1790

Object: Report of the Returns of the Whole Number of Persons in the United States 1790

As enshrined in the Constitution, the United States government must take a census of its people every 10 years. The first report took over two years to conduct and compile. It was then published as the Report of the Returns of the Whole Number of Persons in the United States 1790. The number of volumes increased as the number of questions grew and the census became more than a simple tabulation of numbers.

Since the first census of 1790, the population count has been used to determine the number of congressional representatives allocated to each state. This process, known as apportionment, has taken place after every census, except for 1920. The method of apportionment was the subject of intense debate among the founding fathers. This debate centered around two main topics: who to count and how to allocate the representatives.

The first was tied directly to slavery. Proposed by James Madison in 1783, the 3/5 compromise (every 5 slaves would only count as 3 people for apportionment) helped balance the number of representatives between northern and southern states. Otherwise, the southern states would have a larger number of representatives in Congress and votes in the Electoral College, and therefore a disproportional amount of political power relative to their number of eligible voters. The second was over the method of apportionment. There were two opposing methods proposed by Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Hamilton’s method was used in the first apportionment bill sent to President George Washington. However, after consulting with his cabinet, Washington exercised the first-ever presidential veto and sent the bill back to Congress. In the end, they used a variation of Jefferson’s method, even though it meant fewer seats for his home state of Virginia.

Disagreements over the method of apportionment would crop up every ten years as new territories gained statehood and states vied to keep or increase their number of seats. In 1911, legislation limited the House of Representatives to 435 members. After the 1920 census, debate between rural and urban Congressmen resulted in no reapportionment of representatives for the first time since 1790. The Reapportionment and Census Act of 1929 made apportionment an automatic and mandatory action. Although there have been several processes used to determine apportionment over the years, since 1940 (and codified in 1941), Congress has used the Huntington-Hill/Equal Proportions Method.

Final population count: 3,929,214