%185. The States.%--What sort of a country, and what sort of people, was Washington thus chosen to rule over? When, he was elected, the Union was composed of eleven states, for neither Rhode Island nor North Carolina had accepted the Constitution.[1] Vermont had never been a member of the Union, because the Continental Congress would not recognize her as a state. [Footnote 1: The states ratified the Constitution on the dates given below: 1. Delaware Dec. 7, 1787 2. Pennsylvania Dec. 12, 1787 3. New Jersey Dec. 18, 1787 4. Georgia Jan. 2, 1788 5. Connecticut Jan. 9, 1788 6. Massachusetts Feb. 7, 1788 7. Maryland April 28, 1788 8. South Carolina May 23, 1788 9. New Hampshire June 21, 1788 10. Virginia June 26, 1788 11. New York July 26, 1788 12. North Carolina Nov. 21, 1789 13. Rhode Island May 29, 1790] [Illustration: The %UNITED STATES% March 4, 1789] %186. Only a Part inhabited.%--Three fourths of our country was then uninhabited by white men, and almost all the people lived near the seaboard. Had a line been drawn along what was then the frontier, it would (as the map on p. 177 shows) have run along the shore of Maine, across New Hampshire and Vermont to Lake Champlain, then south to the Mohawk valley, then down the Hudson River, and southwestward across Pennsylvania to Pittsburg, then south along the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Altamaha River in Georgia, and by it to the sea. How many people lived here was never known till 1790. The Constitution of the United States requires that the people shall be counted once in each ten years, in order that it may be determined how many representatives each state shall have in the House of Representatives; and for this purpose Congress ordered the first census to be taken in 1790. It then appeared that, excluding Indians, there were living in the eleven United States 3,380,000 human beings, or less than half the number of people who now live in the single state of New York. %187. How the People were scattered.%--More were in the Southern than in the Eastern States. Virginia, then the most populous, contained one fifth. Pennsylvania had a ninth, while in the five states of Maryland, Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia were almost one half of the English-speaking people of the United States. These were the planting states, and, populous as they were, they had but two cities--Baltimore and Charleston. Savannah, Wilmington, Alexandria, Norfolk, and Richmond were small towns. Not one had 8000 people in it. Indeed, the inhabitants of the six largest cities of the country (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and Salem) taken together were but 131,000. [Illustration: DISTRIBUTION OF THE POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES FIRST CENSUS, 1790/] [Illustration: Boston in 1790[1]] [Footnote 1: From the _Massachusetts Magazine_, November, 1790.]