General

(a) The problem. Of all numerical series that document the progress of a nation, none is more fundamental than its population statistics. In the changing patterns of birth and death rates, population expansion and migration, can be found the quantitative strands indispensable to weaving any larger tapestry of the economic history of a people. Without them, the larger picture is incomplete. This study attempts the first comprehensive analysis of vital statistics and migration patterns within the United States between the Revolution and the Civil War. It is anchored in the one available source for nation-wide estimates, the decennial censuses, and supplemented wherever possible by other relevant data. It attempts to provide, for black and white populations, a consistent set of estimates of birth and death rates, rates of natural increase, and net international and interregional flows. For the black population, it also estimates the changing pace of manumissions in the ante-bellum decades. In short, the goal of this work is to provide the demographic components too long absent from the historical and demographic analysis of the period. The results are twofold: a set of data and a set of questions suggested by the data that promise novel challenges for historians of the ante-bellum era.

In the most aggregate of demographic data, puzzling patterns are not difficult to find. As indicated in Table A-l, the North American rate of increase was unequaled on any other continent during the first half of the nineteenth century.