[9] Studying the percentage of various nationalities in Colonial times, and later, one is guided partly by records of immigration, partly by the names of the inhabitants, as recorded in census and other returns. There was always a tendency, in an Anglo-Saxon region, to corrupt names of other nationalities, occasionally in such a way as to make them appear English. This fact must be allowed for in all calculations in this field.
THE OLD NORTHWEST TERRITORY
The second period to be dealt with covers the years from the first census, 1790, to the eve of the Civil War, 1860, and deals with the organization of our government and the extension of settlement westward to the Pacific. Free land and a very high birthrate among native Americans led to a great increase of the population, so that the white inhabitants of the United States, about three millions and a quarter in 1790, became twenty-seven millions and a half, in 1860, though immigration during the seventy-year period was not over four and a quarter million.
From 1790 to 1820, no official record of immigrant arrivals was kept. Thousands certainly arrived during those thirty years, but it seems probable that they were nearly all English and Scotch.
Just as the termination in 1790 of the preceding period was marked by a racial loss, caused by the expulsion of the Loyalists, so this later period was terminated by an internecine Civil War, costing the country three-fourths of a million Nordic lives, counting killed and died of wounds only. The descendants of those men who gave their lives for their country on both sides would have filled up the West, instead of its being largely populated by the immigrants we recklessly invited to our shores.
During the period referred to (1790-1860), there was, as said, no heavy immigration except from two sources, Ireland and Germany, and both of these occurred in the later portion of the period.
The displacement of agriculture by sheep in Scotland at the beginning of the nineteenth century dispossessed thousands of farmers who moved to America, sometimes with the active assistance of their landlords. The population of some districts, as Perthshire, Argyllshire, and Inverness-shire, fell sharply, because the people, no longer able to make a living, moved away. North America was the favorite destination.