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Westward Who? Estimates of Native White Interstate Migration After the War of 1812

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

James W. Oberly
James W. Oberly
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin—Eau Claire, Eau Claire, Wisconsin 54701
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Abstract

Estimates of interstate migration after 1815 and before 1860 for white, U.S.-born adults are presented. The estimates come from a sample of military bounty land warrant recipients who served in the War of 1812 and show that a majority of veterans spent their adult lives in the same state. The limited amount of interstate movement did conform to traditional descriptions of an east-west pattern. I also consider the social basis for interstate migration.

Type
Papers Presented at the Forty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 46 , Issue 2 , June 1986 , pp. 431 - 440
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1986

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References

The author is Assistant Professor of History, University of Wisconsin—Eau Claire, Eau Claire, Wisconsin 54701. He wishes to thank Stanley Engerman and Robert Margo for comments on this paper. Research support was provided by a University of Wisconsin—Eau Claire Faculty Research and Creative Activities grant and by an Albert Beveridgeresearch grant from the American Historical Association.

1 Thernstrom, Stephan, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Ninteenth Century City (Cambridge, Mass., 1964);Google ScholarCurti, Merle, The Making of an American Community (Stanford, 1959).Google Scholar

2 See Thernstrom, Stephan, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar especially chap. 9 for a discussion of comparative out-migration rates; Knights, Peter, The Plain People of Boston, 1830–1860 (New York, 1971).Google Scholar A good review of the first two decades of social mobility studies is Chudacoff, Howard P., “Sucess and Security: The Meaning of Social Mobility in America,” Reviews in American History, 10 (12 1982), pp. 101–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Prude, Jonathan, The Coming of Industrial Order (New York, 1983);Google Scholar and Morrison, Peter A. and Wheeler, Judith P., “The Image of ‘Elsewhere’ in the American Tradition of Migration,” in McNeill, William, ed., Human Migration (Bloomington, 1980).Google Scholar For writings on the subjects by economists, see Kuznets, Simon and Thomas, Dorothy, Population Redistribution and Economic Growth, United States, 1870–1950, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1957–1964);Google ScholarGalloway, Lowell and Vedder, Richard, “Mobility of Native Americans,” this JOURNAL, 31 (09 1971), pp. 613–649;Google ScholarLebergott, Stanley, “Migration Within the United States, 1800–1960,” this JOURNAL, 30 (12 1970), pp. 839–47.Google Scholar

3 The sampling method is described in my “Acres and Old Men: Military Bounty Land Warrants, 1847–1860,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1982),Google Scholar appendix A. The basic source is the more than half-million military bounty land warrant files, part of the Records of the Bureau of Land Management, housed in Record Group 49, National Archives. One test of the sample's geographical distribution is to measure the percentage share of each state in the sample against the percentage share of each state in the nation's population of white males of fighting age (here, the 1810 census figures on males 16–45). The Pearson correlation coefficient in the test of sample veterans against the national white manpower pooi is 0.86, while a Spearman rank order test produces an Rho of 0.81, both significant at the 0.01 level. For a discussion of the militia as part of early American society and the dominant role it played in the War of 1812 (11 out of 12 soldiers were militiamen in that war), see Mahon, John K., History of the Militia and National Guard (New York, 1983);Google Scholar and Cunliffe, Marcus, Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, 1775–1860 (Boston, 1968).Google Scholar

4 Concentration on interstate movement and same-state persistence does to some extent impose a twentieth-century order on a different nineteenth-century reality. A veteran from Wood County, Virginia (now West Virginia) who moved across the river to Marietta may have viewed the relocation quite casually; to us today, it seems statistically noteworthy. Such a move would be interstate, interregional, and a move from a slave state to a free state. Assembling data on movement at the county level is a more desirable approach but also far more difficult as many of the state militia muster and pay rolls have not survived into the twentieth century. Muster rolls help pin down home county at the time of the war while land warrant files show the home county in the 1850s.

5 On the westward movement, see the treatments by Horsman, Reginald, The Frontier in the Formative Years, 1783–1815 (New York, 1971);Google Scholar and Feller, Daniel, The Public Lands in Jacksonian Politics (Madison, 1984), chap. 2.Google Scholar Regional boundary lines are somewhat arbitrary. Should they reflect geographical boundaries (the Ohio or Mississippi rivers) or social realities? A recent, unusual definition places western Virginia and all of Kentucky in the Old Northwest and excludes antebellum Texas from the South. See McClelland, Peter and Zeckhauser, Richard, Demographic Dimensions of the Early Republic (New York, 1982).Google Scholar

6 Migration estimates for colonial and Revolutionary War militiamen are presented by Villaflor, Georgia and Sokoloff, Kenneth in their “Migration in Colonial America,” Social Science History, 6 (Fall 1982),CrossRefGoogle Scholar appendix A. On the political implications of southerners in the lower Ohio Valley free states, see McPherson, James, Ordeal by Fire (New York, 1982),Google Scholar chap. 2. On Kansas as the deadly end meeting place of northern and southern migrants, see Galloway, and Vedder, , “Mobility of Native Americans.” The most reliable guide to the troubles in Kansas remainsGoogle ScholarGates, Paul W., Fifty Million Acres (Ithaca, 1954).Google Scholar

7 Turner, Frederick Jackson, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920), pp. 99–106.Google Scholar

8 A more detailed account of the interstate and intrastate movement of Virginians is my “Geographical Mobility of Virginia Veterans of the War of 1812” (Paper delivered to the 1985 meeting of the Society of Historians of the Early Republic).

9 Chudacoff, , “Success and Security.”Google Scholar See also Swierenga, Robert, “Agriculture and Rural Life: The New Rural History,” in Gardner, James B. and Adams, George R., eds., Ordinary People and Everyday Life (Nashville, 1983).Google Scholar

10 Class, historians have come to learn, is power perceived and felt but cannot be easily reduced to numerical categories. The point is important in studying a nation emerging from a revolution (in some measure against excessive public privilege and power) and which is about to create a system of political parties based upon the denunciation of privilege and distinctions. The most cited work in changing thought about class is Thompson's, E. P.Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1966 ed.), particularly his now famous preface, pp. 9–13.Google Scholar

11 Some petitions to Congress in the 1850s asking for bounty lands argued that length of active duty reflected class, position. See Records of the House of Representatives, Petitions and Memorials, Record Group 223, Accession HR 33A-G20.l, National Archives.

12 All three independent variables were coded or recoded into dichotomous form: militia rank into enlisted men and officers; literacy as illiterate or literate; and length of service into less than or more than six months.

13 The sample of 1596 veterans, widows, and heirs had to report their county of residence at the time of land warrant application and had to give a mailing address for receipt of the warrant. Some of the warrantees received their land bounty under a congressional act of 1850, while others had to wait for congressional generosity until 1855. See Oberly, “Acres and Old Men,” chap. 2. The delay until after 1855 made many of the warrantees difficult to trace in the 1850 census, despite a county-level identification. Consequently, I only located 220 out of the 500 subsample in the manuscript census.

14 A regression with a state's percentage of out-migrants (calculated from Table 1) as the dependent variable, and land area and population density in 1820 as independent variables did not produce significant coefficients and an R2 of only .08.

15 The connection between land availability and fertility rates is discussed in Easterlin, Richard, “Population Change and Farm Settlement in the Northern United States,” this JOURNAL, 36 (03 1976), pp. 45–83;Google ScholarSchapiro, Morton O., “A Land Availability Model of Fertility Changes in the Northern United States, 1760–1870,” this JOURNAL, 42 (09 1982), pp. 577–600;Google Scholar and Leet, Don R., “The Determinants of the Fertility Transition in Antebellum Ohio,” this JOURNAL, 36(06 1976), pp. 359–78.Google Scholar Marx's comment about the westward movement in America is in Capital (New York, 1967), Book I, pp. 765–774.Google Scholar The literature on republicanism over the past 25 years is quite extensive. A useful review is found in McCoy, Drew R., The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, 1980).Google Scholar The Jeffersonians' equation of farm ownership with independence and civic virtue did not preclude extensive market participation. See Appleby, Joyce O., “Commercial Farming and the ‘Agrarian Myth’ in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History, 68 (03 1982), pp. 833–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar