1825: When the US South Was Not Yet White

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated January 23, 2008. The piece has undergone substantial revision. The title now reads, 1825: When the US South Was Not Yet White. The data referred to spoke of the US South in 1825, not the entire US. I apologize to anyone who got confused by my error.

Most people take it as a given that the USA as a nation and society is and always has been basically White, even mostly British or Northern European White. We have only to look at the authors of the Constitution and signers of the Declaration of Independence to see that all of them where White. And as the Christian fundamentalists love to remind us, they were all "Christians" too. Too bad most of them were actually Deists.

It's true since 1830 or so (see 1830 census figures Excel, pdf ), this has been a majority-White land, and that is the picture most people's memory and cultural knowledge of this country gives them.

But Whites have only been here a short while, and we were immigrants, or actually invaders at first, ourselves. Previously, this land was inhabited 100% by Amerindians, a race close to Northeast Asians. Before this was even a nation, huge numbers of Black slaves were imported to this land, such that most Black lineages in the US go back farther than most White lineages.

In California and the Southwest, we have even had Hispanics (almost all Mexicans) living here before those states were even a part of the US. A Filipino was part of the party that founded Los Angeles before California was even a state. He got sick in Baja and ended up staying there, but he was still present on the voyage. See below where many more Filipinos were already in this country even before 1781.

On the eve of the Gold Rush, there were a mere 1,000 Chinese in the US. Only seven of them were in California. But within a year of becoming a state, California was full of East Indians (Hindoos), Samoans/Hawaiians, Mexicans and other Pacific Islanders (Kanakas) and Chinese, all come for the Gold Rush.

By 1852, there were 25,000 Chinese alone in California. All of these groups stayed on through the whole decades-long Gold Rush and afterwards remained here as residents in the US.

So are West Africans, as this is where many of the American slaves came from. There was a Filipino settlement in St. Malo, Louisiana, in 1763, before the US was even formed. The first Chinese immigrants came to the US in 1820, but before the Gold Rush, only 1,000 or so had arrived.

Japanese and Filipinos have been present in Hawaii in large numbers since 1890, and Koreans have been present in much smaller numbers there from 1896. Hawaii was only made into a state in 1959. Cubans have also been here a very long time. Hundreds of Cubans came to St. Augustine, Florida in 1565, over 200 years before there was a USA.

Similarly, the first Jamaicans (a party of 20) in America were already in Jamestown, the first White British colony in the US, by 1619. Further, many Jamaicans were included in slave shipments to the US since Jamaica was a way station along the way between Africa and the US.

Significant numbers - two large ships full of Chilean and Peruvian miners were in California for the Gold Rush as early as 1848. A couple of thousand Brazilian and Caribbean Blacks also came for the Gold Rush. Note that California did not become a state until 1850.

Pakistanis (people from what later became Pakistan) were in the US since the 1700's and continuing into the 1800's in Oregon and Washington, working in agriculture, logging and mining in California. The first known East Indian Hindu came to the US in 1790, soon after the Declaration of Independence, as a maritime worker.

Mexicans, Samoans, Blacks, Cubans, East Indians, Pakistanis, Chileans, Peruvians, Filipinos, American Indians, Canadians, Japanese, West Africans, Hawaiians, Japanese, Koreans and Chinese have been here in significant, not trivial, numbers, from the very start.

They are not, as groups, wholly immigrants or foreigners to this land. They are not foreign to American culture - they are part of the very building blocks of it. Perhaps Germany, Russia, Sweden, France and most of Europe can lay claim to being predominantly White countries for centuries or millenia, but the US cannot.

On the inside back cover of a recent issue of American Heritage Magazine was a painting of the Antediluvian American South with some text below. The text took me aback. I shook my head and read it again and again and it's stuck in my head ever since.

It said that in 1825, the US South¹ was estimated to be 37% Black (almost all slaves), 25% American Indian², and only 38% was White³. Neither the Blacks nor the Indians could vote and none were citizens until the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, but so what.

Both the US South, and the nation as a whole, were already White-minority as early as 35 years after signing of the Constitution. Take that, "White America" fools!

The White America of movies, TV, magazines, books and memories was just a temporary mirage, a ship passing in the night.

Now, as the USA moves back to becoming a White-minority land, we are not changing the basic nature, culture and essence of this nation. We just reverting to our roots.

I am not arguing for unlimited immigration to this land (In fact, I want to seriously limit it) and I am a staunch opponent of illegal immigration. Nevertheless, it angers me when White Nationalists act like this is some kind of a "White country".

Nothing could be further from the truth.

¹I misremembered the text in the issue - it referred to the US South only, not the US as a whole. A look at the US Census Bureau information (Excel file here, pdf here) clears up the mystery. A 37% Black figure is apparent for Blacks in the US South.

The 25% Indian figure quoted was obviously for Amerindians in the South. Therefore, the article claimed that Whites were 38%, Blacks 37%, and Indians 25% in the US South in 1825.

Figures for the whole of the US reveal a White majority, however, if we include the Amerindians living in the Louisiana Purchase at that time (recently part of the US in 1825), we can still make a case for a non-White majority in the US. See note 3 below for more on that.

²There were numerically small numbers of Filipinos, Chinese, Mexicans, pre-Pakistanis (people from the land that would later become Pakistan), East Indians and Cubans here in 1825, but they probably added up to less than 1% of the population.

³The American Heritage figures quoted have now been called into question (see comments at the end of this post and the comments at the end of the frankly White racist American Renaissance article that linked this piece); the suggestion is that Blacks made up 19% of the US at the time, and Whites made up the rest.

The mystery is cleared up in note 1, where the magazine text referred to only the US South, not the US as a whole.

Indians were not counted in either the 1820 or 1830 censuses, and may have numbered 8 million in the US at the time (recall that the Louisiana Purchase had just been added to the nation).

Figure 12 million Indians in the US and Canada pre-contact, with 90% of those in the US (compare US and Canadian populations now for a 9-1 disparity in US versus Canadian population - a similar distribution was probably extant pre-contact). Assume 2 million Indians gone from the original population by 1825, mostly East of the Mississippi, and 2 million living in New Spain and the Oregon Territory.

This leaves us with 7 million Indians in the US in 1825. Further, runaway slaves were clearly not counted, probably 10% of the Black population. Figuring 7 million Indians, 9.2 million Whites and 2.5 million Blacks in 1825 still leaves us with a bare minority-White population in the US. The US was probably non-White majority from 1803-1825. By 1830, Whites were the majority entire nation, and have remained so ever since.

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