may, then, properly begin our survey of the racial elements in the United States by a brief scrutiny of this American stock, the parent stem of the American people, the great trunk, whose roots have penetrated deep into the human experience of the past and whose branches have pushed upward and outward until they spread over a whole continent.

The first census of the United States was taken in 1790.  More than a hundred years later, in 1909, the Census Bureau published A Century of Population Growth in which an attempt was made to ascertain the nationality of those who comprised the population at the taking of the first census.  In that census no questions of nativity were asked.  This omission is in itself significant of the homogeneity of the population at that time.  The only available data, therefore, upon which such a calculation could be made were the surnames of the heads of families preserved in the schedules.  A careful analysis of the list disclosed a surprisingly large number of names ostensibly English or British.  Fashions in names have changed since then, and many that were so curious, simple, or fantastically compounded as to be later deemed undignified have undergone change or disappeared.[3]

Upon this basis the nationality of the white population was distributed among the States in accordance with Table A printed on pages 26-27.  Three of the original States are not represented in this table:  New Jersey, Delaware, and Georgia.  The schedules of the First Census for those States were not preserved.  The two new States of Kentucky and Tennessee are also missing from the list.  Estimates, however, have been made for these missing States.

For Delaware, the schedules of the Second Census, 1800, survived.  As there was little growth and very little change in the composition of the population during this decade, the Census Bureau used the later figures as a basis for calculating the population in 1790.  Of three of the missing Southern States the report says:  “The composition of the white population of Georgia, Kentucky, and of the district subsequently erected into the State of Tennessee is also unknown; but in view of the fact that Georgia was a distinctly English colony, and that Tennessee and Kentucky were settled largely from Virginia and North Carolina, the application of the North Carolina proportions to the white population of these three results in what is doubtless an approximation of the actual distribution.”

Table A[4]

Distribution of the white population, 1790, in each state, according
to nationality as indicated by names of heads of families

Note:  The first column under each State gives the number of persons; the second, the percentage.  The asterisk indicates less than one-tenth of one per cent.