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It is hard to fathom the historical and cultural patterns of a region, especially in times of great demographic change, without understanding the basic size and distribution of the whole population. This may be one reason the overall history of the South in the eighteenth century has remained elusive and incomplete for so many generations. Surprisingly, almost no one has ever posed the basic question: How many people lived in the southern geographic region during the century before the formation of the United States? And nobody has tried, even in rough terms, to find the answer to this many-sided problem in any systematic and sustained way. In recent years, with help from others, I have explored numerical changes in the population of southeastern North America in the late colonial period. This chapter presents the picture that emerges from such an extended demographic survey.1 My goal has been to seek out and combine population data on Indians, Africans, and Europeans from the late seventeenth century through the late eighteenth century. Specifically, I took 1790, the year of the first federal census , as a final date and, more arbitrarily, 1685 as the starting point. Much of the most dramatic change in the Indian populations of the region had already occurred by that time, as is now well known. But written records covering the preceding century and a half of intermittent foreign intrusion do not touch all parts of the South and are neither frequent nor reliable. By examining the most accessible, and lowest, part of the downward demographic curve among southern Indians, I hoped to assist, indirectly, in the discussion of earlier and less well documented population change. At the same time, I wanted to integrate data concerning Indians with figures for the rapidly changing white and black populations of the region. Only then would it be possible for demographic maps to show for the first time, at least roughly, the actual distribution of people across the South over the course of the eighteenth century. To establish this distribution meaningfully, it proved necessary to divide the region into a set of logical subregions. The Changing Population of the Colonial South An Overview by Race and Region, 1685–1790 peter h. wood    changing population of the colonial south I began, therefore, by separating the entire domain east of the Great Plains and south of the Ohio and Potomac rivers into a workable number of distinct subregions. Some of these ten zones might be combined, such as North and South Carolina, while others could be further divided, such as the Choctaw/Chickasaw area. Plausibly, a “Maryland” subregion could be added on the periphery.2 But as they stand here, each of the ten districts had a geographical, political, or social identity during the colonial era that was separate enough to distinguish it from the rest of the region. Within each broad district the settlements, both Indian and colonial, generally occurred in rather concentrated locales, separated by considerable open space or “hunting land” between different ethnic and economic clusters. These communities were by no means stationary, and occasionally families, villages , or whole groups relocated within the district or migrated from one subregion to another, temporarily or permanently. Only with the largest shifts, as when the Seminoles moved into Florida, have I noted these movements , for they generally had more social and political than demographic significance. As treated successively in separate sections and as shown on the accompanying figures and tables, the ten subregions include (I) Virginia, (II) North Carolina, and (III) South Carolina—all to the eastern edge of the mountains. Farther south lies (IV) Florida, following the boundary of the present state rather than the shifting borders imposed by eighteenth-century treaties. Touching the Atlantic coast between the Savannah and the St. Mary’s rivers but extending inland to include all of modern Georgia and Alabama below the Appalachian chain and east of the Tombigbee River is (V) the Creek Confederacy. To its north, (VI) the Cherokee Nation occupies southern Appalachia. Still farther to the west lie (VII) the Choctaw and Chickasaw homelands in Mississippi and (VIII) the rich lowcountry of the greater Mississippi Delta in Louisiana, dominated first by the Natchez and their neighbors, later by the French and the Spanish. At the western edge of the geographic South, reaching to the Balcones Fault near modern San Antonio, stands the sparsely inhabited trans-Mississippi area of East Texas and Arkansas (IX). Finally, stretching across the north lies (X) the vast interior...

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