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Death and Life in a Colonial Immigrant City: A Demographic Analysis of Philadelphia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Billy G. Smith
Billy G. Smith
Affiliation:
St. Mary's City Commission, Annapolis
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Abstract

This study analyzes the demographic characteristics of a previously neglected area in colonial America—the urban center. Growth, birth, and death rates in Philadelphia between 1720 and 1775 are estimated using a variety of sources. Immigration, smallpox, economic vacillations, and a skewed age structure are attributed primary responsibility in determining the level of and changes in Philadelphia's vital rates. The elevated level of these rates is evident in a comparison with vital rates in Andover and Boston, Massachusetts, and Nottingham, England.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , December 1977 , pp. 863 - 889
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1977

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References

1 Observations by contemporaries such as Benjamin Franklin, the Swedish scientist and colonial traveller Peter Kalm, and the noted demographer Edward Wigglesworth first established this view, and historians, notably Carl Bridenbaugh and John Duffy, have generally perpetuated it. See Labaree, Leonard W. et al. , eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, Conn., 1959—), III, 439, 441Google Scholar; VIII, 77. Labaree, Leonard W., “Franklin as Demographer,” Journal of Economic History, 9 (1949), 25Google Scholar. Benson, Adolph B., ed., The America of 1750: Peter Kalm's Travels in North America (New York, 1964), pp. 33, 51Google Scholar. Vinovskis, M., “The 1789 Life Table of Edward Wigglesworth,” Journal of Economic History, 31 (1971), 574–75CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Bridenbaugh, Carl, Cities in Revolt (New York, 1955), 129–30Google Scholar. Duffy, John, Epidemics in Colonial America (Baton Rouge, 1953), pp. 105–8, 243, 245–47Google Scholar.

2 Impressionistic evidence is liable not only to errors of estimation but also to conscious exaggeration. For example, many of Benjamin Franklin's most familiar comments on the favorable demographic characteristics of the colonies were made in a pamphlet aimed at convincing England to remove restrictions on colonial expansion. Labaree, Benjamin Franklin, IX, 72–74. Overly optimistic claims concerning the health and welfare of colonial cities also were made with pragmatic economic considerations in mind, for unhealthy conditions discouraged business and trade. Franklin may well have ceased publishing Philadelphia's mortality statistics in his newspaper because of his advertisers' concern for the possible adverse effects on Philadelphia's economic affairs. See Cassedy, James, Demography in Early America: Beginnings of the Statistical Mind, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1969), p. 124CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 The most widely used figures are those offered by Carl Bridenbaugh (10,000 in 1720, 13,000 in 1743, 23,750 in 1760, and 40,000 in 1775) and Sam Bass Warner, Jr. (23,739 in 1775). See Bridenbaugh, Carl, Cities in the Wilderness (New York, 1955), p. 143nGoogle Scholar; and Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776 (New York, 1971), p. 224Google Scholar; Warner, Sam Bass Jr., The Private City (Philadelphia, 1968), p. 225Google Scholar. Other estimates are given by Sutherland, Stella H., Population Distribution in Colonial America (New York, 1936), pp. 123–24Google Scholar, 128; and Cremin, Lawrence A., American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607–1783 (New York, 1970), pp. 573–74Google Scholar.

4 The census reported 42,520 people in urban Philadelphia in 1790. Return of the Whole Number of Persons. … (Philadelphia, 1791), p. 45Google Scholar. Benjamin Davies printed a ward and suburban area count of the number of dwellings in 1790, yielding a figure of 6,784. Some Account of the City of Philadelphia. … (Philadelphia, 1794), p. 17Google Scholar. In the 1789 tax assessors' reports for urban Philadelphia 7,598 taxables were counted; the tax assessors' reports are in the Philadelphia City Archives, City Hall. Based on the increase in the number of taxables between 1767 and 1769 and between 1772 and 1774, the 1789 figure was inflated by 1.6 percent, producing an estimate of 7,722 taxables in Philadelphia in 1790. A more detailed explanation of the method of calculating the multipliers and estimating the population is contained in Alexander, John K., “The Philadelphia Numbers Game: An Analysis of Philadelphia's Eighteenth- Century Population,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 98 (1974), 314–24Google Scholar, and Nash, Gary B. and Smith, Billy G., “The Population of Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 99 (1975), 362–68Google Scholar.

5 Between 1749 and 1777, 90 percent of the new houses were built in the “fringe” wards of Dock, Mulberry, or North, or in the suburbs of Southwark and the Northern Liberties. In 1790, the ratio of persons to houses in these areas was only 5.96 as compared to the citywide ratio of 6.27. The basis of these statistics is contained in Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, II, 404; III, 236; and Davies, Some Account, p. 17.

6 While the person to house ratio remained at 6.3 for Philadelphia's Walnut Ward in 1762 and 1790, it increased dramatically in Upper Delaware Ward from 3.48 in 1767 to 4.30 in 1775, and to 7.5 in 1790. Mulberry Ward experienced a similar increase from 3.78 persons per dwelling in 1770 to 6.10 in 1790. These statistics were calculated using the constables' returns in the Philadelphia City Archives and Davies, Some Account, p. 17.

7 Contemporary population estimates of 13,000 in 1744, 14,563 in 1753, 18,756 in 1760, and 28,042 in 1769 support the figures in Table 1. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, III, 237.

8 Using either the population estimates based on the number of houses or the estimates based on the number of taxables as the basis for calculating vital rates will not significantly affect the conclusions of this paper. Use of the house-based population series, for example, produces crude death rate estimates varying an average 1.8 and a maximum 3.5 per thousand from the death rate estimates in Table 2 constructed with the mean population series as a base. Death rates calculated using the taxable-based population series differ an average 1.5 and a maximum 4.1 per thousand from the estimates in Table 2. Birth rates computed from the house-based and taxable-based population series vary an average 2.1 and 2.2 and a maximum 3.8 and 4.6 per thousand, respectively, from the birth rate estimates based on the mean population series presented in Table 5. Maximum divergence of the estimates of vital rates occur during the late 1760s, a period, as explained above, during which a housing-construction boom probably created an overestimation of the population in the house-based population series. In any case, variation between the vital rates calculated from either the house-based or taxable-based population series is minimal, and the general level of the vital rates is the same. While the overall decline in the birth and death rates calculated from the house-based population estimates is more pronounced, the trend of the vital rates remains unaltered no matter which population estimates are used.

9 The bills of mortality are available, except for 1749 and 1750, on microcard as listed in Evans, Charles, American Bibliography: A Chronological Dictionary of all Books, Pamphlets and Periodical Publications Printed in the United States … 1639 … 1820 (Chicago, Ill. and Worcester, Mass., 1903–1959)Google Scholar. The number of deaths in 1746 and 1750 was calculated from information included in the bills of 1747 and 1751. Peter Kalm noted the number of deaths in 1749 and 1745 as recorded by Currie, William, Historical Account of Climates and Diseases of the United States (Philadelphia 1792), p. 188Google Scholar. Names and ages of those interred are in Records of Christ Church, Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. 174; and Church Records of the First Reformed Church, vol. I (1748–1785), Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Franklin's figures are reproduced in Labaree et al., eds., Benjamin Franklin, III, 439; IV, 346.

10 Records of Christ Church; Church Records of the First Reformed Church.

11 For information on the establishment of these churches, see Barratt, Norris Stanley, Outline of the History of Old St. Paul's Church, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,. 1760–1898 (Lancaster, Pa., 1918), pp. 25–26Google Scholar. Rev.Middleton, Thomas C., “Interments in St. Mary's Burying Ground, Philadelphia, from 1788–1800,” American Catholic Historical Society Records, 5 (1894), pp. 21–22Google Scholar. Kelly, Joseph J. Jr., Life and Times in Colonial Philadelphia (Harrisburg, Pa., 1973), pp. 145–46Google Scholar.

12 Carl Bridenbaugh found 18 churches in Philadelphia, Rebels and Gentlemen: Philadelphia in the Age of Franklin (New York, 1965), p. 18Google Scholar. I located only 17, of which burials in 16 were reported by the bills of mortality.

13 Lippincott, Horace Mather, Early Philadelphia: Its People, Life and Progress (Philadelphia, 1917), pp. 100–1Google Scholar.

14 Ibid., pp. 76–77.

15 Ibid., p. 101.

16 Deaths abroad were an important component of mortality in Salem, Massachusetts in 1820. Vinovskis, Mans A., “Mortality Rates and Trends in Massachusetts Before 1860,” Journal of Economic History, 32 (1972), 189, 193CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

17 Wrigley, E. A., ed., An Introduction to English Historical Demography (London, 1966), pp. 83–84Google Scholar; Ogle, W., “An Inquiry into the Trustworthiness of the Old Bills of Mortality,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 55 (1892), 437–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 The annual total burials in Philadelphia were corrected downward by a factor of 7 percent to account for those persons buried in the city who had resided in the areas of Philadelphia county outside urban Philadelphia. The correctional factor was determined by a check of the names of persons buried both in Christ Church and the First Reformed Church cemeteries in 1775 against the tax list of Philadelphia county for 1774. Of the deceased persons found on the tax list of 1774, 7 percent resided outside of urban Philadelphia.

19 Ralph Beaver Strassburger and William John Hinke estimate that approximately 65,000 Germans arrived in Philadelphia during this period. Pennsylvania German Pioneers: A Publication of the Original Lists of Arrivals in the Port of Philadelphia from 1727 to 1808 (Pennsylvania-German Society, Publications, XLII-XLIV[Norristown, Pa., 1934]), I, xxix, xxxi.

20 Duffy, John, “The Passage to the Colonies,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 38 (1951), 21–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Ibid., 23, 27–29; Duffy, Epidemics, pp. 223, 229. Death was an omnipresent threat on board ship. Christopher Sauer, editor of a newspaper in neighboring Germantown, estimated that two thousand passengers on fifteen ships arriving in 1758 died en route. Accounts of individual ship disasters are equally appalling. Johann Keppele reported in his diary that of the 312 passengers on board his ship, 150 died during the voyage. The “Sea Flower” lost 46 of her 106 passengers, while the “Love and Unity” arrived with only 34 of her 150 original passengers. Frank Diffenderffer, The German Immigration into Pennsylvania Through the Port of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-German Society, Proceedings, 10 (Lancaster, Pa., 1900), 260; Hofstadter, Richard, America at 1750: A Social Portrait (New York, 1971), pp. 41–42Google Scholar.

22 Gottlieb Mittelberger, Journey to Pennsylvania, edited and translated by Oscar Handlin and John Clive (Cambridge, 1960), pp. 12–13.

23 Ibid., p. 16.

24 Duffy, Epidemics, p. 218.

25 For a discussion of increased mortality caused by human migration from one disease environment to another see Curtin, Philip D., “Epidemiology and the Slave Trade,” Political Science Quarterly, 83 (1968), pp. 190–216CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

26 Labaree, Benjamin Franklin, III, 439.

27 Evidently the Strangers' Ground did serve as the principal cemetery for newly arrived Palatinate redemptioners and indentured servants in 1754 as 253 of them were reported buried there shortly after arriving in Philadelphia. Strassburger and Hinke, Pennsylvania German Pioneers, I, xxxvi; and Minutes of the Common Council of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1847), pp. 710–11Google Scholar.

28 Common Council of Philadelphia, pp. 710–11.

29 Records of Christ Church, vol. 174.

30 Barratt, Norris Stanley, Outline of the History of Old St. Paul's Church, Philadelphia, Penn., 1760–1898 (Lancaster, Pa., 1918), p. 43Google Scholar. To put the burial cost in perspective, the average Philadelphia laborer might earn from 3 to 4 shillings per day at the time.

31 Bridenbaugh, Rebels, p. 18.

32 Duffy, Epidemics, pp. 202–37. The arrival of immigrants and their activity in the city also caused the spread of other diseases which were already present. Francis Packard, in his History of Medicine in the United States (New York, 1963), I, 88, blamed the severity of the 1756 smallpox epidemic on the spread of the disease caused by the arrival of troops in Philadelphia in that year; the Governor of Pennsylvania is quoted as observing, “The smallpox is increasing among the soldiers to such a degree that the whole town will soon become a hospital.” If the arrival of troops in a single year could have such an adverse effect, the continuous flow of immigrants must have dramatically influenced Philadelphia's overall mortality level.

33 Duffy, Epidemics, pp. 17, 205–9. Shryock, Richard, “A Century of Medical Progress in Philadelphia: 1750–1850,” Pennsylvania History, 8 (1941), 7–28Google Scholar. In 1745 Dr. John Mitchell of Philadelphia attributed the outbreak of two yellow fever epidemics to the arrival of infected immigrants. The Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden (New York Historical Society, Collections, III [New York, 1919]), 326Google Scholar.

34 Shafer, Henry Burnell, “Medicine in Old Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania History, 4 (1937), 29Google Scholar.

35 Duffy, Epidemics, p. 153.

36 “Minutes of the Provincial Council,” Colonial Records of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, 1851), IV, 507, 510Google Scholar.

37 Ibid., 508.

38 Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, III, 333. Diffenderffer, German Immigration, X, 86–87.

39 “A Colonial Health Report of Philadelphia, 1754,” in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 36 (1912), 479Google Scholar.

40 “Minutes of the Provincial Council,” Colonial Records of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, 1851), VI, 345Google Scholar. Stricter regulation hurt the merchants' traffic in both people and goods. Gordon, History of Pennsylvania, p. 300; Diffenderffer, German Immigration, X, 251–55.

41 Diffenderffer, German Immigration, X, 246–47.

42 Duffy found that about 9 percent of the deaths in London from 1731 to 1765 were caused by smallpox; Epidemics, p. 22.

43 Labaree, Franklin, III, 77–79; IV, 63; VI, 452.

44 Duffy, Epidemics, pp. 2n, 123, 153.

45 The decreasing birth rates can be seen in Table 5.

46 If one hundred immigrants died in 1750, for example, the death rate for the city would be inflated by 8 per thousand, whereas if one hundred immigrants died in 1775 it would be inflated by only 3 per thousand.

47 Norris, George W., The Early History of Medicine in Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1886), p. 107Google Scholar.

48 Ibid., p. 113.

49 Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt, p. 329; Blake, John B., Public Health in the Town of Boston, 1630–1822 (Cambridge, 1959), p. 112Google Scholar; Duffy, Epidemics, pp. 40–41, 103; Labaree, Benjamin Franklin, VIII, 284. The cost of inoculation was seldom less than three pounds. Norris, Medicine, p. 112. For a first-hand report of the arduous process of inoculation, see Drinker, Cecil K., Not So Long Ago (New York, 1937), pp. 91–92Google Scholar.

50 Norris, Medicine, p. 114.

51 Frank J. Malje has suggested that there was a natural decrease in the virulence of smallpox throughout the colonies after 1760; “The History of Smallpox in England and the United States,” University of Michigan Medical Bulletin, 21 (1955), 38Google Scholar.

52 Records of Christ Church; Church Records of the First Reformed Church.

53 Claims of great progress in child welfare throughout the colonies were made. Dr. David Ramsay of Charleston saw “a great reformation” in infant mortality rates between 1750 and 1800, and Shryock, Richard found that “fragmentary statistical data point in this same direction”; Medicine and Society in America 1660–1860 (Ithaca, 1960), p. 99Google Scholar. Dr. Benjamin Rush felt that Philadelphia's maternal mortality dropped sharply after 1760, due in part to the abandonment of the services of midwives, although this may have been as much propaganda by the medical profession against midwives as it was an accurate assessment of the situation. Shryock, “Century of Medical Progress,” p. 11.

54 For example, 829 infant baptisms and 481 burials were recorded for six churches in 1766, making the ratio of burials to baptisms in those churches equal to 58. (The annual ratios are given in column 1 of Table 5). The remainder of church burial grounds accounted for 164 burials. Assuming the ratio of burials to baptisms to be identical for both groups of churches, 283 is the projected number of baptisms in those churches where baptisms were unrecorded. The total number of baptisms in Philadelphia thus is estimated as 1,112.

55 Baptisms for these churches are from Records of Christ Church; Church Records of the First Reformed Church; and on microcard listed from 1750 to 1763 as “An Account of the Births and Burials in Christ-Church Parish” and from 1763 to 1775 as “An Account of the Births and Burials in the United Churches of Christ-Church and St. Peter's” in Charles Evans, American Bibliography.

56 The most unreliable rates in Table 5 are those for the 1750s when the churches with unrecorded baptisms accounted for approximately half the burials in Philadelphia's church burial grounds.

57 The constables' returns are in City Archives, Philadelphia.

58 Slaves and unfree whites are not included in these calculations. The constables' returns for Philadelphia's ten wards in 1775 listing the age of 90 percent of the slaves implies a minimum birth rate of 15 per thousand for them.

59 A number of experts have estimated a birth rate of approximately 50 per thousand for late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century America. See Lotka, A. J., “The Size of American Families in the Eighteenth Century”, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 22 (1927), 165Google Scholar. Potter, J., “The Growth of Population in America, 1700–1860,” in D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, eds., Population in History (London, 1965), pp. 646Google Scholar, 672. Thompson, Warren S. and Whelpton, P. K., Population Trends in the United States (New York, 1933), p. 263Google Scholar. Yasuba, Yasukichi, Birth Rates of the White Population in the United States, 1800–1860 (Baltimore, 1962), p. 99Google Scholar.

60 This was true of Philadelphia in 1790 and 1800 when over half of its inhabitants were between the ages of 26 and 45.

61 Because migrants are generally of a young age, immigrant centers nearly always tend to have both a younger age structure and a higher birth rate than non-immigrant centers. See Barclay, George, Techniques of Population Analysis (New York, 1958), p. 231Google Scholar.

62 Births to transient immigrants had a similar effect on Boston's birth rates in the midnineteenth century as the birth rate of the Boston Irish climbed to 66.6 per thousand in 1845. Handlin, Oscar, Boston's Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation (New York, 1969), p. 117Google Scholar.

63 Nash, Gary B., “Up From the Bottom in Franklin's Philadelphia,” Past and Present, 76 (1977)Google Scholar.

64 Nash, Gary B., “Slaves and Slaveowners in Colonial Philadelphia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 30 (1973), 233CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 Gordon, Thomas A., The History of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1829), pp. 348, 385–97Google Scholar. Repplier, Agnes, Philadelphia: The Place and the People (New York, 1904), 141–57Google Scholar.

66 The marriages in the Dutch Lutheran church are in Pennsylvania Archives, Series 2, IX, 285–441; the Anglican marriages are in Pennsylvania Archives, Series 2, IX, 441–495, and in Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. 179 (Philadelphia, 1907)Google Scholar.

67 Marriage rates are extremely sensitive to economic conditions generally. Hawthorn, Geoffrey, The Sociology of Fertility (London, 1970), p. 88Google Scholar.

68 Nash, “Slaves and Slaveowners in Colonial Philadelphia,” p. 233.

69 On declining economic opportunity, see Nash, “Up From the Bottom”; and Gary Nash, B., “Poverty and Poor Relief in Pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ses, 33 (1976CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

70 Studies of Boston, Nottingham and Andover were done by Blake, Boston; Chambers, J. D., “Population Change in a Provincial Town: Nottingham 1700–1800,” in Pressnell, L. S., ed., Studies in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1960), pp. 97–125Google Scholar; and Greven, Philip J. Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, 1970)Google Scholar.

71 Rates were calculated from data presented by Greven, Four Generations, pp. 179, 293; and Chambers, “Nottingham,” p. 122.

72 Rates are from Greven, Four Generations, pp. 184–85; and Chambers, “Nottingham,” p. 122.

73 Rates are from Chambers, “Nottingham,” p. 122; and Blake, Boston, pp. 247–49. Andover's rates were calculated from data presented by Greven, Four Generations, pp. 179, 293. Philadelphia's nineteenth-century rates were computed from Niles, Nathaniel Jr. and Russ, John D., Medical Statistics; or a Comparative View of the Mortality in New-York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston, For A Series of Years (New York, 1827), p. 6Google Scholar.