NEW NATION COMES TO ITS CENSUS
August 2, 1790:

__1790: __In keeping with a tradition at least as old as the Romans and constitutionally mandated by the Founding Fathers, the first U.S. Census begins.

Federal representatives fanned out across the original 13 states, tabulating information on American households, just as they have every 10 years since. The information was used to estimate taxes, assign congressional representation and generally make demographic sense of U.S. society.

At the time, that society – "excluding Indians not taxed" – numbered some 3,929,326 people (later revised to 3,929,214 by some counts). Of them, nearly 700,000 were slaves.

In Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina, slaves outnumbered free white men. Vermont, population 85,539, reportedly contained 16 slaves, a number later corrected to zero.

New York and Philadelphia were the new nation's big cities, with 33,000 and 28,000 inhabitants respectively.

Then as now, not everyone was enthusiastic about being counted. As subsequently described by Census Bureau historians (.pdf), some citizens "having no experience with census-taking, imagined that some scheme for increasing taxation was involved." Others were opposed on religious grounds, "a count of inhabitants being regarded by many as a cause for divine displeasure."

Of course, since it was the Constitution's still-living authors who ordered the census, objectors made no claim to the Founding Fathers' legacy – unlike some Tea Party luminaries, such as Glenn Beck and Ron Paul, who this year discouraged conservatives from participating in the 2010 census.

For the record, Paul Revere – of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, head of a family including three free white males under 16, three free white females, and no slaves – did participate.

Source: https://www.wired.com/2010/08/0802-first-us-census