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