Right at the end of his life, Benjamin Franklin wrote a pamphlet giving advice to Europeans
planning to come to America. He said it was a good place for those who wanted to become rich.
But, he said, it was above all a haven for the industrious poor, for nowhere else are the laboring poor so well fed, well lodged, well clothed and well paid as in the United States of America.' It was a country, he concluded, wherea general happy mediocrity prevails." It is important for
those who wish to understand American history to remember this point about happy mediocrity.' The historian is bound to bring out the high points and crises of the national story, to record the doings of the great, the battles, elections, epic debates, and laws passed. But the everyday lives of simple citizens must not be ignored simply because they were uneventful. This is particularly true of America, a country specifically created by and for ordinary men and women, where the system of government was deliberately designed to interfere in their lives as little as possible. The fact that, unless we investigate closely, we hear so little about the mass of the population is itself a historical point of great importance, because it testifies by its eloquent silence to the success of the republican experiment. Early in the 19th century, America was achieving birth-rates never before equaled in history, in terms of children reaching adulthood. The 1800 census revealed a population of 5,308,843, itself a 35 percent increase over ten years. By 1810 it had leaped to 7,239,881, up another 36.4 percent. By 1820 it was 9,638,453, close to doubling in twenty years, and of this nearly 80 percent was natural increase. As one Congressman put it:I invite you to 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 that same family
twenty-two. That is what I call the American Multiplication Table.'
But with the end of the world war in 1815 high American birth-rates were compounded by a
great flood of immigrants. It is a historical conjunction of supreme importance that the coming of
the independent American republic, and the opening up of the treasure-house of land provided by
the Louisiana Purchase and the destruction of Indian power by Andrew Jackson, coincided with
the beginnings of the world's demographic revolution, which hit Europe first. Between 1750 and
1900 Europe's population rose faster than anywhere else in the world (except North America),
from 150 million to over 400 million.' This, in turn, produced a huge net outflow of immigration:
to South America, Russia, Australasia, Canada, South Africa, and above all the United States.
The rush to America began after the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815 and continued right through
the autumn and winter, the immigrant ships braving gales and ice. It accelerated in 1816, which
in Europe was `the year without a summer,' with torrential rain and even sleet and snow
continuing into July and August and wrecking harvests, sending poor and even starving people to
the coast to huddle in the transports. Ezekiah Niles (1777-1839), who ran Niles's Weekly Register
from 1811 onwards, in many ways America's best journal of record at the time, calculated that
50,000 immigrants reached America in the year, though this figure was later revised downwards.
His more careful calculation for 1817, based on shipping lists (the federal government, though it
took censuses, did not yet publish statistics), produced a figure of 30,000 up to the end of the
main season in September. Of this half went to New York and Philadelphia, though some went
straight over the Appalachians into the Ohio Valley.
No authority on either side of the Atlantic was bothered with who was going where or how,
though the British limited ship-carrying capacity to one passenger to every 2 tons of registry in
their own ships. The sheer freedom of movement was staggering. An Englishman, without
passport, health certificate or documentation of any kind-without luggage for that matter-could