Talk:List of U.S. states and territories by historical population

Starting the article; rationale
Note, this article is still a work in progress. I hope to add (soon!) more tables on enslaved population, 1790-1860; historical congressional apportionment; and perhaps, historical Electoral College votes per state. Also plan to add links from/to related articles, categories, etc.

The rationale for this article: I have searched in vain across the internet for easy access to this information, which obviously exists but for some reason has not been tabulated anywhere (that I can find, certainly not in Wikipedia) in an easily accessible format. Ideally, these tables would not need a separate article but instead would be incorporated into related articles on the US census, US demography, etc. However, the nature of these tables makes the underlying "wiki code" so large and unwieldy that doing so would make those articles too huge to edit. So, this is my solution, which I hope others will find useful.

For the same reason (ease of access), I have (1) broken the table into three parts (ideally it would be one single table, but that would make it too large to view on a standard monitor), and (2) included all 50 states in the first table, even though several of them have no census population recorded for 1790-1860. That will make it a lot easier for other users to copy the three tables into a single excel file, if anybody else out is crazy like me and likes to do that kind of stuff.--Potosino (talk) 15:16, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Fixes to population data
Hi. I have gone through and fixed the data, conforming to a US Census Source. That source calculates population data based on present-day boundaries, therefore there's no need for WP:OR calculations. However, that source only has the total percentage of black population that was enslaved, not the percentage enslaved out of the total population. Unless there's a source that has that explicit information, we should not include it here since that would constitute original research on our part. I have saved the info, however, on the following Talk page: Talk:List of U.S. states by historical population/Manual Archive. This page should now be reasonably complete, but if people would like to include more data such as ethnic breakdowns, etc. feel free. Best, epicAdam(talk) 17:04, 1 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Looking at this, I would think that calculating the percent of the population that is enslaved would be covered by WP:CALC/WP:AVRC and thus would not fall afoul of WP:OR. It's just two sourced numbers and then math. Carter (talk) 16:47, 15 July 2017 (UTC)

Someone should correct the data for Alaska. The 1880, 1890 the population figures are shown 10 years off. The 1900 figure is not correct. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.128.11.222 (talk) 19:47, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
 * ✅ It looks like 1900 was missing; as noted 1880 and 1890 were reported for the wrong decades. —Carter (Tcr25) (talk) 15:31, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

sortable tables
The tables should be designed so they can be sorted by population and not just alphabetical. Jamo58 (talk) 03:41, 4 October 2012 (UTC)


 * it was a formatting issue. —Mrwojo (talk) 22:19, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

Indians Not Taxed
It might be worth including some clarification about the populations counted, especially for earlier censuses.

My suspicion, from looking at the census table that's cited as the source, is that Native Americans aren't counted at all in the data for the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries (though I'm not sure at what date they'd start being counted). My evidence for this is, in part, that the data for Alabama shows no Native American population in the early 1800's, though in 1800 the Native population must have well exceeded the 733 whites and 517 blacks shown.

This seems consistent with the Census Clause's exclusion of "Indians Not Taxed" from the census, but makes a big difference to the population density for states before heavy white settlement. (Hawaii being a special case, as I believe the native Hawaiian population have never legally been considered Native Americans, which means they would have been counted.)

I think some note about this should be included. Thoughts? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.54.222.27 (talk) 04:36, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

It makes sense that any population number not enumerated in the census should be its own column, and those numbers are available for 1860, '70, and '80 here: https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2006/summer/indian-census.html The 1890 census enumerated all indigenous populations, but apparently the data were lost in a fire! Still, that's a fairly old article. Are these numbers saved somewhere else? ~ Peter Scholtes (7/29/21)

Sortability
The charts have one fatal problem: they aren't sortable. This needs to be fixed, if you know how.-2A00:1028:83CC:42D2:AD79:38E5:7031:9337 (talk) 16:11, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Are Enslaved Persons Included in State Populations?
There are two tables, one that has the entire population by state and one that has slaves. To get the non-enslaved population, is it necessary to deduct enslaved persons from free persons? Or, does the first table already exclude the enslaved population?--Bemcfarland (talk) 15:13, 21 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Looking at the Census data linked in the references, it looks like the "Total population, 1790–1860" table is all counted persons, regardless of race/ethnicity. The "Enslaved population, 1790–1860" shows enslaved persons of African descent, so subtracting would get you the non-enslaved population, but doesn't break out whites from free persons of color. That data is in the source file, however. It looks like from the source file that only white and black (free and enslaved) were the only categories tracked. According to United States Census, the data prior to the 1850 census was much less complete, so numbers might need to be taken with a grain of salt. It wasn't until the 1860 census that Native Americans were counted, but apparently only those who'd renounced tribal affiliation. Carter (talk) 15:27, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

What about historic population levels of current U.S. dependencies?
The District of Columbia is included on this page, yet it isn't a state, wouldn't it also make sense to add Puerto Rico, Guam, Northern Marianas, etc. on here just the same? -- sion8 talk page 22:12, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
 * You'd want to use U.S. Census data, to keep it consistent with the other records, but it would be possible to add them. It looks like Puerto Rico has been part of the decennial Census since 1910, USVI since 1940, Guam and American Samoa since 1920, and the Northern Marianas since 1980 (in 1970, CNMI was included with the rest of the Pacific Trust Territories). If this were done, it'd also make sense to include the Canal Zone, which was included in the Census from 1920 to 1970, and Americans abroad, first surveyed in 1950. WP:BB Carter (talk) 16:32, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Well, I was actually asking a question. Also, I didn't know they got census data from foreign born U.S. citizens. -- sion8 Flag_of_Barranquilla.svg talk page 23:16, 28 December 2017 (UTC)

✅ Okay, I added data from the U.S. census, as available, for U.S. territories. Carter (talk) 13:16, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

U.S. territories
The 5 inhabited U.S. territories (American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands) should be added to the tables, and the article's title should be moved to "List of U.S. states and territories by historical population". Since these territories became territories around the year 1900 (in the case of Puerto Rico, Guam and American Samoa) and later than that for the other two territories, it would make sense to add them to the 20th century / 21st century tables. LumaP15 (talk) 09:34, 5 January 2019 (UTC)