In 1790 the federal government took the first census of the new country. The census takers found a population of four million people: fewer than the superpowers of the day, for the British had nearly fifteen million people and the French numbered twenty-six million. One-fifth of the Americans (800,000) were African Americans held in slavery. The small US population was dispersed over the eastern third of an entire continent, for the nation stretched 1,000 miles east-to-west, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, and about 2,000 miles from Florida, on the south, to the Great Lakes, on the north.