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Population Change and Farm Settlement in the Northern United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Richard A. Easterlin
Richard A. Easterlin
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Abstract

As farm settlement spread westward, area after area exhibited remarkably similar economic and demographic changes, among them, the establishment of a virtually zero growth rate of farm population. At bottom this was due to a shift in farm family fertility from very high to replacement levels, a trend apparent in older areas as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century despite the abundance of good farm land to the west. The principal source of this wholly voluntary adjustment of fertility was the increasing difficulty encountered by farm parents in providing for their children the kind of start in life they would like them to have. Similar pressures may account for other rural fertility declines in the historical past or today's LDC's.

Type
Papers Presented at the Thirty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , March 1976 , pp. 45 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1976

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References

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7 In generalizing about the “mechanics of migration,” Bogue describes a similar pattern, dating the shift to substantial out-migration at “perhaps a generation and a half after settlement.” (Allan G. Bogue, From Prairie to Cornbelt, p. 20.)

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9 New Hampshire is omitted from Figure 2d. The New Hampshire series for farm value per acre is level (though fluctuating) from 1850 onward, but at a much lower level than is reached in the other states, perhaps because of the comparative in feriority of farm land in that state, or the much later settlement stage observed.

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11 Sampling procedures and tests of representativeness are described in Bateman, Fred and Foust, James D., “A Sample of Rural Households Selected from the 1860 Manuscript Censuses,” Agricultural History, 48 (January 1974), 75–93Google Scholar.

12 Because data at the township level were not available, the ratio is computed for the county in which each township is located.

13 The figures for total children omit those who have left home, but for this age group of women, the bias is not serious. See Easterlin, Richard A., Alter, George, and Condran, Gretchen A., “Farms and Farm Families in Old and New Areas: The Northern States in 1860”(Paper delivered at the MSSB Summer Conference in Historical Demography,Williamstown, Mass.,July 14–27, 1974), p. 16Google Scholar.

14 The cumulative fertility of women aged 30–39 is not, of course, their completed fertility, but the pattern of differentials shown by the former is likely to be a reasonable approximation to the differentials that their completed fertility will show.

15 Easterlin, Alter, and Condran, “Farms and Farm Families,” p. 45.

16 Bash, “Changing Birth Rates”; Bash, “Differential Fertility”; Sydenstricker,. “A Study of the Fertility.”

17 Easterlin, Alter, and Condran, “Farms and Farm Families,” p. 36 ff. See also Richard A. Easterlin, “Factors in the Decline of Farm Family Fertility in the American North,” Journal of American History, forthcoming.

18 Note, in this respect, the similarities pointed out by Curti between educational conditions in Wisconsin and Vermont at this time. See Curti, Merle, The Making of an American Community (Stanford, 1959), ch. xiv.Google Scholar

19 See Yasuba, Birth Rates of the White Population, ch. iii. Tucker obtains similar cross-section results in an analysis of British data. See Tucker, G. S. L., “A Note on the Reliability of Fertility Ratios,” Australian Economic History Review, 14 (September 1974), 160–167CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 This hypothesis was stressed earlier in my own work. See Easterlin, Richard A., “Does Human Fertility Adjust to the Environment?” American Economic Review, 61 (May 1971), 401Google Scholar.

21 Easterlin, Alter, and Condran, “Farms and Farm Families,” pp. 48–50.

22 Lebergott, Stanley, Manpower in Economic Growth: The American Record since 1800 (New York, 1964), p. 539Google Scholar.

23 Only state data are readily available. Wage rate data at the county level have been obtained for a few states from the manuscript censuses for 1850 and 1860 and these give a picture consistent with the state data.

24 Danhof, Change in Agriculture, pp. 74–78.

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26 A recent paper by Leet shows this clearly. In his data, value per acre correlates best with fertility, although the advantage is slight (Leet, “Inter-relations of Population Density”).

27 See Davis, Kingsley, “Theory of Change and Response in Modern Demographic History,” Population Index (October 1963)Google Scholar; Davis, James C., A Venetian Family and Its Fortune 1500–1900 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1975)Google Scholar; Spengler, Joseph J., France Faces Depopulation, 2nd ed. (New York, 1968)Google Scholar. In a recent paper Nerlove also touches on this; see Nerlove, Marc, “Household and Economy: Toward a New Theory of Population and Economic Growth,” Journal of Political Economy, 82 (March/April 1974), pp. S200–218CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Greven, Philip J. Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, 1970)Google Scholar.

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31 Some evidence on the limited role of native Americans in factory labor is given in Ibid., ch. v; and Hutchinson, Edward P., Immigrants and Their Children, 1850–1950 (New York, 1956)Google Scholar. In Four Generations, Greven provides evidence on the increase over time in the entry of sons into trades. Sometimes the cost of establishing a child took the form of outlays on education.

32 Davis, Easterlin, and Parker, eds., American Economic Growth, pp. 143–145.

33 Greven, Four Generations; Morris, Richard B., Studies in the History of American Law (Philadelphia, 1959)Google Scholar.

34 Earlier studies which use the notion of targets or their equivalent are Easterlin, Richard A., “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot?” in David, Paul A. and Reder, Melvin W., eds., Nations and Households in Economic Growth: Essays in Honor of Moses Abramovitz (New York, 1974), pp. 89–125Google Scholar; and Easterlin, Richard A., “Relative Economic Status and the American Fertility Swing,” in Sheldon, Eleanor B., ed., Social Structure, Family Life Styles, and Economic Behavior (Philadelphia, 1973)Google Scholar. In a wide-ranging study centering on state fertility data primarily for the twentieth century, Peter Lindert has had considerable success with a relative income variable (Peter Lindert, “Fertility and Scarcity in America,” unpublished manuscript). Leibenstein has recently developed a theory in which targets play a critical role; Harvey Leibenstein, “The Economic Theory of Fertility Decline,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (Fall 1974), pp. 1–31. One of the first applications of notions of this sort to fertility behavior is Banks, J., Prosperity and Parenthood (London, 1954)Google Scholar.

35 Gagan, David P., “Men of Property: The System of Inheritance in Nineteenth Century Rural Ontario”(Paper delivered at the Economic History Association meeting,Chicago, Illinois,September 19, 1975)Google Scholar.

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37 Ibid., p. 121.

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39 One of the few studies providing evidence on farm succession practices is Tarver, James D., “Intra-Family Farm Succession Practices,” Rural Soctology, 17 (September 1952), 266–271Google Scholar.

40 As quoted in Danhof, Change in Agriculture, p. 111 [italics added]. References to the concern for providing for one's children appear also in Allan G. Bogue, From Prairie to Cornbelt, pp. 51, 185, 193, 266.

41 Spillman, W. J., “The Agricultural Ladder,” American Economic Review, 9 (March 1919), 170–179Google Scholar.

42 This figure is the proportion for those other than Spillman's “FO” group obtaining their farms by purchase (excluding “purchase from close relatives” which Spillman takes to mean “easy terms”). The FO group refers to persons who went directly from unpaid family labor to farm ownership status. These persons typically would have needed family help to purchase a farm. Similarly, it is quite likely that a number of those in his other groups who purchased farms had family help—hence the description of the 36 percent figure in the text as a maximum estimate. Spillman reports about one-third of his sample acquiring farms by inheritance, but this refers only to the direct transmission of the family farm.

43 Friedlander, “Demographic Responses.”

44 Kingsley Davis, “Theory of Change.”

45 Two papers by R. Marvin McInnis document the association between fertility and land availability in both Ontario and Quebec (“Birth Rates and Land Availability in Nineteenth Century Canada” [Paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America, Toronto, April 13–15, 1972]; and “Farm Households, Family Size and Economic Circumstances in Mid-Nineteenth Century Ontario,” [Paper delivered at the Cliometrics Conference, Madison, Wisconsin, April 25–27, 1974]). Several studies reveal parallels between fertility declines in Australia and the United States (Ansley J. Coale and Melvin Zelnik, New Estimates of Fertility and Population in the United States [Princeton, 1963]; Forster, Colin, “Aspects of Australian Fertility, 1861–1901,” Australian Economic History Review, 14 [September 1974], 105–122CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jones, E. F., “Fertility Decline in Australia and New Zealand 1861–1936,” Population Index, 37 [October-December 1971], 301–338CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

46 Ohlin, Per Goran, “The Positive and the Preventive Check: a Study of the Rate of Growth of Pre-Industrial Population” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1956)Google Scholar.

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48 Thomas Merrick is currently exploring this possibility for Brazil. See Merrick, Thomas W., “Interregional Differences in Fertility in Brazil, 1920–1970,” Demography, 2 (August 1974), 423–440CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Thomas W. Merrick, “Demographic Aspects of Rural Settlement in Brazil: Evidence from the 1970 Census,” unpublished manuscript.

49 James C. Davis, A Venetian Family, ch. ix.

50 Kuznets, Simon, “International Differences in Capital Formation and Financing,” in Universities-National Bureau Committee for Economic Research, Capital Formation and Economic Growth (Princeton, 1955), pp. 82–98Google Scholar; Lebergott, Stanley, “Are the Rich Getting Richer?—Trends in U.S. Wealth Concentration”(Paper delivered at the Economic History Association meeting,Chicago, Illinois,September 19, 1975)Google Scholar; Lee Soltow, “Inheritance of Wealth and Fertility,” unpublished progress report; Soltow, Lee, Patterns of Wealthholding in Wisconsin since 1850 (Madison, 1971)Google Scholar. Daniel Scott Smith is currently engaged in promising work on inheritance patterns. See his “Inheritance and the Position and Orientation of Colonial Women”(Paper delivered at the second Berkshire Conference on the history of women, Radcliffe College, October 27, 1974).