The total white population found in the United States by the first census (1790) was 3,172,444. To this should be added, for the present purpose, the population of parts of the continent that are now, but were not then, in the United States, that is Louisiana and Florida. The latter had but a few thousand inhabitants. The Louisiana Purchase territory may be credited with 36,000, of whom nearly one-half were Negroes. The French are estimated at about 12,000. Professor Hansen gives the figure of Whites only for the Louisiana Purchase area in 1790 as 20,000. The addition of Negroes would probably increase these population figures considerably. Texas may be allotted 5000 (Spanish) Whites, New Mexico and Arizona 15,000, and California 1000 at this period. But it will be shown later that the use of the word "White" in these Spanish-American lands is frequently largely a "courtesy title." Finally, the census enumerators did not reach the Old Northwest Territory, where there were already some 11,000 residents, about equally divided between American and French. The total white population of the territory now comprised in the continental United States may therefore be put at approximately 3,250,000 in 1790.
Disregarding the French and Spanish in the outlying regions, the only race, aside from the Nordic, that was important enough to be counted at this period was the Alpine, represented by the Germans. In Maine one in a hundred of the population might have been German, but in the other New England states the Alpines were negligible.[9] In the middle colonies they were an important element, perhaps one in every ten or twelve in such States as New York, New Jersey, and Maryland, and one-third of the whole population in Pennsylvania. Through the Southern States they formed perhaps one in twenty of the population, confined mainly to the upland regions and, having spread over from these uplands and from Pennsylvania into the west, they amounted to about one in seven in Kentucky and Tennessee.
Nine-tenths of the whole white population of 1790 was therefore Nordic in race, and ninety-nine hundredths of it Protestant in religion. It was all English-speaking, save for the little island of Pennsylvania Dutch, and for the French and Spanish on the frontiers. It was all living under a political and cultural tradition that was characteristically British.
At the time of the Revolution there were about 6,000,000 people in England and about half that number in the colonies.
The preceding pages have been devoted to describing the conditions in the English colonies at the end of the Colonial Period. Let us now consider the situation of the continent as a whole.
Never before in the history of the Nordic race had there been an event comparable in importance to this occupation of North America, north of the Rio Grande, by the English and Scotch. The Canadian French were too few to be a serious obstacle to the development of the country and, as will be seen in the following pages, the rest of Canada was in race, language, religion, and cultural traditions identical with the original British colonies.
Thus we have the most vigorous race in existence, with a few outside elements which were entirely in sympathy with the dominant type, in possession of the richest and most salubrious continent in the world. That this country was healthy and well fitted to breed a highly selected race is shown by the comparison of the fate of the colonists who went to the West Indies with those who went to New England.
These Puritan migrations were in their general nature identical, but the enervating climate of the Caribbean Sea proved fatal to the Nordics who went there, while the vigor of the New Englanders as a body was increased by the elimination of weaklings through a harsh but beneficent climate.