Mapping the American Population

In 1940, cartographer Herman R. Friis published “A Series of Population Maps of the Colonies and the United States, 1625-1790.” Many small-scale maps plot population by randomly distributing a number of dots proportional to the number of people in a given area. Unlike those dot-density maps, Friis’s ten maps imprecisely illustrate the actual location of colonists. Since 1940, demographers have refined and improved population estimates for early America, but no one has plotted location in the way Friis does. In short, Friis’s maps are still the best spatial representation of the growth of the colonial population.

Yet the maps reflect the shortcomings of mid-twentieth-century historiography. They do not distinguish between enslaved and free peoples. As a result, the growth of slavery, so central to the development of the colonies, is invisible. Nor do they plot the Native American population. What looks like an empty continent was in fact home to some two million people in 1700.

In the M.A.P. Project, the CVH is amending Friis’s maps. Beginning with the Southeast, we are separating the enslaved and free populations and adding the Native American population. Next we will add the colonial population in Canada and the Spanish population in the Southwest. Eventually, we will map the entire human population in North America between 1500 and 1800.