Well no, it should be where each nation that's *supposed* to be alive is alive. Otherwise you'd have Carthage, Greece, and Rome when America is around.
Probably the best way to do it would be to manually create a "realistic start" in the worldbuilder but America spawns in 1730 which makes that kind of... odd.
As a side note, America's geography is messed up a bit in RFC. I'm going to need to look at the city name map to figure out what's up and if there's an easy fix that doesn't affect gameplay (I'm thinking that the Mississippi delta needs to be shifted left one tile, possibly two... but then the cities are wrong.)
I know I saw a picture of a city name map in one of the game-creation threads, but I can't seem to find it on my local copy of RFC. Is it in the XML, and if so, is there an easy way to view it in the worldviewer?