This article constructs new life tables for the white population of the United States in each decade between 1790 and 1900. Drawing from several recent studies, it suggests best estimates of life expectancy at age 20 for each decade. These estimates are fitted to new standards derived from the 1900-02 rural and 1900-02 overall DRA life tables using a two-parameter logit model with fixed slope. The resulting decennial life tables more accurately represent sex-and age-specific mortality rates while capturing known mortality trends.

This article relies on samples of the federal decennial censuses from 1850 through 1880 to compare white marriage patterns before and after the American Civil War. Although this study presents marriage estimates for all regions, the discussion focuses on the South, which suffered three times the rate of military deaths of the North. The results suggest that a modest marriage squeeze affected southern white women who reached marriage age during the war. Faced with a shortage of potential spouses in the postwar period, some women postponed marriage or chose less appropriate husbands. Diaries, letters, and memoirs of southern women supplement the quantitative analysis and document womens wartime fears of spinsterhood. However, the results of this study demonstrate that womens feared spinsterhood failed to materialize over the long term. The vast majority (approximately 92 percent) of southern white women who came of marriage age during the war married at some point in their lives. Indeed, the marriage squeeze on southern women apparent in the 1870 census is no longer evident in the 1880 census.

This paper constructs new life tables for the American Indian population in the late nineteenth and early nineteenth centuries, thus pushing back the availability of age-specific mortality and life expectancy estimates nearly half a century. Because of the lack of reliable vital registration data for the American Indian population in this period, the life tables are constructed using indirect census-based estimation methods. Infant and child mortality rates are estimated from the number of children ever born and children surviving reported by women in the 1900 and 1910 Indian censuses. Adult mortality rates are inferred from the infant and child mortality estimates using model life tables. Adult mortality rates are also estimated by applying the Preston-Bennett two-census method (1983) to the 1900-1910 intercensal period.

Over 600,000 men died in the American Civil War--roughly equal to the number of deaths suffered in all other American wars through the Korean War combined. In this paper, we investigate the impact of wartime mortality on subsequent nuptiality through a microsimulation coupled with an empirical investigation of age at marriage and proportions ever marrying in the 1850-1880 IPUMS samples. We construct microsimulations, indices of the intensity of the postwar marriage squeeze (including the marital sex ratio and Schoen's index), and nuptiality estimates for each census region. We focus our discussion, however, on the postwar South, which lost an estimated 1-in-4 white men of military age in the conflict--three times the rate of death in the North. Diaries, letters, and memoirs of nurses, soldiers, and people on the home front supplement the analysis and confirm the presence of a developing marriage squeeze on southern white women.

Despite its importance for the economic and demographic history of the nineteenth-century United States, there are few published estimates of the timing and incidence of marriage and no published studies of its correlates before 1890, when the Census Office first tabulated marital status by age, sex, and nativity. In this article, I rely on the 1860 IPUMS census sample to construct national and regional estimates of white nuptiality by nativity and sex and to test theories of marriage timing. I supplement this analysis with two new public use samples of Civil War soldiers. The Gould sample, collected by the United States Sanitary Commission between 1863 and 1865, allows me to test whether height and body mass influenced white mens propensity to marry. Finally, a sample of Union Army recruits linked to the 1860 census, created as part of the Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease, and Death project, allows me to combine suspected economic, demographic, and anthropometric correlates of marriage into a multivariate model of never-married white mens entrance into first marriage. The results indicate that nuptiality was moderately higher in 1860 than it was in 1890. In contrast to previous studies, which emphasize the primary importance of land availability and farm prices, I find that single womens opportunity to participate in the paid labor force was the most important determinant of marriage timing. I also find modest support for the hypothesis that height affected mens propensity to marry, consistent with the theory that body size was a sign to potential marriage partners of future earnings capacity and health.

Under the urging of late nineteenth-century humanitarian reformers, U.S. policy toward American Indians shifted from removal and relocation efforts to state-sponsored attempts to civilize Indians through allotment of tribal lands, citizenship, and forced education. There is little consensus, however, whether and to what extent federal assimilation efforts played a role in the stabilization and recovery of the American Indian population in the twentieth century. In this paper, we rely on a new IPUMS sample of the 1900 census of American Indians and census-based estimation methods to investigate the impact of federal assimilation policies on childhood mortality. We use children ever born and children surviving data included in the censuses to estimate childhood mortality and several questions unique to the Indian enumerationincluding tribal affiliation, degree of white blood, type of dwelling, ability to speak English, and whether a citizen by allotmentto construct multivariate models of child mortality. The results suggest that mortality among American Indians in the late nineteenth century was very highapproximately 62% higher than that for the white population. The impact of assimilation policies was mixed. Increased ability to speak English was associated with lower child mortality, while allotment of land in severalty was associated in higher mortality. The combined effect was a very modest four percent decline in mortality. As of 1900, the government campaign to assimilate Indians had yet to result in a significant decline in Indian mortality while incurring substantial economic and cultural costs.

Under the urging of late nineteenth-century reformers, U.S. policy toward American Indians shifted from removal and relocation efforts to state-sponsored attempts to civilize Indians through allotment of tribal lands, citizenship, and forced education. There is little consensus, however, whether and to what extent federal assimilation efforts played a role in the stabilization and recovery of the American Indian population in the twentieth century. In this paper, we rely on a new IPUMS sample of the 1900 census of American Indians and census-based estimation methods to investigate the impact of federal assimilation policies on childhood mortality. We use children ever born and children surviving data included in the censuses to estimate childhood mortality responses to several questions unique to the Indian enumerationincluding tribal affiliation, degree of white blood, type of dwelling, ability to speak English, and whether a citizen by allotmentto construct multivariate models of child mortality. The results suggest that mortality among American Indians in the late nineteenth century was very highapproximately 62 percent higher than that for the white population. The impact of assimilation policies was mixed. Increased ability to speak English was associated with lower child mortality, while allotment of land in severalty was associated with higher mortality. The combined effect was a very modest four percent decline in mortality. As of 1900, the government campaign to assimilate Indians had yet to result in a significant decline in Indian mortality while incurring substantial economic and cultural costs.

This paper uses improved source data to test various theories of U.S. antebellum fertility decline. In the first part of the analysis, we rely on child-woman ratios and other county-level aggregate data from the population and economic censuses of 1800 to 1860 and the agricultural and manufacturing censuses of 1840-1860 to evaluate a number of hypotheses. Data on churches in 1850 and 1860 provide some indications of ideational differences across counties. We supplement these commonly-used data in a number of ways. We include, for example, new estimates of urbanization and the geographic areas of the counties in all census years. More critically, for the 1850 and 1860 analysis, we include aggregated estimates of nuptiality constructed with the 1850 and 1860 IPUMS samples. We are thus able to determine whether identified correlates of child-woman ratios in the antebellum period remain significant when nuptiality is included in the modelin other words, to suggest whether the correlates of child-woman ratios act as Malthusian or neo-Malthusian adjustments. We take this analysis one step further in the second part of the analysis, where we rely on the 1850 and 1860 IPUMS samples to model marital fertility at the individual level.

In this article, I rely on new estimates of nineteenth-century mortality and the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series to construct new estimates of white fertility in the nineteenth-century United States. Unlike previous estimates that showed a long-term decline in overall fertility beginning at or before the turn of the nineteenth century, the new estimates suggest that U.S. fertility did not begin its secular decline until circa 1840. Moreover, new estimates of white marital fertility, based on own-children methods, suggest that marital fertility decline did not begin in the nation as a whole until after the Civil War (1861-1865).