Excerpt from American Census Taking From the First Census of the United States: Reprinted From the Century Magazine for April, 1903 The developments of statistics are causing history to be rewritten. Till recently, the historian studied nations in the aggregate, and gave us only the story of princes, dynasties, sieges, and battles. Of the people themselves - the great social body, with life, growth, forces, elements, and laws of its own - he told us nothing. Now, statistical inquiry leads him into hovels, homes, workshops, mines, fields, prisons, hospitals, and all other places where human nature displays its weakness and its strength. In these explorations he discovers the seeds of national growth and decay, and thus becomes the prophet of his generation. The chief instrument of American statistics is the census, which should accomplish a twofold object. It should serve the country, by making a full and accurate exhibit of the elements of national life and strength; and it should serve the science of statistics by so exhibiting general results that they may be compared with similar data obtained by other nations. The census is indispensable to modern statesmanship. - James A. Garfield. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

No other official record or group of records is as historically significant as the 1790 census of the United States. The original 1790 enumerations covered the present states of Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, and Virginia. Unfortunately, not all the schedules have survived, the returns for the states of Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Virginia having been lost or destroyed, possibly when the British burned the Capitol at Washington during the War of 1812, though there seems to be no proof for this. For Virginia, taxpayer lists made in the years 1782-1785 have been reconstructed as replacements for the original returns. In response to repeated requests from genealogists, historians, and patriotic societies, the surviving census records were published by the Bureau of the Census in 1907 and 1908. The twelve states whose records were then extant are each covered by a single volume. The twelve published volumes contain the names of the heads of about 400,000 families, with information concerning their place of residence, the size of their families, and the approximate ages of the male family members. The families, averaging six people each, comprised about 2,400,000 individuals, or approximately 75% of the total population of the United States at the time.

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