Full Citation
Title: The Population of the United States, 1790-1920
Citation Type: Book, Section
Publication Year: 2000
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Abstract: In the late eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin commented on the remarkably high fertility and large family size in what was British North America, which he attributed to the ease of acquiring good farm land. His comments were reiterated by Thomas Robert Malthus in his famous Essay on the Principle of Population:But the English North American colonies, now the powerful people of the United States of America, made by far the most rapid progress. To the plenty of good land which they possessed in common with the Spanish and Portuguese settlements, they added a greater degree of liberty and equality. The political institutions that prevailed were favorable to the alienation and division of property. There were no tithes in any of the States and scarcely any taxes. And on account of the extreme cheapness of good land a capital could not be more advantageously employed than in agriculture, which at the same time that it supplies the greatest quantity of healthy work affords the most valuable produce of society.The consequence of these favorable circumstances united was a rapidity of increase probably without parallel in history. Throughout all of the northern colonies, the population was found to double in twenty-five years.Although Malthus guessed at the rate of natural increase (implying a 2.8 percent per year rate of growth), he was not far off. During the period 1790 to 1810, population growth in the new nation (including migration) exceeded 3 percent per annum (see Table 4.2).
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Authors: Haines, Michael R.
Editors: Engerman, Stanley L.; Gallman, Robert E.
Pages:
Volume Title: The Long Nineteenth Century
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publisher Location: New York, NY
Volume: 2
Edition:
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Migration and Immigration, Other
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