Two years ago occurred the 200th anniversary of the taking of the first United States census in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. This investigation into the history of that event and its circumstances is in observance of the county's participation in an event which was a necessary part of the founding of the United States Government. Also, as history is founded in the identity of people of whom records exist, so any understanding of early Cumberland County must begin with the study of those persons named in its first demographic sources. The earliest useful list of names is not the first United States census, taken in 1790-1791, but that census is the first record pretending to refer to every individual living in the county on one date.
That the 1787 Federal Constitution called for a census had to do with the necessity of raising government income equitably. The Revolutionary War had broken out before a central government could be formed. Earlier, when the Continental Congress in 1775 authorized the issuance of $3 million in bills of credit, the new States pledged to redeem them in proportion to their respective populations and in ways they would determine individually.1 Only two states actually took censuses.
There the matter stood in the six years that followed , as Congress fought a war and waited for all states to ratify the plan of government proposed under the Articles of Confederation. As the states stalled on ratification and on paying their assessments to the Congress, the national treasury emptied, and the Continental currency depreciated almost to the point of being worthless. To start to meet the financial crisis Edmund Randolph of Virginia on 21 November 1781 moved that each state enumerate its white inhabitants.2 The motion failed; the growing financial crisis worsened.
When the Constitutional Convention met in 1787, a key question was the method by which the people would be represented in the national legislature. It was closely related to other matters for debate: how to levy taxes, directly or indirectly through the state governments and whether such levies should be based on wealth and /or population. Diametrically opposed views surfaced both at the national convention and at the Pennsylvania Ratification Convention. At the former Hugh Williamson, a Cumberland County native who had moved to North Carolina, and James Wilson, who had lived in Carlisle, offered opposing views. At the latter convention the county's Robert Whitehill and James Wilson differed in their views.3 From the attitudes of these three political leaders it might be inferred that the County residents were split on the plan for the government and thus toward the census as a tool for making it work If there were any doubts about this, they can be dispelled by the fact of tl1e violent riot in December 1787 in Carlisle between proponents and opponents of the Constitution.
Perhaps the opinion of the County was split evenly. The lines of division were not ethnic because the Scots-Irish still predominated in the population, and they were aligned generally along the divergent Wilson and Whitehill positions. National survival had not at all been guaranteed by the victory at Yorktown , and Cumberland County mirrored the American crisis to an alarming degree.
A miracle was needed and came to pass. George Washington, who had refused an American crown at his moment of greatest glory in 1783, waited five years and then presided over the creation of an impossible political office to which he then accepted nomination and election, becoming responsible for the nation to an extent never, except possibly in 1861, to be equalled. The hopeful people, living in a gaggle of semi-independent American states, yielding sovereignty only from necessity, waited to see whether Washington could save them again. The census was carried out in the same period as that when the first President of the United States bore out those hopes. For Cumberland County, his success was critical to the success of the census. Washington's actions and Congressional passage of a set of Constitutional amendments which became the Bill of Rights convened the county's anti-Constitutionalists. When the census takers went on their rounds in Cumberland County, they were able to complete a fairly accurate record in a comparatively short space of time.
“Every man in Cumberland County is a rioter at heart,” lamented Governor John Penn the year he ordered his family’s land in Lower Manor subdivided and sold. The concurrence of his remark and his order to sell may have been mere chance, but young Penn in this instance established himself as seer and prophet. When he used the word “rioter” he spoke of the seething Scotch-Irish, who were virtually the only group then living in the County.