Abstract
The American fertility transition is unusual in comparison with historical transitions in other currently developed nations. The decline came very early, dating from about 1800 and took place from very high levels of fertility, a crude birth rate of 55 and a total fertility rate of about 7.0 for the white population in 1800. Further, the fertility transition began long before the sustained decline in mortality, dating from approximately the 1870s. Finally, the transition occurred in a predominantly agrarian and rural nation, although birth rates declined in both rural and urban places. Using a new database that supplements basic population census measures with other demographic, agricultural and manufacturing data, age-specific child-woman ratios can be calculated at the county level files for 1800 to 1860. This chapter examines patterns of geographic dispersion of white child-woman ratios, estimates structural spatial regression models and assesses spatial autocorrelation and clustering. Spatial autocorrelation was significant for variation by longitude (east-west) but not latitude (north-south). Low fertility counties were clustered in 1,800 and 1,810, while high fertility counties were more often found together later. Finally, fertility was less spatially patterned in longer settled and newly settled counties than in transitional areas.
Go to the West, and visit one of our log cabins, and number its inmates. There you will find a strong, stout youth of eighteen, with his better half, just commencing the first struggles of independent life. Thirty years from that time, visit them again; and instead of two, you will find in the same family twenty-two. That is what I call the American multiplication table
(Indiana Democrat Andrew Kennedy, 1846).
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the IUSSP, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research and the Minnesota Population Center for sponsoring the conference. Some of the data originated with the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research and the Integrated Public Use Microdata project. The authors wish to acknowledge those data archives.
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Haines, M.R., Hacker, J.D. (2011). Spatial Aspects of the American Fertility Transition in the Nineteenth Century. In: Merchant, E., Deane, G., Gutmann, M., Sylvester, K. (eds) Navigating Time and Space in Population Studies. International Studies in Population, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0068-0_3
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