On the eve of the Revolution, the thirteen belligerent
British colonies clustered along the Atlantic coast had
a population of approximately 2.5 million, including
about half a million blacks. Approximately 90 per-
cent of the workforce was engaged in agriculture. By
1790, there were nearly 4 million people in the United
States, by 1820 over 9.5 million, and by 1830, close to
13 million. In just sixty-five years the nation’s popula-
tion had more than quintupled. It had also begun to
be both more urban and more industrial.
Educated Americans, such as Thomas Jefferson
and James Madison who followed trends in Europe
and purchased many of their reading materials
abroad, were knowledgeable about and interested
in the theories of European economists, including
Thomas Malthus, concerning the relationship of
populousness, land ownership, and poverty [see
Documents 21 and 26]. However, these issues did not
arouse the passions of most Americans. Although
there were poor people in the United States, large
pockets of urban poverty comparable to those found in
London and Paris were unknown in the United States
until well into the nineteenth century. Furthermore,
in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century
America, there was plenty of unsettled land available
for farmers—unlike in western Europe, where much
of the arable land had been farmed for generations.
Indeed, the U.S. government was anxious to populate
the nation’s western lands with Europeans and their
descendants.Growth of The Nation
In the Treaty of 1783, Great Britain not only rec-
ognized the independence of the thirteen American
colonies but also, very generously, established the
Mississippi River as the western boundary of the new
nation, far beyond the westernmost border of any
of the existing colonies. Twenty years later, Thomas
Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory from
France moved the young nation’s western boundary
to the Rocky Mountains and incorporated into the
country the Great Plains, a terrain vastly different
from the deciduous forest regions of the Northeast.
The territories west of the original thirteen col-
onies gained new inhabitants during the first half-
century of the country’s existence. One of the most