High birth rates accounted for some of the growth. The city thus grew at an exceptionally rapid rate of more than 4 percent annually during the 1790s, despite very high death rates, especially during the yellow fever epidemics responsible for at least 9,000 deaths.
![us population density map 1840 us population density map 1840](https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/border.jpg)
A decade later, the federal census recorded 67,811 people in Philadelphia. The first federal census takers in 1790 counted 44,096 residents in the city of Philadelphia and its adjacent suburbs of Southwark and the Northern Liberties, making it the most populous urban center in the new nation. A series of deadly yellow fever epidemics plaguing Philadelphia in the 1790s also persuaded politicians to move. While many Philadelphians wanted to keep the capital in their city after 1800, political compromises over the national debt and related issues and the desire of southerners to move the capital to an area bounded by slave states, among several concerns, led Congress to move the capital southward. Philadelphia also served as the residence of Congress during most of the Confederation Era (1776-1787). The Second Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence in the city in 1776, and the United States Constitutional Convention met there in 1787. Not only was it geographically located near the midpoint of the new nation, but it also had served as the unofficial political center for the past fifteen years. The Pennsylvania city was a fitting capital. The capital of the United States officially moved on December 6, 1790, from New York City to Philadelphia, where it remained for the next decade before moving again to the District of Columbia. The Pennsylvania State House in 1799, depicted in an engraving by William Birch. As the largest metropolitan area in America, it had a significant impact on region, acting as a magnet for people, wagons, goods, money, and produce from New Jersey and southeast Pennsylvania and sending out its products and setting up commercial and other connections in the region in turn. Philadelphia was the focal point of intellectual and high culture in the new country as well. It served as a major commercial hub of the nascent nation and became its financial center during the 1790s. Philadelphia was the premier urban city in North America during the Early National era, a city so admired that people nicknamed it the “Athens of America.” Between 17, it was the official political capital of the United States.
![us population density map 1840 us population density map 1840](https://www.uni-ulm.de/fileadmin/_migrated/pics/KDE_Cultural_GrowthMap_1500-2000_1000-1500_01.png)
Although the original city plan envisioned a grid pattern stretching between two major rivers, residents clustered within eight or nine blocks of the Delaware.
![us population density map 1840 us population density map 1840](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/lbC9-WfuOIw/maxresdefault.jpg)