Karl E. Valois
This lesson is suited for almost any group of high school students. It ia an excellent exercise in the use of primary source materials and permits the student to make judgments and hypotheses from the raw statistics provided.
The teacher needs only to photocopy the chart above, or to retype the population figures onto a ditto master for reproduction.
This first federal census practically speaks for itself and serves to illustrate the great variations in size among the thirteen states. Students viewing the data should quickly come to appreciate a number of considerations:
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(1) the relatively small numbers of people living in the United States in 1790.
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(2) that Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania contained as mary people as the next six states combined.
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(3) that it was little wonder that the delegates of Virginia led the way for the creation of a national legislature based on proportional representation.
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(4) that New Jersey and the smaller states fought equally hard to maintain the principle of equal representation in the national legislature.
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(5) that slaves made up a sizeable portion of the population in the United States and, in some Southern States, almost equaled the native whites.
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(6) that clashes of interest would manifest themselves at the Constitutional Convention.
