Analyst Notes: Government data and America’s founding
America's founders were data nerds.
This democratic project we call the United States of America is celebrating a birthday again, and this year it’s a big, 18-letter one — a semiquincentennial. If you haven’t heard by now, that’s a celebration of 250 years.
Data has been a part of the nation’s story from the beginning. The very founding of America as a representative democracy was predicated on the idea that Congress would represent the people. That begged some of the simplest data questions a new government could possibly face: Which people? And where?
Indeed, collecting data on the US population was so top-of-mind for our founders that not only is it written into the Constitution, but they get to it fast. The famous 52-word preamble establishes the goals of the new government — a government by “We the People.” Article I, Section I grants legislative powers to a Congress, which will have two branches.
And then, a mere 200 words into the seminal document, the founders mandate a decennial “Enumeration” of the people:
The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.
In other words, a population census — the first Constitutionally mandated US government data.
That’s how high up on the first page of the Constitution that the nation’s founders mandated a census.
A census itself was not a novel concept; the British even conducted censuses in parts of the US before independence. But our government’s early mention of it — before mentioning such priorities as, say, a president or a military — reveals a truth: data collection is an essential tool of democratic governance.
Population data was necessary to quite literally build the early American government. It used the census to compose the House of Representatives, with states represented proportionally according to their population. (We should note that this meant their population of “free persons” of any race, though most American Indians were not enumerated between 1790 and 1850, and three-fifths of the enslaved population.) The census was also the beginning of a formalized revenue model, as the government intended to tax states proportionally to cover Revolutionary War debts.
Those debts were an example of early data collection themselves. After the war, Alexander Hamilton delivered the First Report on Public Credit, arguing that the federal government would be responsible for repaying their debts accumulated during the war. Treasury records show that those debts amounted to some $75 million. This was effectively the basis of American economic policy.
The first Congress delivered on the Constitutional data-collection mandate with the Census Act of 1790. That year, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson led a census of the original 13 states as well as then-territories Kentucky, Maine, Vermont, and the Southwest Territory (which would become Tennessee). Heads of household were asked for six data points:
- Their name
- The number of free white males 16 and older
- The number of free white males under 16
- The number of free white females
- The number of all other free people
- The number of any enslaved people
The project reported 3,929,214 people in the US. For perspective, that was just slightly less than the 2025 population of Oklahoma. This included 697,624 enslaved people, who were 17.8% of the population.
The US population has grown by 84 times since the start of the Census in 1790.
US population by Decennial Census, 1790–2020
As the population increased along with the number of states in the union, the government’s statistical work remained a critical resource for dealing with economic and social challenges. When Congress was concerned about shortages of imported goods from Europe, the census started surveying manufacturing data in 1810 (and further economic data in future decades). Senate hearings on labor strife and working conditions led to the creation of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1884. The Great Depression necessitated data on unemployment.
The US population grew by about one-third each decade until the Civil War.
Decennial US population change, 1790–2020
The 1960s and 1970s brought a focus on health, education, and the natural world, with the creation of the National Center for Health Statistics, the Nation’s Report Card, and the Environmental Protection Agency and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. As government responsibilities expanded, so too did data collection.
Today, the federal statistical system comprises over 100 agencies and programs, including 13 principal statistical agencies. It’s a vast patchwork of information infrastructure designed specifically, over 250 years, to support our nation’s legislators and citizens alike in decision-making.
This country started by counting, and it’s the data that tells the story of the past quarter millennium. Our population has grown by more than 80 times since 1790. We’ve continued to move west and south, even long since Western states were added to the Union. We’ve grown older, more diverse.
We have to measure our history to celebrate it — but also to learn from it.
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