By the end of the decade, about one-third of
Pennsylvania's population was found west of her central counties. At
that time New York and Pennsylvania became the most populous states
in the Union. Virginia and Massachusetts, which in 1790 held the
lead, had now fallen to third and eighth place respectively. New
Jersey, meanwhile, lagged far behind, and Delaware's rate of
increase was only five and one-half per cent. In 1829 a member of
the Virginia constitutional convention asked: "Do gentlemen really
believe, that it is owing to any diversity in the principles of the
State Governments of the two states, that New York has advanced to
be the first state in the Union, and that Virginia, from being the
first, is now the third, in wealth and population? Virginia ceded
away her Kentucky, to form a new state; and New York has retained
her Genessee--there lies the whole secret." [Footnote: Va.
Constitutional Convention, Debates (1829-1830), 405.]
In the closing years of the eighteenth century and the first decade
of the nineteenth the New York lands beyond the sources of the
Mohawk had been taken up by a colonization characteristically
western.
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