DEMOGRAPHY
Rapid, unprecedented population growth was the salient feature of American demography from 1754 to 1829. The astounding expansion of that interval came about primarily through exceptionally high fertility rates and relatively low mortality rates. Although immigration was an important growth factor both earlier and later in U.S. history, during those years it paled by comparison to the rate of natural increase in the native population. In fact, inward migration generated less than 4 percent of overall population growth in that period.
The burgeoning population was no match for the vastness of the new nation. Throughout the colonial and early republican era, people spread thinly across the land, making labor scarce and epidemics few. Consequently, wages were good and public health excellent by the standards of the day. Free white American males had an enviable quality of life and level of material well-being. They lived longer than populations elsewhere and better than many people alive outside the United States today. Women and slaves did not fare as well, but their life expectancy was at least comparable to that of their counterparts elsewhere.
TOTAL POPULATION AND GROWTH RATES
The population of British America rose by about 3 percent annually from 1750 to 1830, with a slightly higher growth rate in the mid-Atlantic area and a somewhat lower rate in New England. As a result, the number of people doubled about every twenty-five years. Philosopher and doomsayer Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) foresaw dire consequences of such rapid growth; Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), on the other hand, celebrated the peopling of the new nation. Most Americans of the time tended to view population growth as a sign of progress and a way to reduce the hazards of the sparsely inhabited frontier.
Although establishing accurate population counts is difficult for the early years, scholars estimate that the colonies contained about 1 million residents in 1740 and nearly 2.5 million by 1775. More than half a million Europeans had come to North America as indentured servants by that date. Nearly half a million blacks—only about eighteen thousand free—resided in the colonies when America declared its independence from Britain. One of these was Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave and the first man to die in the name of American freedom. After the American Revolution, national census records indicate a population of 5.3 million by 1800 and nearly 13 million by 1830. As Table 1 indicates, the non-white population remained a stable proportion of the total throughout the period from 1790 to 1830. Most people resided in rural areas, although the percentage of urban dwellers steadily grew over time.
REGIONAL DISTRIBUTION BY RACE
More than 70 percent of individuals living in the colonies were native born by 1700. People of European descent came mostly from British stock; by 1750, descendants of British emigrants outnumbered those with French blood by nearly twenty to one. This is not surprising, given that Spain and England were the primary owners of North American territory at this time. France, which ceded the Louisiana Territory in 1762, did not reacquire it until 1800, and then held it only to 1803. By 1760, settlers had spread throughout New England, down the Atlantic coast, and into the Piedmont. The population of the original thirteen colonies divided roughly into thirds among New England, the mid-Atlantic, and the South at the time of the American Revolution.
Even before the Revolution, intrepid pioneers had begun to cut through the Cumberland Gap and enter what became Kentucky and Tennessee. The Northwest Territory joined the original colonies during the 1780s, and the Louisiana Purchase added large amounts of land in 1803. Florida came into the mix in 1819. This was the sum of the United States for over twenty years. Not until the 1840s did the country expand again.
By the time Britain and the United States engaged in another war in 1812, just over 1 million people—about 15 percent of the total population—lived west of the Appalachians. In that year, the center of population (COP) moved westward from Maryland to Virginia. Population growth rates west of the Appalachians ranged from 5 to 7 percent annually in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and the area that became West Virginia contained the COP each decade from 1820 to 1850. Escalating growth continued to be a hallmark of the trans-Appalachian
| Population of the United States, 1790–1830 | |||||||
| POPULATION (millions) | PERCENTAGE | ||||||
| Year | Total | White | Nonwhite | Nonwhite | Urban | % Increase in Total from Previous Decade | % Increase in Total Due to Immigration |
| 1790 | 3.9 | 3.2 | 0.7 | 17.9 | 5.2 | ||
| 1800 | 5.3 | 4.3 | 1.0 | 18.9 | 6.1 | 35.9 | n/a |
| 1810 | 7.2 | 5.9 | 1.3 | 18.1 | 7.3 | 35.8 | 3.3 |
| 1820 | 9.6 | 7.9 | 1.7 | 17.7 | 7.2 | 33.3 | 2.1 |
| 1830 | 12.9 | 10.6 | 2.3 | 17.8 | 11.7 | 34.4 | 3.8 |
area, which hosted almost half of all Americans when the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter.
The southern population differed from that in the rest of the nation long before the Civil War. As Table 2 shows, the South was home to fewer than 40 percent of whites but over 90 percent of blacks—mostly slaves—throughout the early republican era.
FERTILITY
Early Americans were notoriously fecund. Although precise measures of fertility are impossible to obtain, demographers have used various indirect ways to estimate typical family size. These include the number of children born per one thousand people, number of children born per one thousand women of childbearing years, number of children under age five per one thousand women of childbearing years (also known as the child-woman ratio), and total fertility rates. Infant mortality rates as well as fertility obviously affect the child-woman ratio, but data available for early years often yield no other measure of fertility. Total fertility rates attempt to measure the number of children the average woman would have had if she lived throughout her entire child-bearing period (usually ages twenty to forty-four).
White birthrates in North America per one thousand women were from about forty-five to fifty in colonial days, as compared to just under thirty in Europe at the same time and twelve in the United States in 2004. Virtually all children were born to married couples, and colonial women married early, at an average age of between twenty and twenty-three—about two years earlier than their European counterparts. Fragmentary evidence indicates that the average woman in 1800 married before age twenty and bore seven children, with very few women remaining unmarried. Not until after the 1810 birth cohort of women (who began having children by about 1830) did marital fertility begin to decline significantly.
Obtaining estimates of family size for the white population is challenging; doing the same for nonwhites is nearly impossible. Perhaps the best evidence comes from interviews with ex-slaves conducted by the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s, which indicate that the average number of children depended upon family type. These data suggest that two-parent consolidated households (about half of families) had 7.2 children on average, whereas two-parent divided households (one-eighth of families) had 8.0 and one-parent female-headed households (one-third of families) 5.7 children. Naturally, these figures pertain to antebellum families rather than those from the colonial or early republican era. Nonetheless, they suggest that black fertility was comparable to white fertility in those days.
MORTALITY
After the first years of starvation in the colonies, low mortality rates prevailed. During the colonial period, the annual death rate in Europe was about forty per thousand people; in the colonies, the figure was more like from twenty to twenty-five per thousand. White American males achieved an unheard-of life expectancy. Table 3 compares life expectancy for groups of British residents and U.S. native-born white males. Not surprisingly, British peers (nobility) could expect to enjoy a longer lifespan starting at birth than the ordinary population. Yet peers at age ten anticipated from four to nine fewer years of life on average than white male Americans born from 1750 to 1825.
Another notable feature of the American experience was the low rate of child mortality. Before 1750, children and infants suffered high death rates
| Southern Population by Race, 1800–1830 (millions) | ||||||
| SOUTHERN WHITES | SOUTHERN BLACKS | |||||
| Number | % US Whites | Number Slaves | Number Free | % US Blacks | Slaves as % of Free Persons in the South | |
| 1800 | 1.70 | 39.5 | 0.86 | 0.06 | 92.0 | 49 |
| 1810 | 2.19 | 37.1 | 1.16 | 0.11 | 97.7 | 50 |
| 1820 | 2.78 | 35.2 | 1.51 | 0.13 | 96.5 | 52 |
| 1830 | 3.55 | 33.5 | 1.98 | 0.18 | 93.9 | 53 |
everywhere. But by 1800, the death rate in the United States had slowed to about twenty per thousand babies dying before their first birthday. This was far lower than death rates elsewhere in the world. By comparison, the figure for the early twenty-first century is less than ten per thousand in the United States.
Table 3 specifies two mortality measures: life expectancy at birth for English subpopulations and life expectancy at age ten for English and American subpopulations. Researchers using historical data often rely upon the latter so as not to confound trends in adult mortality with trends in infant and child mortality. Evidence suggests that life expectancy at age ten rose through most of the eighteenth century in the United States. Food, fuel, and housing materials were plentiful, and thinly populated areas kept the communication of diseases to a minimum. But the first three decades of the nineteenth century were not so kind, and life expectancy declined, partly because of crowding, poor sanitation, and unsafe water.
Aggregate patterns mask an important gender difference, however. Throughout the period, white males who survived infancy lived into their sixties, whereas women could expect to die in their forties. Given the high fertility rates and significant possibility of death during childbirth, this difference, however lamentable, is understandable.
As with fertility, less is known about the mortality of the nonwhite population. Recent scholarship suggests that, although infant mortality among slaves was relatively high, slaves who survived past childhood enjoyed life spans nearly as long as those of their masters.
IMMIGRATION AND POPULATION GROWTH
External migration dominated American population growth only in the early days of European settlement. Very rough estimates put the flow of immigrants into the United States at 115,000 between 1730 and 1760, 444,000 from 1760 to 1790, and 673,000 from 1790 to 1820. By 1775, only 1 in 10 whites and about 2 in 10 blacks were foreign-born. The birth rate of the native white and black population in the last decade of the eighteenth century was about 55 per 1,000 and the death rate about 28 per 1,000, leading to a rate of natural increase of 27 per 1,000—almost exactly the same as the rate of population growth overall. As Table 1 indicated, immigration mattered little for population growth between 1790 and 1830 as well. Although black slaves were imported into the United States in significant numbers until the ban on the trans-atlantic trade in 1808, natural increase was far more important as a source of population growth for them, just as it was for their white masters.
ETHNICITY AND DEMOGRAPHY: A NOTE
Overall birth and death rates were similar for blacks and whites in British North America. This was an anomaly, since elsewhere in the Americas, black life expectancy was quite short. In part, U.S. slaves lived longer because of agricultural work that was less brutal (not necessarily as a consequence of kinder masters, but rather, as a result of easier crops to raise and better climates), a superior diet, and a more even gender composition. The distribution of imported relative to native blacks shows the contrast sharply. Only about 6 percent of the slaves crossing the Atlantic came to the United States. Yet by 1825 the country contained 36 percent of slaves in the Western Hemisphere.
The main group excluded from the demographic bounty of the New World was Native Americans, who were devastated by smallpox and measles early on and forced migration later. By 1715, nonindigenous people dominated North America. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 set the stage for the tragic Trail of Tears, on which one-quarter of the Cherokee tribe
| A Comparison of Life Expectancy for U.S. White Males, British Male Peers, and the English Population | ||||
| England and Wales (both sexes) | British Peers | U.S. Native-Born White Males | ||
| 1750–1774 | 36.3 | 44.6 | 46.3 | 55.8 |
| 1775–1799 | 37.0 | 46.9 | 46.1 | 51.9 |
| 1800–1825 | 41.5 | 49.3 | 48.3 | 52.3 |
died while traveling from North Carolina to Oklahoma in mid-winter.
See also Childbirth and Childbearing; Contraception and Abortion; Domestic Life; Health and Disease; Immigration and Immigrants: Overview; Immigration and Immigrants: Race and Ethnicity; Slavery: Slave Trade, African.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bogue, Donald J. The Population of the United States. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1959.
Coale, Ansley J., and Melvin Zelnik. New Estimates of Fertility and Population in the United States. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963.
Fogel, Robert William, and Stanley L. Engerman. Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974.
Forster, Colin, and G. S. L. Tucker. Economic Opportunity and White American Fertility Ratios, 1800–1860. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972.
McCusker, John J., and Russell R. Menard. The Economy of British America, 1607–1789. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.
Smith, Daniel Scott. "The Demographic History of Colonial New England." Journal of Economic History 32 (1972): 165–183.
U.S. Bureau of the Census. Historical Statistics of the U.S. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1960, 1975. Also available at http://www.census.gov.
Wahl, Jenny. "New Results on the Decline in Household Fertility in the United States from 1750 to 1900." In Long-Term Factors in American Economic Growth. Edited by Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Jenny B. Wahl
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