English Americans
English Americans are Americans whose ancestry originates wholly or partly in England. According to the 2020 United States census, English Americans are the largest ethnic demographic in the United States with 46.6 million Americans self-identifying as having some English origins representing of the White American population. This includes 25,536,410 identified as predominantly or "English alone".
Overview
Despite their status as the largest self-identified ancestral-origin group in the United States, demographers still regard the number of English Americans as an undercount. As most English Americans are the descendants of settlers who first arrived during the colonial period which began over 400 years ago, many Americans are either unaware of this heritage or choose to elect a more recent known ancestral group even if English is their primary ancestry.The term is distinct from British Americans, which includes not only English Americans but also others from the United Kingdom such as Scottish, Scotch-Irish, Welsh, Cornish, Manx Americans and Channel Islanders. In 1980, 49.6 million Americans claimed English ancestry. At 26.34%, this was the largest group amongst the 188 million people who reported at least one ancestry. The population was 226 million which would have made the English ancestry group 22% of the total.
Scotch-Irish Americans are for the most part descendants of Lowland Scots and Northern English settlers who migrated to Ireland during the Plantation of Ulster in the 17th century. Additionally, African Americans tend to have a significant degree of English and Lowland Scots ancestry tracing back to the Colonial period, typically ranging between 17 and 29%. English immigrants in the 19th century, as with other groups, sought economic prosperity. They began migrating in large numbers, without state support, in the 1840s and continued into the 1890s.
English American elites, known as "WASPs", have dominated American society, culture, and politics for most of American history. The majority of presidents of the United States, as well as the majority of sitting U.S. congressmen and congresswomen, were born into families of English ancestry. The majority of the Founding Fathers of the United States were also of English ancestry. Ivy League universities such as Harvard University, Yale University, and Princeton University were established by and have been mostly composed of WASPs.
Historically, many different ethnic groups assimilated into the Anglo-American population during and after the British colonial period, specifically Germans, Irishmen, Swedes, French Huguenots, Native Americans, Africans, Dutchmen, and Finns. This intermarriage resulted in the creation of a uniquely Anglo-American frontier identity, specifically in the Upland South.
In states such as Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana, and California; former colonies of Spain and France, Anglo-American settlers developed a cohesive identity centered around their Protestantism, English language, and British colonial heritage. Despite the overwhelming majority of Anglo settlers being native-born white American Protestants of colonial immigrant ancestry, there were also English, French-Canadian, Irish, German, Jewish, Melungeon and even Catholic settlers as well. Many Anglos married into the families of Spanish, French, and Mexican elites.
An early expression of Anglo-American nationalism occurred during the Texas Revolution, when revolutionaries created flags which included the British Union Jack, George Washington, and elements of the American flag. The term Anglo-American can be ambiguous and used in several different ways. While it is primarily intended to refer to people of English ancestry, it is also used to denote all people of British or Northwestern European ancestry. Most broadly it is used to include all people of Northwestern European ethnic origin who currently speak English as a mother tongue and their descendants are in the New World, thus including a large assimilated group of mostly Protestant Europeans.
Sense of identity
of English heritage are often seen, and identify, as simply "American" due to the many historic cultural ties between England and the U.S. and their influence on the country's population. Relative to ethnic groups of other European origins, this may be due to the early establishment of English settlements; as well as to non-English groups having emigrated in order to establish significant communities.Since 1776, English Americans have been less likely to proclaim their heritage, unlike other British Americans, Latino Americans, African Americans, Italian Americans, Irish Americans, Native Americans or other ethnic groups. This is a reason why numbers vary drastically between self-identification and estimates. A leading specialist, Charlotte Erickson, found them to be ethnically "invisible," dismissing the occasional St. George Societies as ephemeral elite clubs that were not in touch with a larger ethnic community. In Canada, by contrast, the English organized far more ethnic activism, as the English competed sharply with the well-organized French and Irish elements. In the United States, the Scottish immigrants were much better organized than the English in the 19th century, as were their descendants in the late 20th century.
Number of English Americans
As the primary founding group, the original 17th century settlers were overwhelmingly English. Most of these early settlers came from what is referred to as Southern England. From the time of the first permanent English presence in the New World until the 1900s, these migrants and their descendants outnumbered all others firmly establishing the English cultural pattern as predominant for the American version.1700–1775
According to studies and estimates, the ethnic populations in the British American Colonies from 1700 onwards were:Data
National origins: 1790–1900
The ancestries of the population in 1790 has been estimated by various sources, first in 1909, then again in 1932, 1980 and 1984 by sampling distinctive surnames in the census and assigning them a country of origin. There is debate over the accuracy between the studies with individual scholars and the Federal Government using different techniques and conclusion for the ethnic composition.A study published in 1909 titled A Century of Population Growth. From the First to the Twelfth census of the United States: 1790–1900 by the Government Census Bureau estimated the English were 83.5%, 6.7% Scottish, 1.6% Irish, 2.0% Dutch, 0.5% French, 5.6% German and 0.1% all others of the white population for the 12 enumerated states. "Hebrews" were less than one-tenth of 1 percent. When the Scotch and Irish are added, British origins would be more than 90% of the European ancestry.
The same 1909 data for each state of English ancestry were Connecticut 96.2%, Rhode Island 96.0%, Vermont 95.4%, Massachusetts 95.0%, New Hampshire 94.1%, Maine 93.1%, Virginia 85.0%, Maryland 84.0%, North Carolina 83.1%, South Carolina 82.4%, New York 78.2% and Pennsylvania 59.0%. CPG estimated that, of all European Americans in the Continental United States as of 1790, 82.1% were English, followed by 7.0% Scotch, 5.6% German, 2.5% Dutch, 1.9% Irish, and 0.6% French.
English American population estimates (1790)
The 1909 Century of Population Growth report came under intense scrutiny in the 1920s; its methodology was subject to criticism over fundamental flaws that cast doubt on the accuracy of its conclusions. The catalyst for controversy had been passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed numerical quotas on each country of Europe limiting the number of immigrants to be admitted out of a finite total annual pool. The size of each national quota was determined by the National Origins Formula, in part computed by estimating the origins of the colonial stock population descended from White Americans enumerated in the 1790 Census.The undercount of other colonial stocks like German Americans and Irish Americans would thus have contemporary policy consequences. When CPG was produced in 1909, the concept of independent Ireland did not even exist. CPG made no attempt to further classify its estimated 1.9% Irish population to distinguish Celtic Irish Catholics of Gaelic Ireland, who in 1922 formed the independent Irish Free State, from the Scotch-Irish descendants of Ulster Scots and Anglo-Irish of the Plantation of Ulster, which became Northern Ireland and remained part of the United Kingdom. In 1927, proposed immigration quotas based on CPG figures were rejected by the President's Committee chaired by the Secretaries of State, Commerce, and Labor, with the President reporting to Congress "the statistical and historical information available raises grave doubts as to the whole value of these computations as the basis for the purposes intended."
Among the criticisms of A Century of Population Growth:
- CPG failed to account for Anglicization of names, assuming any surname that could be English was actually English
- CPG failed to consider first names even when obviously foreign, assuming anyone with a surname that could be English was actually English
- CPG started by classifying all names as Scotch, Irish, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, or other. All remaining names which could not be classed with one of the 6 other listed nationalities, nor identified by the Census clerk as too exotic to be English, were assumed to be English
- CPG classification was an unscientific process by Census clerks with no training in history, genealogy, or linguistics, nor were scholars in those fields consulted
- CPG estimates were produced by a linear process with no checks on potential errors nor opportunity for peer review or scholarly revision once an individual clerk had assigned a name to a nationality
Concluding that CPG "had not been accepted by scholars as better than a first approximation of the truth", the Census Bureau commissioned a study to produce new scientific estimates of the colonial American population, in collaboration with the American Council of Learned Societies, in time to be adopted as basis for legal immigration quotas in 1929, and later published in the journal of the American Historical Association, reproduced in the table below. Note: as in the original CPG report, the "English" category encompassed England and Wales, grouping together all names classified as either "Anglican" or "Cambrian".
Estimated English American population in the Continental United States as of the 1790 Census.
Another source by Thomas L. Purvis in 1984 estimated that people of English ancestry made up about 47.5% of the total population or 60.9% of the European American or white population. The study which gives similar results can be found in The American Revolution, Colin Bonwick in percentages for 1790: 47.9 English, 3.5 Welsh, 8.5 Scotch Irish, 4.3 Scottish, 4.7 Irish, 7.2 German, 2.7 Dutch, 1.7 French, 0.2 Swedish, 19.3 Black, 103.4 British. The difference between the two estimates are found by comparing the ratios of the groups to accommodate and adding the Welsh.
The category 'Irish' in the Bonwick study represents immigrants from Ireland outside the province of Ulster, the overwhelming majority of whom were Protestant and not ethnically Irish, though from Ireland. They were not Irish Catholics. By the time the American War for Independence started in 1776, Catholics were 1.6%, or 40,000 persons of the 2.5 million population of the 13 colonies.
Some 80.7% of the total United States population was of European origin.
Using the first model above, in 1900, an estimated 28,375,000 or 37.8% of the population of the United States was wholly or partly of English ancestry from colonial roots. The estimate was based on the Census Bureaus Estimate that approximately thirty five million white Americans were descended from colonial forebears.