North Carolina in 1776: Population and Demographics

Here at the Triangle Trumpet, we're celebrating the 250th anniversary of 1776 with a year-long series on the local Revolutionary history of our beat

When our founding fathers declared independence and fought the Revolutionary War, North Carolina was populated in a manner vastly different than the modern day; the state wasn’t just an order of magnitude smaller, the inhabitants were also much more rurally distributed.

The cities and towns which form the metropolitan core of the modern “Triangle” area were generally yet to be founded, with Raleigh being created to be the state capital in 1788, Durham burgeoning as a railroad stop with incorporation in 1869, and Chapel Hill being little more than a chapel on a hill prior to the establishment of the University of North Carolina in 1789.

For this item of the Triangle Trumpet’s semiquincentennial series, we will look at the first census data taken several years after the Revolutionary War, while future parts will cover the infrastructure and communities like Hillsborough which had already been established, as well as the history of how the counties which existed at the time developed.

The Census

In 1784, after a resolution from the Continental Congress, the General Assembly ordered state officials to take a census with “an Act to ascertain the number of White and Black Inhabitants, and the Citizens of every Age and Condition in the State.”

However, the returns provided in compliance with this law were not high quality, with some being described in the Minutes of the North Carolina House of Commons in 1787 as being “so promiscuously thrown together, and being irregularly drawn, occasions them to be in so confused a manner as to be almost unintelligible.”

With North Carolina’s ratification of the United States Constitution in 1789 came the participation in the first national decennial census in 1790, which provided more standardized data as to the size and composition of the population of the state’s fifty-four counties.

The counties of Johnston and Wake had the most similar borders to their modern counterparts, while Orange would have its western half pared off into Alamance; Person and Harnett would be split off from Caswell and Cumberland respectively; and Durham, Lee, and Vance would be carved out from the other counties of the Triangle as well as portions of what was then Cumberland, Moore, Warren.

The census counted households, free white males sixteen and older, free white males under sixteen, free white females, all other free persons, and slaves. (American Indians were not counted in the census, as the Constitution explicitly excludes “Indians not taxed” from the calculation for the apportionment of the House of Representatives.)

The sum of the results by county shows a total population of 397,179 across 52,705 households in North Carolina, with 293,290 free whites, 100,569 slaves, and 4,975 free non-whites.

The 1790 population wasn’t just a fraction of the today’s population (the entire state was slightly larger than modern-day Durham County), but the population was significantly more evenly dispersed.

The most densely populated county at the time was Chowan at 28.8 people per square mile, which was 16x more densely populated than the most sparsely populated county of Rutherford with 1.8/mi².

In comparison, the most densely populated county in 2025, according to the Office of State Budget and Management, is nearly twenty times higher with Mecklenburg at 2,288.9/mi², which is 305x the density of 7.5/mi² in Hyde County.

The most densely populated counties, in the northeast of the state, corresponded to some of the counties with the highest levels of slavery, with slaves making up over 50% of the population in Chowan and Warren.

This pattern stretched into the Triangle area, where slaves made up 35.9-54.7% of the population in Franklin, Granville, and Warren, while only 9.8-27.0% in Caswell, Chatham, Cumberland, Johnston, Moore, Orange, and Wake. Similarly, the former three had a population density of 14.9-17.8/mi² while the latter seven had a population density of 4.4-12.3/mi².