Demography. Demography examines the sources and consequences of population increases or decreases.This, in turn, involves assessing the rates of birth, death, and geographic movement—fertility, mortality, and migration. Historically, American demography fits into a three‐stage progression characteristic of societies that now have low birth and death rates. Convenient labels for these three stages are Malthusian‐frontier, neo‐Malthusian, and post‐Malthusian. (The term “Malthusian” comes from Thomas Robert Malthus, a pioneering English theorist of demography). Originating in the theory of demographic transition, this periodization scheme locates a turbulent transitional era, between two periods of relative stability, when a demographic pattern of roughly balanced
high birth and death rates gives way to one of relatively equal
low birth and death rates.
While “demographic transition” theorists once portrayed the decline in fertility as a response to a reduction in mortality, this theory is today usually seen as a useful description, or first approximation, of historical experience rather than a guide to cause and effect or a detailed blueprint that adequately captures all of the features of the demographic history of the United States or any other society. In comparative terms, the most distinctive feature of American demographic history is the extremely rapid growth of people of European and African origins, from 250,000 in 1700 to a projected 275 million by the year 2000—a thousandfold increase. Over these same three hundred years, the population of Europe multiplied only fivefold.
The human impact of this demographic transition is profound. Before 1800, in the traditional or pretransitional era of high fertility, the average woman who survived to age fifty had seven children; in the 1990s, the average was two children. The high fertility of the traditional era produced a very young aggregate population. About half of the pre‐1800 population was under age sixteen; by the 1990s, the median age was thirty‐three years. Only one in forty Americans in 1800 was over sixty‐five, compared to one in eight at the end of the twentieth century.
Mortality rates have changed dramatically as well. Until about the 1870s, the average
life expectancy in the United States was around forty‐five years, compared to seventy‐six years in the 1990s. The impact of mortality decline is somewhat misleading if portrayed in terms of averages, however, since relatively few individuals actually die around the average age at death. Instead, infants and young children once died at radically higher rates than today, pulling the average down. In the pre‐1870s period, about one in six infants died before his or her first birthday, and one in four died before age five. In the 1990s, fewer than 2 percent of American infants died before their fifth birthday. Instead of infectious diseases, which took a heavy toll on the young, the major killers at the end of the twentieth century were chronic
diseases related to aging, especially cardiovascular disease and
cancer, which together accounted for nearly two‐thirds of all deaths.
Three elements characterize the demography of the earliest stage of American population history: (1) an extremely high rate of overall growth that, despite a substantial contribution of
immigration, was mostly due to natural increase—the difference between birth and death rates; (2) high fertility caused by markedly younger marriage ages for women than in western Europe; and (3) mortality that was high compared to the late twentieth century, but moderate in comparison to contemporary death rates in Europe.
The term “Malthusian‐frontier” summarizes the larger economic and cultural context of this demographic regime of rapid natural increase in early America. Writing in 1798, Malthus linked mortality rates and marriage age to the tenuous but ultimately equilibrating relationship between population size and food supply. Because Malthus lived in an era when sustained growth of economic
productivity was nearly inconceivable, long‐term population growth seemed impossible. Demographic expansion, he theorized, would ultimately be halted by what he called the “positive check” of higher mortality caused by famine and malnutrition.
Malthus, however, viewed eighteenth‐century America as an exception to his general rule that resource constraints would limit population growth. America's seemingly boundless frontier and low population density meant that land was cheap and labor expensive. Because couples could acquire land relatively easily, they could, Malthus reasoned (as had Benjamin
Franklin a half‐century earlier), marry earlier than their counterparts in Europe. This relaxation of what Malthus called the “preventive check” of late marriage spurred American population growth.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, couples married later and, more significantly, began to practice family limitation. Fertility fell by 50 percent, even though few couples apparently made use of contraceptive devices. These nineteenth‐century trends can be attributed in part to the declining availability of agricultural land as the frontier moved toward closure.
Urbanization also played a role in this large‐scale demographic transition. Before 1800, during the “Malthusian‐frontier” era, only one in twenty Americans lived in a town or city. Since 1970, with the process of urbanization nearly complete, about three‐fourths of Americans have resided in places with populations over 2,500. While large numbers of foreigners arrived in the United States from 1840 to 1920, in no decade did immigration account for more than one‐third of total population increase. High (though declining) rates of natural increase continued as a distinctive feature of American demographic history during this transitional stage.
The third phase of American demographic history, the closing decades of the twentieth century, was characterized by the increasing irrelevance of marriage, demographically speaking. The wide gap between fertility rates of married and unmarried women shrank dramatically in this period. By the 1990s, further, Americans were marrying later than at any time in the nation's history.
The three‐period framework fits the historical experience of
African Americans as well. As with the population as a whole, rapid rates of aggregate growth characterized the early historical demography of the American black population, especially in the era of
slavery. Of the 10 to 11 million Africans brought to the New World in the slave trade, some 600,000 to 650,000 were imported into the area that became the United States. During the nineteenth century, annual natural increase among American slaves was over 2 percent, only slightly under the rate for the white population. Compared to slaves in other regions of the Americas, the enslaved population in the United States had both higher fertility and lower mortality. Since emancipation, blacks and whites have experienced the same trends in mortality and fertility, although both rates have been consistently higher for blacks. The black‐white difference in life expectancy at birth was six years in 1990 compared to eight years in 1900.
Prior to the twentieth century, the indigenous Indian population experienced a radically different demographic trajectory from that of European and African Americans. Instead of rapidly increasing, the numbers of Indians declined precipitously, a demographic catastrophe owing largely to extremely high death rates from diseases of European origin—most importantly
smallpox, typhus, and measles. Having no previous experience with these diseases, whole populations were nearly wiped out by epidemics. Estimates of the numbers of Indians in North America before European contact are varied and disputed. One conjecture places the figure at more than 5 million in the conterminous U.S. area in 1492. By 1800, the Indian population was about 600,000. It reached its nadir of 250,000 in the 1890s. The Indian population rebounded after 1900, however, reaching nearly 1.9 million in the 1990 census.
The public discussion of population‐related issues over the course of American history has typically reflected these broad trends. During the
Colonial Era, Americans exulted in, and British officials worried about, the colonies' exploding population. Central to nineteenth‐century demographic thinking were the relationships among land availability, population, and the social order. Thomas
Jefferson and James
Madison believed that territorial expansion would sustain the egalitarian economic basis of republican political institutions. During the
Antebellum Era, both southern and northern writers tied the eventual extinction of slavery to a limitation of its territorial expansion into cheap lands. At century's end, historian Frederick Jackson
Turner saw the closing of the frontier as the end of an epoch in American history.
Differential fertility among various groups attracted considerable comment during the period of transition to lower birth rates. Native‐born New Englanders, the vanguard group in the control of fertility within marriage, were thought to be on a path toward “race suicide.” By the close of the twentieth century, population questions often intertwined with value debates over such issues as
abortion, women's status, and intergenerational equity.
Even in the third stage of relative demographic stability, important changes still occurred. The baby boom of the post–
World War II era, peaking in 1957, nearly doubled total fertility rates. A “baby bust” of equal magnitude then surprised the experts. These fluctuations gave rise to the prospect of the nation's having too few people of working age to fund the retirement of the baby boomers beginning in the second decade of the twenty‐first century. A new wave of immigration, principally from Latin America and Asia, was another important development of the late twentieth century with demographic implications.
Despite these changes, by the late twentieth century, fertility fluctuated narrowly around replacement levels, mortality was declining at a markedly lower pace than in the three‐quarters of a century after 1880, urbanization had nearly ended, and Americans had become less residentially and geographically mobile. With only 3 percent of the workforce engaged in
agriculture, it was obvious that the long‐term shift from farm to city was over. As a new century approached, demographic phenomena were much more stable than they had been during the previous century and a half.
See also
Birth Control and Family Planning;
Columbian Exchange;
Heart Disease;
Indian History and Culture;
Life Stages;
Marriage and Divorce.
Bibliography
Robert V. Wells , Revolutions in Americans' Lives: A Demographic Perspective on the History of Americans, Their Families, and Their Society, 1982.
Samuel H. Preston and and Michael R. Haines , Fatal Years: Child Mortality in Late Nineteenth‐Century America, 1991.
Massimo Livi‐Bacci , A Concise History of World Population, 1992.
Douglas L. Anderton,, Richard E. Barrett,, and and Donald L. Bogue , The Population of the United States, 3d. ed., 1997.
Michael R. Haines , The Population of the United States, 1790–1920, in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. II, The Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Stanley Engerman and Robert Gallman, 2001.
Daniel Scott Smith
