The Demographic Miracle of 1776—And What it Means Today

Visitors to the American Colonies in the mid-18th century were astonished by the families they encountered. Schoolmaster Gottlieb Mittelberger, dispatched in 1750 by the Duke of Wuertenberg to report on German settlers in Pennsylvania, was typical. “It must be confessed that the female sex in this new country is very fruitful,” he wrote. In both city and country, “when one comes into a house, one finds it usually full of children, and the city of Philadelphia is fairly swarming with them.” Whenever a visitor meets an American woman, he noticed, “she is either with child, or she carries a child in her arms, or leads one by the hand.”¹

In 1766, the Church of England sent the priest Charles Woodmason to bring Anglican order to the Scotch-Irish settlers in the Carolina backcountry. He described the subjects of his mission as “Rude—Ignorant—Void of Manners, Education, or Good Breeding…the most lowest, vilest men breathing.”²

And yet, Woodmason was stunned by the fecundity of their womenfolk: 

There’s not a Cabin but has 10 or 12 Young Children in it—When the boys are 18 and the Girls 14 they marry—so that in many Cabins you will see 10 or 15 Children, Children and Grandchildren of one size—and the Mother looking as Young as the Daughter.

No less a figure than Benjamin Franklin pondered the causes of such things. In his remarkable 1755 essay, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, Etc., he accurately calculated that American marriage and birth rates were twice as high as those found in Europe: an average of eight births per woman in the New World compared to four in the Old. This meant that the American population would double every 20 years by natural increase alone. Why this difference? Franklin noted that land was plentiful and cheap in America and that “a laboring man that understands Husbandry, can in a short time save enough to purchase a piece of new land sufficient for a plantation, whereon he may subsist a family.” Such men “are not afraid to marry,” and marry early. Moreover, Franklin argued that “sects” that regarded frugality and hard work as religious duties and educated “their children therein” would grow faster than groups which did not.³

Writing in 1775, Harvard University theologian Edward Wigglesworth suggested causes closer to the divine. The rapidity of American population growth had no “parallel in the annals of Europe!”  he wrote. Indeed, he noted, such a thing “has never been equaled since the patriarchal ages,” described in the Old Testament. On a more practical note, he argued that Americans “are less luxurious in their manner of living” and that their “temperance in diet renders them more healthy.” Hinting at the political implications, Wigglesworth estimated that Americans “will be more numerous than their brethren in Britain” within a mere 50 years.⁴

This demographic exuberance was not new. The Puritan settlers of New England had recorded similar numbers in the 17th Century. The first two generations of Puritans averaged nine children per couple.⁵ At the upper extreme, the 90 families in Billerica—today a Boston suburb—counted 1043 children, an average of 11 kids.⁶ As demographer Jim Potter has summarized, “the natural growth rate of Massachusetts and Connecticut in the second half of the seventeenth century was extremely unusual, if not unique, in human history.”⁷

In both the 17th and 18th centuries, families formed the basic economic unit, not individuals.

Moreover, similar decades-long episodes of familial effervescence also occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries. During the former event, the hugely influential writers Sarah Hale and Lydia Sigourney described a remarkable conflation of good homes and the American Republic around “the Eden Laws”: the creation by God of marriage; the Divine command “to be fruitful and multiply;” and the necessity of distinctive male and female tasks. As Hale wrote: “Do you not perceive a striking similitude between the family on Mount Ararat and the Pilgrim band in the Mayflower?”⁸

In the latter episode, marriage- and baby-booms altered the American social landscape. The marriage rate more than doubled between 1932 and the late 1940s. The average age of first marriage may have reached record American lows in 1956: 22.5 for men; 20.1 for women. By 1970, over 95% of American adults either were or had been married. Meanwhile, the fertility rate soared from an estimated 2 lifetime births per woman in 1930 to 3.625 in 1957, an increase of 80 percent.⁹

Looking past our current time of marriage and fertility woes, do these past episodes of family strength and renewal teach common lessons about what works?  The answer, I believe, is yes. 

Here are six lessons we can take away from America’s past to boost fertility in our future: 

1. Embrace a family-centered worldview. In one exemplary community, the Quakers in 18th-century Pennsylvania organized the whole of life around family-centeredness, to transform the “trivia, responsibilities, and relations of family life” into something “fascinating, profound, and sacred.”¹⁰
2. Encourage Property Ownership. Productive land, homes, forests, and small enterprises should be owned by as many families as possible. Notable episodes of greatly expanded property-holding include a quadrupling in the number of family farms in America during the second half of the 19th century through measures such as the Homestead Act of 1862 and the 90% rise in the number of owner-occupied homes between 1945 and 1960, heavily fueled by favorable federal policies.¹¹ (See the IFS report on housing for more ideas on boosting home ownership).
3. Build Family Economies. In both the 17th and 18th centuries, families formed the basic economic unit, not individuals. Throughout the British colonies, Americans expected each family to operate as a self-contained unit. They expected children to accept a duty toward their families, “even to the point of sacrificing individual advantage.” And they expected that education would be the responsibility of families, not “society.”¹² In the 19th century, theologian Horace Bushnell borrowed an image from Jeremiah to praise “the organic working of the family,” explaining: “If the father kindles the fire, and the women knead the cakes, the children will gather the wood.”¹³ Even in the late 20th century, calculations of the value of the full-time homemaker’s contribution to the home economy through child care, cooking, cleaning, and so on ranged from 50-100% of the median cash family income.¹⁴ (Looking ahead, the "Third Oikos" model, a joint project of IFS the Foundation for American Innovation, seeks ways in which new information technologies can reintegrate production in households, bringing both mothers and fathers "home.")
4. Grow the Middle Class. Every period of family strength in American history either witnessed or built upon a shrinkage of the proportions of both the super-rich and the very poor, and the expansion of the middle class. Perhaps the most dramatic and well-documented example of this came in the middle decades of the 20th century. Labeled “the great compression of wages,” economic inequality “fell precipitously” between 1940 and 1970, with “a wage structure more egalitarian” than it had been for the prior one hundred years or “at any time since.”¹⁵ These were the very years of the celebrated Marriage and Baby Boom.
5. Seek a Family-Centered Polity. Just as in economics, “the family rather than the individual was the basic political unit” throughout 18th century America.¹⁶ Much closer to current time, every significant Federal domestic policy adopted between 1933 and 1948 sought to promote and defend the breadwinner-homemaker family model as a clear expression of American solidarity.¹⁷
6. Respect Sexual Complementarity in Marriage, While Making Work from Home Easier. The Americans of 1776 expected that men and women would hold distinct spheres of responsibility: the former in the fields and the public square; the latter in the house, garden, and farmyard. Albeit with a shift from farm to suburb, the same assumptions prevailed in the mid- 20^th century. Research studies of that era found well-educated women expressing “a fervent commitment to marriage” and full-time homemaking.¹⁸ As feminist historian Elaine Tyler May accurately summarizes: “the young women of the day would not be dissuaded. They were homeward bound.”¹⁹

These are the principles—grounded in a distinctive, if large, geographic place—on which a well-defined American family system has been built, and re-built, over the last four centuries. As we celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, I predict that if family renewal occurs again in this fair land, it will derive from new iterations of these same six strategic tasks.

Allan C. Carlson’s books include The American Way: Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity(Cannon Press, 2003), and  Family Cycles: Strength, Decline, and Renewal in American Domestic Life, 1630-2000(Routledge, 2016).

Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the Institute for Family Studies.

*Photo credit: Shutterstock

1. Gottlieb Mittelberger, Journey to Pennsylvania in the Year 1750 and Return to Germany in 1754, trans. By Carl Theo. Eben (Philadelphia, PA: John Jos. McVey, 1898), 107.

2. Charles Woodmason, The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution 1766-68 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953), 39.

3. Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, Etc. (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1755), 217-8, 220, 222.

4. Edward Wigglesworth, Calculations on American Population with a Table for Estimating the Annual Increase of Inhabitants in the British Colonies…. (Boston: John Boyle, 1775), 5-6, 23.

5. Richard Archer, “New England Mosaic: A Demographic Analysis for the Seventeenth Century,” The William and Mary Quarterly (Third Series) 47 (October 1990), 477-502.

6. Changes in Population,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 38 (1869), 387.

7. Jim Potter, “Demographic Development and Family Structure,” in Colonial British America, ed. Jack P. Greene and J.R. Pole (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 148.

8. Sarah J. Hale, Manners; or Happy Homes and Good Society. All the Year Round (New York: Arno Press, 1972 [1868], 22-3, 261-2.

9. Historical Statistics of the United States. Colonial Times to 1970, Part 1 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1976), 19, 50, 63.

10. Barry Levy, “The Birth of the ‘Modern Family’ in Early America: Quaker and Anglican Families in the Delaware Valley, Pennsylvania, 1681-1750,” in Michael Zuckerman, ed., Friends and Neighbors: Group Life in America’s First Plural Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 48.

11. Harvey S. Rosen, “Owner Occupied Housing and the Federal Income Tax: Estimates and Simulations,” Journal of Urban Economics 6 (1979), 263-4.

12. Robert V. Wells, Revolutions in Americans’ Lives: A Demographic Perspective on the History of Americans, Their Families, and Their Society (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), 56-63.

13. Horace Bushnell, Christian Nurture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967 [1847]), 74-98.

14. Reuben Gronau, “Home Production—A Forgotten Industry,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 62 (1980), 408-16.

15. Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo, “The Great Compression: The Wage Structure in the United States at Mid-Century,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 57 (February 1992), 2-4. 24-32. 

16. Wells, Revolutions in Americans’ Lives, 56-63.

17.This assertion comes from materials found in: Allan Carlson, The ‘American Way’: Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003), 55-78.

18. The most rigorous and thorough of these was the Kelly Longitudinal Study, ably summarized in: Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 30-38.

19. May, Homeward Bound, 80-82.