Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 1, No. 3 | Beyond Census 2000: As a Nation, We are the World, page 2

It is tempting to think of our demographic history as one of self-selected immigration, starting with the first settlers and followed by successive waves of immigrants drawn by the promise of religious tolerance, political freedom and economic opportunity. As we are all aware, that’s only part of the story. Our demographic history is also about conquest, purchase and the slave trade. Not everyone who became “American” did so voluntarily.

In 1500, the land mass that is today the U.S. was home to approximately 3.5 million native Indians belonging to 17 major language groups. Population densities were very low, with the largest population groups situated in the coastal areas of the Northwest. Once Europeans arrived, contact with their diseases, especially smallpox, began to reduce native populations, as did the fact that Europeans had guns, making settlers almost always the superior force in warring encounters. Indian groups along the Atlantic Coast, where the earliest settlers established themselves, were particularly vulnerable. By the time that the first U.S. census was taken in 1790, native Indians living in the 13 recently formed states comprised only 1.2 percent of the total population. Three centuries of imported diseases, colonization and genocide had reduced to a tiny fraction the Native Americans’ share of the new nation’s population.

Involuntary immigration—the slave trade—was a second factor in the nation’s early demographic history. Slavery reached the Caribbean Islands in 1501 and was first recorded in the colonies in 1619 with the arrival of a single African American male, slave to a Jamestown family. Over the next 30 years, the slave population of the colonies grew to around 50,000, largely concentrated in Virginia and Massachusetts, and the numbers were still rising. Between 1670 and 1700, for instance, the black population increased five-fold while the white population only doubled. When the first census was taken, slaves were the second largest demographic group in the new nation, comprising 19% of the population.

The largest group counted in the 1790 census was, of course, from the British Isles. The English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish comprised nearly three million of the almost four million people counted in the first national census. Another ten percent of the population was northern European, primarily Dutch and German. (All of these groups also overwhelmingly shared the same Protestant faith.) But things were about to change.

The 19th Century
as a Story of Immigration

Demographically, the 19th century started quietly. Social and political observers considered the new U.S. to be a stable society. Its population, now settled for several generations, had shared colonialism, independence and the birth of the republic. These shared experiences had, presumably, melded the population into one nation, one people—excepting, of course, the slaves and the native Indians.

But the nation was less demographically formed, less finished than both its citizens and outside commentators may have thought. Immigrants—though that term was not yet in use—were beginning to crowd into cities on the eastern seaboard. Although the most astute of social commentators, Alexis de Tocqueville, did not focus on immigration, there is a telling passage in his classic treatise, Democracy in America. He noted that recent immigrants, mostly Irish, were, to his way of thinking, a lower class that brought the threat of mob rule to America. “Living in a country of which they are not citizens,” de Tocqueville wrote, “they are ready to take advantage of all the passions that agitate it.” He wrote that social order could best be preserved through a national military force that was “independent of the people of the cities and able to restrain their excesses.”

De Tocqueville was giving early voice to nativist sentiments, in full cry by mid-century, which started from the premise that the first settlers were not themselves “immigrants” and were now the true Americans. Immigrants, by this view, were not only altogether different, they were something to be concerned about—particularly because of their ever-expanding numbers. Still, they kept coming, reducing the numerical domination of British stock and greatly contributing to the growth of the population. Fewer than four million people were counted in the first census; nearly 92 million were recorded in 1910, on the eve of World War I. And with growth came diversity, including a religious diversity not welcome to the country’s original Protestant base.

In the early 19th century, Roman Catholics, especially from Ireland, began to arrive in large numbers, generally escaping economic deprivation more than religious persecution. Emigration was further stimulated by political turmoil in northern Europe, sending people from Germany, France, Belgium and Holland to the American shores. By 1850, the Roman Catholic Church was the largest denomination in the country, though Catholics were still less numerous than all the Protestant denominations combined.

It was in 1850 that the census first introduced the distinction between native- and foreign-born Americans. When the census results were tallied, they showed, then as now, that the foreign-born concentrated in urban areas: more than half of New York City’s population was foreign born, with similar high proportions in Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, St. Louis and New Orleans.

Living together amidst all this diversity did not come easily. In the eastern U.S., the nativist Know-Nothing Party led an anti-Catholic cry. “Romanism,” it was feared, would undermine Protestant Puritanism on which the nation had constructed its moral and political identity. The effort by nativists to close down immigration was opposed by economic interests: factory owners needed workers, as did the railroads pushing across the country. The frontier was there to be settled, and shipping interests benefited from the huge cross-Atlantic traffic. Economic interests prevailed. Immigration continued, though naturalization was not made easy.

The middle of the 19th century also saw a sharp upsurge in the arrival of Asian immigrants on the West Coast. They were drawn to the “Mountain of Gold,” where work in the mines and on the railroads offered economic returns unheard of in China and Japan. The “coolie” labor trade was beneficial to the American economy, but in the case of the Chinese, for example, only men and not women were allowed to come to the U.S. to work. This was to prevent Chinese from being born in America, thereby becoming citizens. In many additional ways, patterns of discrimination and anti-immigration sentiment directed at Catholics in the eastern U.S. repeated themselves on the West Coast. Asians, denied the protections of citizenship, were poorly paid, badly treated and sometimes violently attacked. In the first instance of closing our borders to immigrants, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and successor laws stopped Chinese immigration; the 1907 “Gentleman’s Agreement” between the U.S. and Japan to discourage emigration had a similar effect on the flow of Japanese. These policies reflected both racist views and fears of wage competition in a mixture that came to dominate immigration policy for decades.

Even more dramatic population shifts resulted from the next wave of immigration, which began about 1880, peaking in the years before WW I. It was during this period that immigration from northern Europe fell sharply to be replaced by large numbers of arrivals from southern and Eastern Europe, including the first large wave of Jewish immigrants.

Across the 19th and into the 20th century, learning to live together did not proceed smoothly. Anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism and anti-Asian views fit easily into the beliefs and practices of the descendents of the settlers who viewed the Mediterranean, Jewish, Negroid and Oriental races—the terms used during those years—as inferior to those of Anglo stock. These attitudes were fueled by psuedo-scientific racist theories such as Social Darwinism and eugenics, which came into vogue in this era; the former suggested that the poor were deservedly so while the latter would advance racial purity through selective reproduction. Racist quotas in the restrictive immigration laws passed in the 1920s were the culmination of four decades of efforts to legally control immigration and represented a last gasp effort to reestablish the dominance of the “better” race that had founded the Republic. But it was too late. The country had little choice but to try to figure out how it could become a pan-European nation.

Immigrants came to America voluntarily. The same cannot be said for groups added to the population through purchase or conquest. Even though the slave trade was terminated in the early 19th century, the slave population continued to grow through reproduction. The Civil War may have emancipated the slaves but it did not extend full civic membership. Social segregation, economic discrimination, second-class citizenship, all sanctioned in law, continued a carefully tiered system of civic membership based on race.

Other wars of the 19th century played their part in demographic change. The Indian Wars that opened the West to European settlers further reduced and relocated the native Indian populations. Other military action added new lands in the Southwest and a new population group: by the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, the U.S. had acquired its first large Mexican population—about 80,000 people. The Spanish-American War in 1889 added the Puerto Rican islands and their people. When Hawaii was annexed in 1898, its native Pacific Islander population also became “Americans.”

Along with territorial wars, land purchase altered our demography. Thomas Jefferson’s vast Louisiana Purchase in 1803 added a French settler population; William Henry Seward’s purchase of the Russian colony of Alaska in 1867 added the Inuit, the Kodiak and other Alaskan natives.

While population increases resulting from conquest and purchase were not large, relatively speaking, they did add to the country’s demographic diversity. In a pattern now familiar, this diversity provided new opportunities for discrimination in the labor market, in housing and in the educational system, which was as true for Hispanics as it was for the ex-slave population. Native Alaskans and Pacific Islanders were given no more rights than were Native American Indians, who were denied citizenship until 1924.

Out of all the new racial and ethnic groups added to the U.S. population in the 19th century, only those of European origin were granted civic membership. Non-European peoples, though living and working in the U.S., were “stateless”: they were without the right to have rights. It was not until well into the 20th century that the nation finally took up the issue of full civic membership for all social groups.

Next page: Over the years, racial categories have been added or dropped depending on prevailing political beliefs.

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