Findings

Congress finds that— (1)Thomas Jefferson, as Secretary of State in 1790, supervised the first modern census in world history; (2)the 1790 census was the first national census in the United States and the first periodic census in the modern nation-state era; (3)Jefferson urged President Washington to veto the first apportionment bill presented by Congress on the grounds that it was unconstitutional, and Jefferson’s own apportionment formula was adopted and used until 1840; (4)Jefferson’s mastery of numbers and statistical analysis helped alert the Nation to the importance of accuracy in the numbers used to describe the society and pointed to methods that later improved census taking; (5)Jefferson offered population corrections to the European diplomatic community to more accurately convey the fast-growing United States population, which had been undercounted in previous census taking; (6)Jefferson believed in the importance of territorial expansion and insisted on equal representation for the territories that were to join the Union as States; (7)Jefferson supervised the first census in world history that gave to the people more than it took from them, being designed less to extract taxes or raise a militia than to apportion political power to the people of the United States according to their numbers; and (8)Jefferson’s role in establishing a republic based on principles of representation underscores the historical significance of the United States census and the way the Government views and governs itself today.