ABSTRACT
Early Nineteenth-Century Immigration Compared to the great waves of Irish and German immigration in the mid-nineteenth century and the flood of Eastern and Southern European immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century, immigration during the half century from the presidency of George Washington in the 1790s to that first great wave of immigrants from Europe in the 1840s was moderate. Although some 4.2 million immigrants came to the United States in the 1840s and 1850s, just one-fifth of that number arrived in the two decades preceding 1840. And although systematic statistics were not maintained until passage of the 1819 Manifest of Immigrants Act, it is likely that the twenty-five years of near-continuous European warfare that followed the onset of the French Revolution in 1789 kept immigration to the United States at a minimum in those years.
