A “Population Pressure” Framework for the Study of Migration in Early America, 1607-1860 (Spring 1991)

[When I decided to go to the University of Florida to pursue my PhD, I had no intention of continuing my study of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake. My vision was to do a study of internal migration in the antebellum South. This essay was my first attempt to develop a theoretical framework for how I was going to approach the analysis of migration. I submitted the essay as one of the requirements for a grad seminar on Early American Society (AMH 6198) taught by my dissertation advisor, Darrett B. Rutman, in the Spring of 1991. Darrett hated the paper just as he had hated most of my social science theorizing. I can’t remember the exact chronology but sometime after this, I decided that the path of least resistance was to return to the study of the 17th-century Chesapeake to flesh out some of the insights I thought I had gained from the work on my MA thesis. But I still think the theoretical framework presented here (a variation of which show up as Appendix 6 in my dissertation) is a solid one.]

Contemporaries, historians, and social scientists have long acknowledged the central role that internal migration played in the growth and development of American society as well as in the personal lives of American individuals, families, and communi­ties. With the first seeds planted in Jamestown and Plymouth, Americans began spreading ever outward, continuing a pattern established in England and reinforced by the transatlantic crossing (Thornthwaite, 1934; Rutman, 1965; 1975; Hansen, 1940; Demos, 1970:9-11; Morgan, 1975:423-32; Breen and Foster, 1973; Kulikoff, 1986a:162-3; Kelly, 1979; Adams and Kasakoff, 1984; Prest, 1976; Main, 1965: 164; Bielinski, 197?; Mathews, 1909; Turner, 1920; Bailyn, 1986; Craven, 1926:57; Wrightson, 1982; Clark and Souden, 1988; Horn, 1988). In thousands of antebellum newspaper editorials, books, diaries, travellers’ accounts, and personal letters, Easterners bemoaned the great loss of people and capital to the West while Westerners beckoned everyone to join in the bonanza, respectively condemning and applauding the great migratory habit of Homo Americanus. Federal census reports beginning in 1850 officially confirmed the great East‑West movement of population. Frederick Jackson Turner in his famous “frontier thesis” speech of 1893 placed internal migration (i.e., the “frontier safety valve”) at the heart American historio­graphy. Economists have linked much of early American economic growth to the extensive migration of labor and capital to regions of higher wages and greater economic opportunity.

Nevertheless, despite the centrality of migration to American development, the historical aspects of the phenomenon have received scant attention. Beginning in the 1930s with the rapid increase in rural‑urban migration, social scientists began to intensively analyze internal migration, but only two studies, that of C. Warren Thornthwaite (1934) and Everett S. Lee (1957), extended their analysis back into the 19th century and these offered little more than estimated net state migration totals. During the 1930s and 1940s, historians like James C. Malin (1984), Frank L. Owsley (1945; 1949), and Barnes Lathrop (1949) began to tap manuscript census records for information on domestic migration but the tedious work attracted few followers. Only with the coming of social mobility studies, following Merle Curti (1959) and Stephan Thernstrom (1964), and the rise in the 1960s of the “new social history” did internal migration become a major topic of interest, but even then most studies limited analysis to calculating community persistence rates, balking at the immense difficulty of tracking individuals across both space and time.

In the 1980s, a renewed interest in internal migration began to appear on the horizon, perhaps as part of a growing frustration with so much ignorance over such a crucial element in Ameri­can life. Bernard Bailyn (1986) has even called for a new American historical synthe­sis centered on migration to and within British North America, and two general surveys of the literature have seconded the tremendous potential for research in this area (Parkerson, 1983a; Kulikoff, 1986a). Social and economic historians have begun to trace migrant heads of households across space and time using census indexes to finally link both social and geographical mobility (Stephenson, 1974; 1980; Schaefer, 1985; 1987; 1989; Steckel, 1988a; 1989). Studies, including several unpublished dissertations, have opened new sources of information like family genea­logies, colonial militia and war pension records, state censuses, and land sales data (Davenport, 1982; 1984; Parkerson, 1982; 1983b; Bosworth, 1978; 1980; Oberly, 1982; 1986; Villaflor and Sokoloff, 1982; Steckel, 1983; Adams and Kasakoff, 1980; 1984b; Crackel, 1981). With so many new avenues tapped, the 1990s would seem ripe for a synthetic effort.

However, on almost every point besides simply acknowledging the importance of geographical mobility in American history, historians and social scientists have reached little consensus about the exact nature of that mobility, apart from its general westward and cityward trend. Even on such a crucial point as identifying a link between geographical and social mobility, some stress the positive “pull” of greater economic opportunity, others the negative “push” into wandering poverty, while still others a homeostatic holding pattern. Although migration and community persistence studies have generated much empirical evidence, the lack of a solid theoretical framework has thus far prevented any synthesis.

Unfortunately, for the most part migration theory has not really advanced beyond Ravenstein’s (1885; 1889) hundred‑year‑old overly mechanical push-pull “laws,” developed from census analysis in industrializing England. Most “theory” remains simply at the level of empirical regularities observed in rural‑urban migration in developing and developed nations. But a general theory of migration has yet to appear, perhaps reflecting the very complexity of migration impacted by many psychological, cultural, social, demographic, economic, and other factors. Overall, migration studies prove most unsatisfying for their failure to place migration within the total context of available choices, the individual and household decision-making matrix.

The most sophisticated approach to the study of internal migration in agrarian regions like early America builds on the extensive literature of “peasant” economic development and the “transition to capitalism” debate. ¹ Although work has begun to identify much evidence of traditional and pre‑capitalist behavior among early Americans, historians have yet to escape the ultimate bugaboo of American uniqueness which colors all of American historiography. Historians who dabble in the peasant literature do so for insights into the unique American experience, while disavowing any explicit comparability. This study presumes that the United States experience did not fundamentally differ from the experience of developing nations today and that theoretical and comparative work provide an excellent framework to help organize research and raise questions to be tested against the historical evidence.

This paper synthesizes a behavioral model of “peasant” economic development built on a “peasant” (“subsistence economy”) ideal typology, contrasted with a “capitalist farmer” (“market/political economy”) ideal typology. The “peasant” ideal type posits that peasant farmers were “interested first in obtaining an adequate output per head and second in maximizing their leisure,” “were not much concerned with profit, that their prin­cipal interests were subsistence and the long‑term security of the farm, that they did not try to maximize production of cash crops and marketed only their surplus, that they avoided risk and were suspicious of innovations” (Grigg, 1979:69; McCusker and Menard, 1985:298). Earle and Johnson (1987:12) trace the logic of the “subsistence economy” to formal economics and optimal foraging theory in animal populations: “The goal is not to maximize production but to minimize the effort expended in meeting household needs.” In general, a specific mix of strategies that minimizes procurement costs remains stable unless upset by changes in population density, technology, or the environment. The model presented here presumes that each peasant household participates in the market and thus the subsistence economy interacts with the political economy. ²

In the “market/political economy,” “capitalist farmers” “were latent entrepeneurs, willing to take risks and accept innovation, who found their drive for profits frustrated by high factor prices, primitive techno­logies, poor transportation net­works, and weak markets” (McCusker and Menard, 1985:298). Whereas peasant behavior centers on minimizing labor necessary to maintain a “competency” without undue risk, the profit-oriented capitalist farmer, although limited like the “peasant” by a “bounded rationality,” more willingly risks capital and works harder with no a priori limits, constantly calculating and acting on differential economic opportunities in an attempt to maximize profits. ³ Although both “peasants” and capitalist farmers” use household labor, the key for the peasant household lies in household survival; this contrasts with an individualistic capitalist farm household which operates far closer to an n-person cooperative game than an organic unit and more likely uses non-household labor (Becker, 1981; Sundstrom and David, 1988). ⁴

McCusker and Menard (1985:304-5) identify the different implications of the two models for the process of internal migration: “In the subsistence model, ‘push’ factors dominated migration decisions: migrants moved away from overcrowded settlements with their poor prospects for economic independence rather than toward better market possibilities; and movement was financed out of family resources. In the market model, the ‘pull’ of better prospects predominated: migrants moved toward chances for commercial agriculture rather than away from depressed conditions; and it was merchants and land developers who provided much of the needed capital.”

The formalist-ecological “peasant” model of economic development employed here falls under the rubric of “population pressure” theory. Although traceable directly to the work of Thomas Malthus and his “positive” and “preventative” checks, most of this body of theory actually follows the anti‑Malthusian argument, beginning in 1818 with George Ensor, which stresses that most societies avoided a Malthusian catastrophe through implementing many different demographic and economic strategies thus enabling agricultural output to rise as rapidly as population (Ensor, 1818:205-12,371; Grigg, 1980a:61-4; Simon, 1977:3). ⁵ Ensor refuted Malthus’s dismissal of the potential of emigration advancing “a mobility and support‑capacity thesis which has been essentially corroborated,” theorizing “that people would migrate from settled to unoccupied areas until support capacities were reached at approximately equal levels of living; the choicest unused land would be sought by the nearest peoples who lived at the lowest standards. Ensor’s ‘theory’ was narrowly‑based on the principle of searching for food, but it did bear the elements of a minimax principle‑‑viz., least effort and most need” (Adams, 1969:36,435). In more recent years, two key lines of anti-Malthusian thought have developed:

(1) “demographic response” following Kingsley Davis’s “multiphasic response” with a primary focus on fertility control in modern industrializing nations (Davis, 1963)

(2) “economic response” following lead of Ester Boserup with an emphasis on agricultural intensification in response to population pressure on the land in primitive agrarian nations (Boserup, 1965)

While often recognizing the intricate relationship between economic and demographic behavior, most studies focus on one or the other to reduce the inherent complexities in “total” analysis. However, a few studies have taken a more complex Ensorian approach (e.g., Nicholls, 1969; Simon, 1977:183-203; Murray, 1977:22-6; Friedlander, 1983:250-1). Following Grigg (1980a; 1980b), responses to population pressure fall into six general categories:

(1) “agricultural extensification” to increase agricultural output by putting additional land into production within present agricultural system

(2) “agricultural intensification” to increase agricultural production through frequency of cropping, reduced fallow, adoption of new technology, improved methods, switch to higher yielding crops, and regional specialization (Boserup, 1965; Hirschman, 1959; Dumond, 1965; Geertz, 1963:36; Von Thunen, 1966; Slicher van Bath, 1963; Gourou, 1966; Colin Clark, 1967, 1969; Clark and Haswell, 1974; Wilkinson, 1973; Harris, 1977; Simon, 1977:158-82; Earle and Johnson, 1987; Turner, Hanham, and Portararo, 1977). ⁶

(3) “non‑agricultural diversification” to increase non-farm income through domestic industry, day laboring, and temporary and seasonal migration as surplus labor makes rural industry profitable (Thirsk, 1961; Jones, 1968; Mendels, 1972)

(4) “fertility control” to limit the number of births whether through regulation of births within marriage (e.g., contraception, abortion, sterilization, abstinence, infanticide, etc.) or “nuptuality control” (e.g., higher age of marriage and increased celibacy). Studies emphasizing this response note like Ensor that most preindustrial societies maintained a variety of methods for limiting population growth within a “homeostatic demographic regime,” whereas Malthus admitted only the “moral” solution of delayed marriage and abstinence (Malthus, 1798; Davis, 1963; Hajnal, 1965; Wrigley, 1966, 1969:108-43; Friedlander, 1969; 1983; Wilkinson, 1973:37‑9; D.S. Smith, 1977; Harris and Ross, 1987). Concomitant with this hypothesis, populations tend to grow most rapidly in situation with abundant resources, such as early America (Malthus, 1798; Birdsell, 1957; Dumond, 1965:303).

(5) “migration” to remove from the present place of residence on a permanent or semi-permanent basis, shares many similarities with “agricultural extensification” (rural-rural or frontier migration) and “non-agricultural diversification” (rural-urban migration), with migration simply implying a relatively greater break with the place of origin. Studies stressing this approach, often draw upon the concept of a population “safety valve,” both in a third-world peasant context (Friedlander, 1969; 1983; Brandes, 1975:14) and an early American frontier context (Turner, 1920; Wilkinson, 1973; Rutman, 1975, 1986; D.S. Smith, 1980).

(6) “sociopolitical adaptation” (or “agricultural involution”) to change institutions of access, especially “pressure reducing innovative arrangements in the manner of allocating cropping ground within the society” in response to population pressure, leading frequently to lower standards of living (Murray, 1977:32; Geertz, 1963). ⁷

Of these different responses to population pressure, the exact solution set remains temporally, spatially, and culturally specific.

Empirical evidence reveals, ceteris paribus, a ubiquitous preference for simple extensive development, reflected in perpetuation of and regression to slash-and-burn agricultural systems under conditions of relative land abundance (Boserup, 1970:110; Davis, 1963:353; Turner, 1920:21-22; Dumond, 1965:315-8; Adams and Kasakoff, 1984a:215). Similarly, many studies treat out-migration as a “safety valve” at the heart of any adaptation strategy, with alternative responses inversely correlated with migration opportunities (Davis, 1963:355; Friedlander, 1969:359-60; 1983:265,268; Moore, 1945:119; Hawley, 1950:Chap. 9; Adams and Kasakoff, 1984a:218-9; Zelinsky, 1971).

Following Malthus, social scientists often equate “population pressure” with a true subsistence crisis, but many of the recent works disavow such a simplistic notion, preferring a culturally-defined balance between “levels of living and aspirations.” This definition emphasizes not absolute poverty, hunger, or some collective standard of living but more a sense of deprivation, declining relative to other families in the same reference group especially in conditions of rising prosperity (Davis, 1963:352,355-6,362; Glass, 1965; Friedlander, 1969; 1983; Dumond, 1965:317-8; Simon, 1977:165). ⁸

Although some historians and social scientists might question the applicability of peasant developmental models to America, there are really no a priori reasons for assuming so. ⁹ The question is not whether American farmers were peasants (whether of the substantivist, Chayanovian, formalist, or Marxist variety), capitalist farmers, or something in between. Such definitions often rest denotatively on unmeasurable variables and connotatively on the “you know one when you see one” syndrome, which obviates definitions that could possibly include those individuals, like American farmers, whom one “knows” were not peasants. Rather, the value of any typology lies in its ability to form testable hypotheses (i.e., avoiding post hoc circular explanations) conforming to rules of simplicity and generality (i.e., Occam’s Razor) which successfully predict or retrodict observable regular, repeatable (i.e., non-idiosyncratic) individual and aggregate human behavior (which in an historical framework proves more difficult since the historian can only infer behavior from material and literary remains). The power of any typology rests in its ability to explain both stasis and change, with process models stressing temporal continuity preferable to transformation models under the assumption of a basic continuity in human behavior over time as well as commonality across space, allowing for variations in evolutionary historical experience. ¹⁰

Indeed, the peasant framework, although rarely explicitly described as such in American historiography, informs much of the work on the nature of the family farm and agricultural practices in early America. The “population pressure” concept of “standard of living and aspirations” and the “peasant” emphasis on meeting household needs compares very favorably with the traditional notion of “competency” which several scholars have found to drive early American behavior (e.g., Turner, 1920; Christopher Clark, 1979; Bushman, 1981:240; Hahn, 1982:42-3; Vickers,1990). Eclectic similarities to the peasant literature reflected in the work of “substantivist-Marxist” historians like Henretta (1978), Christopher Clark (1979; 1990), Merrill (1977), Kulikoff (1989), and Hahn (1982; 1983); “formalist-ecological” scholarship like Wright (1978), Otto (1983; 1985; 1989a; 1989b), and Wilkinson (1973); the “formalist-Marxist” work of Weiman (1983; 1985; 1987; 1989); the “Celtic schoo”l of McDonald and McWhiney (1980); the more balanced historical approach of Allman (1979), Rutman (1985; 1986), Schlotterbeck (1980; 1982), Bushman (1981), and Vickers (1990); and the seminal (but rather neglected) work of cultural geographer Milton B. Newton (1967; 1974) demand a closer examination of the benefits that a more rigorous anthropological peasant framework can bring to an understanding of early American development. Due to space limitations the rest of this paper will limit development of this framework to the “demographic response” to population pressure within early America, saving for a second paper an analysis of the “economic response” and changes wrought by commercialization, industrialization, and urbanization.

Although not fully synthesized, “population pressure” models have a long history in the United States, beginning with the work of Malthus himself who pointed to America as proof that only a rich abundance of land could stave off the disaster of Malthusian popu­lation growth (Malthus, 1798; Potter, 1965:662-3; Wilkinson, 1973: 148). George Tucker (1843:101‑7), using available aggregate census data, perhaps first recognized the negative impact of “increasing density of numbers” on fertility in a society with a relatively high standard of living far removed from a true subsistence crisis. Tucker identified a highly uniform inverse relationship between population density and natural increase across space and time, East and West, North and South, the same empirical pattern that social scientists are still trying to explain.

Most recent “anti-Malthusian” interpretations of the historical American experience highlight “fertility control” and “migration” as the key responses to population pressure, with the most sophisticated work following the lead of Yasuba (1962) who identifies population pressure on limited land resources and delayed marriage as the key causal factor in the tremendous fertility decline in the 19th century United States. ¹¹ These works, including Forster and Tucker (1972); Easterlin (1976a; 1976b; 1978); Leet (1975; 1976; 1977; 1978); McInnis (1977), Lindert (1978), Temkin-Greener and Swedlund (1978:40), Laidig, Schutjer, and Stokes (1981), Schapiro (1982; 1986), Newell (1986), and Atack and Bateman (1989), for the most part follow Easterlin’s “bequest model” emphasizing the causal interrelationships between farm acreage values, returns on capital, inheritance practices, and the desire of a father to pass on land to his children, which lead to efforts to limit the number of children or move west as land prices rise under more dense settlement. Combining the leads of Frederic LePlay on inheritance patterns and Kingsley Davis’s “multiphasic response,” Easterlin extends the “competency” model of early American behavior to not just the immediate household but future branch households since the “concern about loss of status for his children most motivates the farmer who goes to great efforts to avoid risking a short fall” (Easterlin, 1976b:65). “The main pre‑conditions for our model are chiefly an agricultural organization based on family farm or peasant units, the institution of multi‑geniture or its equivalent, and mortality conditions sufficiently favorable to assure a reasonably good prospect of the survival of infants to adulthood” (Easterlin, 1976b:73, emphasis added).

However, the “bequest model” and other “population pressure” variants, despite achieving some sort of consensus among historians, remain largely untested and continue to rest on highly questionable assumptions. Much effort has gone into attempts to refine and isolate the “population pressure” variable (Potter, 1965:677-8; Forster and Tucker, 1972; Easterlin, 1976b; Leet, 1978; Schapiro, 1986; Connell et al., 1976:7-9; Vinovskis, 1978b; D.S. Smith, 1987:77), but still the concept remains quite nebulous. Steckel (1980:332; 1985:132-3) notes quite correctly that aggregate correlations of population density factors with fertility might mask more significant causal relationships (suggested in the steady decline of frontier fertility over time), while tests of the model at the individual household level have proven far less successful than at the aggregate county or state level (McInnis, 1977; Easterlin et al., 1978). Both of these points indicate the need to look more closely at the cultural and community context in which households make demographic decisions and the relative nature of the standard of living and aspirations as the key to population pressure rather than absolute land availability, well illustrated in the finding that New Englanders and Southerners retained to a high degree their deviant fertility patterns when they settled in Ohio under conditions of similar land availability (Leet, 1978).

The present understanding of agrarian inheritance patterns remains highly undeveloped (Bogue, 1976). Some studies note a shift from primogeniture to more egalitarian multigeniture with respect to land inheritance under increasing population pressure in the 19th and 20th centuries (Newell, 1986; Otto, 1989a), while Rutman and Rutman (1984b) and Greven (1970) note the opposite in the 17th and 18th centuries, and Easterlin (1976b:64) and Schapiro (1986) presume multigeniture fully in place by the 17th century with little change thereafter. Davis (1963:353) entirely downplays the role of the “inheritance system” as more symptomatic than causal simply reflecting the prevailing demographic solution, a conclusion supported by Gallman’s (1982) comparison of age of marriage patterns in the colonial Chesapeake and New England. Also, although Easterlin (1976b:72-3) finds that such a model explains “closely linked patterns of economic and demographic change that have reoc­curred in state after state,” combining North and South in a single explanation as Tucker (1843), Yasuba (1961), and Forster and Tucker (1972) had done before him, demographic historians have all but ignored the applicability of the model to the early South. ¹²

The major problem with the “bequest model” for the study of early America lies in questionably presuming people delay marriage because of the number of children they want to have rather than real cultural constraints linking marriage to the establishment of an independent household. Easterlin (1976b:63) draws inspiration from Greven’s (1970) work on colonial Andover, and thus a long tradition linking age of marriage to inheritance patterns and land availability in pre-industrial societies (e.g., Malthus, 1798; Davis and Blake, 1956:215-8; Ohlin, 1961; Hajnal, 1965:133-4; Wrigley, 1978; D.S. Smith, 1973; Gross, 1976:78), while many studies have identi­fied adjustments in nuptuality (both the rise in the age of marriage and celibacy) as the key to the decline in the child-woman ratio in the American colonial and antebellum era, especially in the South where marital fertility control proved negligible (Yasuba, 1962:135; Steckel, 1980:350; Sanderson, 1979; David and Sanderson, 1986:309-13; Haines, 1986:380; Newell, 1986; Wahl, 1986:420-1; Sundstrom and David, 1988:191). ¹³ But the “bequest model” negates the primacy of nuptuality by shifting from the readily understandable context of a couple attempting to set up a household in order to marry to the dubious context of a couple deciding whether to marry based on twenty-year futuristic projections of the standard of living of their potential offspring. Indeed, Dan Scott Smith (1987:76) in a recent overview of the literature concludes: “Declining fertility as a conse­quence of later and less universal marriage requires no special theory of the uniqueness of the American experience; America was simply becoming Europeanized in its fundamental economic environment.” For this reason Yasuba’s more general “population pressure” model emphasizing nuptuality adjustment, land availability, and independent household establishment continues to prove a more useful starting point than Easterlin’s “bequest model.” ¹⁴

More general critiques of the “population pressure” model for fertility generally fall into two camps: neo-classical economics and “modernization” theory. Sundstrom and David (1988), reflecting the neo-classical economic “capitalist farmer” approach, emphasize an “old‑age security motive” for raising children with demands for family labor regulated by intrafamilial bargaining in an n-person cooperative game. They trace the 19th century fertility decline to the commercial and industrial revolution which generated increasing labor market opportunities outside the agricultural sector, thus giving children a distinct bargaining advantage and reducing the adult demand for children. Similarly to the criticisms of the “bequest model,” however, the Sundstrom-David model patently confuses nuptuality and fertility responses, questionably presuming that people delay marriage based on futuristic projections of the number of children they want to have take care of them in old age. Other economic historians, reflecting unease with equating fertility behavior and the availability of land in an era of general land abundance, reverse the “population pressure” causality hypothesizing that bigger families tended to migrate to the frontier (Wright, 1974:307; Steckel, 1980a:344,348-9). ¹⁵ Several early American studies cite evidence supporting such an hypothesis (A.G. Smith, 1958:34; Taylor, 1979:32; Oakes, 1982:81; Hammel, Johansson, and Ginsberg, 1983; Otto, 1985:196-7); however, Steckel (1989:211-17), in the most systematic test of this hypothesis, finds no systematic link between number (or sex ratio) of children and migration.

Like Davis and Friedlander, “modernization” theorists stress the role of the “standard of living and aspirations” to demographic and economic behavior; but, like Sundstrom and David, they link the causal role to commercialization, urbanization, and industrialization, highlighting the accompanying “isms” and subsequent “broad changes in American society” (Potter, 1965:677-8; Vinovskis, 1976a:76-9; Modell, 1971; Wells, 1975). Interest­ing­ly, Vinovskis, the preeminent critic of the “population pressure” school, seems most troubled over the failure of the “population pressure” model to explain the parallel decline in both urban and rural fertility, yet Davis (1963:355-6) finds that the “population pressure” model does just that as both rural and urban individuals respond to the changing circumstances fostered by population growth and redistribution. More descriptive than explanatory, modernization theory, drawn like most Western economic development models from a limited understanding of the demographic and economic experience of northwest Europe and the northern United States, offers little help to the study of rural peoples. Most importantly, the theory provides no inherent direction (let alone causation) for changes in demographic behavior, except from presentist assumptions that smaller families are more desirable and modern people more migratory. Education and literacy only make information available and do not dictate utilization (cf. Newell, 1986:300). ¹⁶

Davis (1963:354-5) likewise rejects explanations of change or persistence based on value systems divorced from economic and demographic forces; such explanations dichotomize modern “declines in marital fertility (a neo‑Malthusian transition)” and traditional “adjustments in nuptuality (a Malthusian transition),” “biological and social control” and “independent choice,” “social sanctions” and “family sanctions” (Haines, 1986:380; Wrigley, 1969:192; 1978: 148-52; Easterlin, 1978:120-3). Peasant “failure to feature contra­cep­tion and abortion was not due to ‘traditional attitudes’…but to the availability of an alternative which fitted the interests and structure of peasant families in the evolving economy” (Davis, 1963:355). The exceed­ingly poor state of nuptuality theory reflects an obsessive presentist concern with modern marital fertility control (shared equally by the “bequest model,” “modernization” theory, and the Sundstrom-David hypothesis) which leads demographers to ignore the basic “homogeneity” between traditional nuptuality and modern fertility control as well as the many alternative fertility adjustments made within marriage in most “pre-modern” societies (Wrigley, 1985; Coale and Watkins, 1986; Sundstrom and David, 1988:191; Smith, 1987:74). ¹⁷ Furthermore, this presentism divorces fertility responses from alternative economic, demographic, and social responses to population pressure and exaggerates social discontinuity, dismissing the high level of individual household decision making in “traditional” societies and social constraints in “modern” society, the very problems which the framework presented here seeks to correct.

In contrast to the work on fertility, social scientists have devoted little attention to testing the implications of the “popu­la­tion pressure” model for the study of early American migration. Yet the link of population pressure to internal migration in the American context, like that for fertility decline, also has long roots and many branches. Most of these studies emphasize the ability of fron­tier land abundance to act as a “safety valve” or “homeostatic governor,” thus avoiding a true subsistence crisis or decline in the standard of living (Ravenstein, 1889:278-94; Turner, 1920; Wilkinson, 1973:164-5; Rutman, 1975; Kelly, 1975:95-6; Bielinski, 197?:18; D.S. Smith, 1980:19; 1982). ¹⁸ Historians of the South, following Craven (1926), tradi­tionally turn to a similar but more negative theme linking migration directly to soil exhaustion and concomitant land engross­ment by large planters, forcing small farmers to search for new lands farther West, although the most thorough analyses move closer to a “population pressure” interpretation stressing “relative” rather than “absolute” exhaustion and scarcity since much undeveloped land remained in older areas (Gray, 1933, 1:196-8,2:641; A.G. Smith, 1958:32-3; Walsh, 1977:402-5; Baird, 1990:61-8; Wooten, 1953:62; Schlotterbeck, 1980; Crawford, 1988a:216,232).

Many of these studies hypothesize an “optimum density” model of infilling (net in-migration) until population reaches an “optimum density,” followed by overflowing (net out-migration) to maintain the proper density, a process suggested for the historical American experience as early as 1934 (Thornth­waite, 1934:1-2; Gallaway and Vedder, 1971: 628-32; Rutman, 1975; 1986:173-4; Easterlin, 1976b: 72; Schlotterbeck, 1980:96,110; Jones, 1981:24,70-1; McCusker and Menard, 1985:254; Schapiro, 1986:114-5n). ¹⁹ Others criticize this infilling-overflowing model for distorting the wave-like (rather than cell-like) frontier migration pattern, ignoring the relative cultural and spatiotemporal nature of “population pres­sure,” and minimizing the impact of tremendous gross migration in an overly exclusive emphasis on net migration (Baird, 1990:78-92). Adams and Kasakoff (1984a:213), seconded by D.S. Smith (1982b:453-4), argue for a “constant process of moving in and out of towns [driven by differential land prices] rather than a ‘golden age’ of filling up and a subsequent period of ‘spilling over’ once towns were filled.” ²⁰

Recently demographic historians have begun moving toward a synthesis along the lines of Zelinsky’s (1971) “mobility transi­tion” hypothesis to link early American fertility and migration behavior in a “population pressure” framework, although the diverse American experience has made periodization rather difficult, suggesting perhaps a superior strategy to focus on Easterlin’s wave-like process (Easterlin, 1976b; Nugent, 1981; Jones, 1981; Schapiro, 1986; Swierenga, 1983). Dan Scott Smith (1980; 1982b:453-4; 1987) presents most of the elements for such a synthesis but has thus far left the connections only implicit. These works identify a similar process, North and South, East and West, with transition from traditional demographic regime regulated by land population pressure, rural-rural and frontier out-migration, and nuptuality control to a “modern” regime regulated by non-agricultural economic opportunity, rural-urban and urban-urban out-migration, and marital fertility control.

These attempts to combine both fertility and migration behavior in one model have highlighted, contrary to Dumond (1965) and Friedlander (1969), that out-migration, whether rural-rural or rural-urban, did not relieve the pressure for fertility regulation (Easterlin, 1976b:46). ²¹ This conclusion, however, far from disproving Friedlander or championing American uniqueness, highlights the importance of understanding the entire response matrix of peoples in historical and cultural context, as well as differentiating between aggregate and individual responses. While some individuals choose to migrate, some always choose to stay; and under conditions of rapid population growth, those that choose to stay face greater pressures to adapt in other ways, and thus migration does not negate alternative responses to population pressure as Friedlander seems to suggest. ²² Migration may indeed be the key to the total response strategy, but even “free” migration is a “sticky” process with “imperfections” “of many types: family attachments, ties to a locality, imperfect information, and, particularly, financial barriers to the acquisition of land and equipment and the cost of migration to the western lands” (Wright, 1979:665; D.S. Smith, 1980:19-20; Morrison, 1977:63-4; Easterlin, 1976b:67; Walsh, 1987). ²³

Indeed, this very “stickiness” in the process accounts for differing interpretations of “Malthusian crises” and “homeostatic governors” in New England towns (Grant, 1961; Lockridge, 1971; Greven, 1970; Cook, 1970; Gross, 1976; Rutman, 1975; D.S. Smith, 1980:20) and the colonial Chesapeake (Earle, 1975; Kulikoff, 1986b; Papenfuse, 1972; Marks, 1979b; Rutman, 1986; Baird, 1990). Many of the “crisis” studies conclude that eventually a migration response kicks in (e.g., Lockridge, 1971:481-2; Greven, 1970), while Rutman (1986:173) concludes “The truth encompasses a bit of both of these views.” Yet the dichotomization continues to reign. A shift from explaining local and regional variations to the framework presented in this paper, with special attention to fleshing out the “stickiness” of the migration response and the alternative responses of non-migrants, would help resolve these dichotomies while pushing the debate forward to examine more rigorously the nature of early American society. ²⁴

This paper has outlined the “demographic response” to population pressure within the agrarian context of early America (excluding rural‑urban migration for later anaylsis along with the “economic” shift to non‑agricultural occupations). A second paper will analyze the “economic response” including the initial regression from the English alternate husbandry to a slash‑and‑burn agricultural system, the later impact of agricultural reform movements, and the abandonment of the land for mills, small towns, and larger cities. This second paper will also more explicitly compare and contrast the response differences between the “peasant” and “capitalist farmer” ideal types to economic and demographic changes, developing hypotheses which should allow testing of the two typololgies against the historical evidence. Furthermore, the analysis will identify the critical interdependent link between population pressure, market forces, and economic development through incorporation of Von Thunen and central place theories. Finally, this next paper will conclude with a summary of the role of internal migration within the total demographic‑economic regime for both the “subsistence economy” and “market/political economy” models, setting up a research agenda for analyzing migration at both the individual household, community, and aggregate regional levels in the antebellum South in order to test the two models.

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