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Urban Growth in the Mid-Atlantic States, 1785–1850

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Simeon J. Crowther
Simeon J. Crowther
Affiliation:
California State University, Long Beach
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Abstract

This article analyzes aspects of secular urban growth in two systems of cities in the mid-Atlantic states. One system centers on New York City; the other on Philadelphia. The author finds that the growth oi New York's hinterland was an important factor in explaining that system's relatively rapid expansion through the War of 1812. In subsequent years, this situation changed; basing his analysis on cross-sectional data, the author shows that relatively simple patterns of development gave way to complex situations shaped by the differential impacts of transportation, manufacturing, and commerce on these two urban systems.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , September 1976 , pp. 624 - 644
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1976

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References

1 One example of this is the work of Madden, Carl H., “On Some Indications of Stability in the Growth of Cities in the United States,” Economic Development and Cutural Change, 4 (April 1956), 236–252CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Some Spatial Aspects of Urban Growth in the United States,” Ibid., 4 (July 1956), 371–386; and “Some Temporal Aspects of the Growth of Cities in the United States,” Ibid., 6 (January 1958), 143–170. Eric E. Lampard's now classic “The History of Cities in the Economically Advanced Areas,” Ibid., 3 (January 1955), 81–136 helped to redefine the whole approach here; and two broad gauged works published by Resources for the Future, Perloff, Harvey S., et al. , Regions, Resources, and Economic Growth (Baltimore, 1960)Google Scholar, and Perloff, Harvey S. and Wingo, Lowdon, eds., Issues in Urban Economics (Baltimore, 1968)Google Scholar, contain much valuable material of this type.

2 See for example Wade, Richard C., The Urban Frontier: The Rise of the Western Cities, 1790–1830 (Cambridge, Mass., 1959)Google Scholar, and Gilchrist, David T., ed., The Growth of the Seaport Cities, 1790–1825 (Charlottesville, published for the Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation by the University Press of Virginia, 1967)Google Scholar, or Taylor, George Rogers, “The Beginnings of Mass Transportation in Urban America: Part I,” The Smithsonian Journal of History, 1 (Summer 1966), 35–50Google Scholar, Williamson, Jeffrey G. and Swanson, Joseph A., “A Model of Urban Capital Formation and the Growth of Cities in History,” Explorations in Economic History, 8 (Winter 1970/1971), 213–222Google Scholar, and Pred, Allan R., Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790–1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Williamson, Jeffrey G., “Antebellum Urbanization in the American Northeast,” Journal of Economic History, 25 (December 1965), 592–608CrossRefGoogle Scholar, presented some preliminary findings from a study subsequently published as Williamson, Jeffrey G. and Swanson, Joseph A., “The Growth of Cities in the American Northeast, 1820–1870,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, 2nd ser., 4 (Fall 1966), Supplement, 3–101Google Scholar.

4 Williamson and Swanson, “The Growth of Cities,” define the Northeast as New England plus New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, an area containing 182 urban places (those with populations over 2,500 persons) in 1860 (p. 9). They were disappointed to report that “We have been able to explain only a very small percentage of the variation in city growth rates” (p. 67).

5 sIbid., p. 27.

6 sIbid., p. 67.

7 sIbid., p. 66; Higgs, Robert, “Williamson and Swanson on City Growth: A Critique,” Explorations in Economic History, 8 (Winter 1970/1971), 203–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Eric E. Lampard, “The Evolving System of Cities in the United States: Urbanization and Economic Development,” in Harvey S. Perloff and Lowdon Wingo, eds., Issues in Urban Economics, p. 95, italics in original.

9 A list of these urban places and their populations in 1840 is contained in Table 6 in the Appendix. The term “urban place” refers only to communities holding 2,500 persons or more.

10 Miller, Zane L., The Urbanization of Modern America; A Brief History (New York, 1973), p. 9Google Scholar.

11 Precise definition of these hinterlands is impossible for reasons which are well understood, and this study does not attempt such a definition below the county level. The counties which made up each hinterland at different points in time are listed in the notes to Table 2. The resulting arrangement is based upon information on market areas and trading patterns obtained from a variety of sources. Among those which provided useful accounts by contemporaries were: Carey, H. C. and Lea, J., The Geography, History, and Statistics, of America (London, 1828), pp. 155–177Google Scholar; Gilpin, Joshua, “Journal of a Tour from Philadelphia Thro the Western Counties of Pennsylvania in the Months of September and October, 1809,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 50 (1926), pp. 64–78, 163–178, 380–382Google Scholar; 51 (1927), pp. 172–190, 351–375; 52 (1928), pp. 29–58; U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Executive Document No. 308, Documents Relative to Manufactures in the United States, Collected by the Secretary of the Treasury [Louis McLane], 22nd Cong., 1st Sess., Washington, D.C., 1833. Some valuable modern studies are: Emerson, F. V., “A Geographic Interpretation of New York City,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, 40 (October 1908), pp. 587–612CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lemon, James T., The Best Poor Man's Country; A Geographical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania (Baltimore, 1972)Google Scholar; Walzer, John F., “Colonial Philadelphia and Its Backcountry,” Wintherthur Portfolio 7, Charlottesville, Va., The University Press of Virginia, 1972, pp. 161–173Google Scholar.

12 See for example, Nettels, Curtis P., The Emergence of a National Economy, 1775–1815 (New York, 1962), p. 302Google Scholar.

13 The most complete articulation of this theory is to be found in Christaller, Walter, Central Places in Southern Germany, trans, by Baskin, Carlisle W. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966)Google Scholar, passim. Simply put, this theory defines the urban center's primary function as that of a supplier of services to a complementary hinterland, and the size of that hinterland will determine the size of the urban center.

14 Shepherd, James F. and Walton, Gary M., Shipping, Maritime Trade, and the Economic Development of Colonial North America (London, 1972), p. 90Google Scholar.

15 Lemon, James G., “Urbanization and the Development of Eighteenth-Century Southeastern Pennsylvania and Adjacent Delaware,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 24 (October 1967), p. 532CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Crowther, Simeon J., “The Shipbuilding Output of the Delaware Valley, 1722–1776,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 117 (April 10, 1973), pp. 96, 101Google Scholar.

16 Lemon, “Urbanization and the Development of Eighteenth-Century Southeastern Pennsylvania and Adjacent Delaware,” pp. 501–533 is the most complete and useful application of central place theory to colonial urbanization available.

17 See for example [McCready, John], A Review of the Trade and Commerce of New-York New York, 1820Google Scholar); [Dix, John A.], Sketch of the Resources of the City of New-York (New York, 1827)Google Scholar; [Baker, G. W.], A Review of the Relative Commercial Progress of the Cities of New-York & Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1859)Google Scholar.

18 Albion, Robert G., The Rise of New York Port [1815–1860] (New York, 1939)Google Scholar.

19 Subsequent authors have usually followed Albion in his brief account of post- Revolutionary development and his emphasis upon the years after 1815. See Curtis P. Nettels, The Emergence of a National Economy, p. 302, and the textbook by Hession, Charles H. and Sardy, Hyman, Ascent to Affluence; A History of American Economic Development (Boston, 1969), p. 171Google Scholar.

20 Smith, Walter B. and Cole, Arthur H., Fluctuations in American Business, 1790–1860 Cambridge, Mass., 1935), p. 37Google Scholar.

21 Bridenbaugh, Carl, Cities in Revolt; Urban Life in America, 1743–1776 (New York, 1955), p. 216Google Scholar, says 25,000 and 40,000 respectively. Everett S. Lee and Michael Lalli, “Population,” in Gilchrist, ed., The Growth of Seaport Cities, p. 28, citing Rossiter, W. S., A Century of Population Growth (Washington, D. C., 1909), p. 11Google Scholar gives figures of 28,000 for Philadelphia in 1770 and 21,000 for New York City. Alexander, John K., “The Philadelphia Numbers Game: An Analysis of Philadelphia's Eighteenth-Century Population,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 98 (July 1974), p. 324Google Scholar, asserts that Philadelphia's 1774 population was 33,482. My figures are compromise estimates designed to convey an impression of relative size.

22 Greene, Evarts B. and Harrington, Virginia D., American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York, 1932), pp. 91, 116Google Scholar. Total New York population (238,000) minus that of New York City (23,000) plus that of eastern New Jersey (70,000). Again an obvious estimate. See note 11 for derivation of hinterland.

23 Ibid., pp. 112, 113, 116. Pennsylvania (300,000) minus Philadelphia (33,000) plus western New Jersey (70,000) and Delaware (30,000). See notes 11 and 22.

24 The Northern Liberties and Southward. The issue of suburbs will be dealt with more fully below, but some of the reasons for their inclusion here are discussed by Williamson and Swanson, “The Growth of Cities in the American Northeast,” p. 72, and George Rogers Taylor, “Comment,” in Gilchrist, ed., The Crowth of the Seaport Cities, pp. 38–42.

25 At this point its adjacent suburb, Brooklyn, with 4,402 people is added to New York City. See note 24.

26 Between 1790 and 1800, the populations of Philadelphia and New York City grew by 40 percent and 83 percent respectively while their hinterlands grew by 22 percent and 40 percent. From 1800 to 1810, Philadelphia's population grew by 42 percent, New York City's by 67 percent, and the hinterlands by 22 percent and 26 percent respectively. The latter discrepancy is discussed in the text.

27 Before that date, New York City's hinterland development was constrained by hostile Indians and a land policy which tended to favor large estates over family farms. These factors acted to mute population growth in the Hudson River Counties with ready access to the city, and to halt settlement beyond Albany. On this and the migration to New York see Ellis, David M., Landlords and Farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk Region (Ithaca, N.Y., 1946), pp. 77–91Google Scholar, and his “The Yankee Invasion of New York, 1783–1850,” New York History, 32 (January 1951), pp. 3–17Google Scholar.

28 The reasons for this would appear to be the changed regulatory environment for American trade, the consequent decline of Boston as an entrepot for western Connecticut, and the area's inability to provide commercial services as cheaply as the larger-scale operators of New York City. See Emory R. Johnson, T. W. Van Metre, G. G. Huebner, and D. S. Hanchett, History of Domestic and Foreign Commerce of the United States (orig. ed. 1915; reprint New York, Burt Franklin, n.d., I, pp. 129, 160); Martin, Margaret E., “Merchants and Trade of the Connecticut River Valley, 1750–1820,” Smith College Studies in History, 24 (Northampton, Mass., 1939), pp. 48, 50, 58, 135Google Scholar; Weeden, William B., Economic and Social History of New England, 1620–1789 (orig. ed. 1890; reprint New York, 1963), 2, pp. 832–833Google Scholar; Albion, Rise of New York Port, p. 246; and “Letters of Phineas Bond, British Consul at Philadelphia, to the Foreign Office of Great Britain, 1787, 1788, 1789,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association … 1896, 1 (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office), pp. 629–630Google Scholar.

29 This being the approximate population of the western Connecticut counties of Fairfield, Hartford, Litchfield, Middlesex, and New Haven in that year.

30 See Lemon, The Best Poor Man's Country, passim.

31 Gilpin, “Journal of a Tour,” passim.

32 Baltimore's rise as a trading center was due principally to the shift of its backcountry agriculture from tobacco to wheat. The trade in tobacco was largely in British hands, but the new grain trade was wide open to Baltimore merchants. See Livingood, James W., The Philadelphia-Baltimore Trade Rivalry, 1780–1860 (Harrisburg, Pa., Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1947), pp. 12–15Google Scholar, and Lampard, “The History of Cities in the Economically Advanced Areas,” p. 117.

33 Davison, Robert A. and Hicks, Isaac, New York Merchant and Quaker, 1767–1820 (Cambridge, Mass., 1964)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially chapter 5, illustrates the geographic range of the city's early national trade.

34 Isard, Walter, Location and Space-Economy (New York, 1956), p. 58Google Scholar.

35 Lemon, The Best Poor Man's Country, p. 226.

36 Richardson, Harry W., Urban Economics (London, 1971), p. 82Google Scholar, provides a basic summary of these problems. Even the use of the urban hierarchy component of that model as Lemon, “Urbanization and the Development of Eighteenth-Century Southeastern Pennsylvania and Adjacent Delaware,” has done faces problems because manufacturing and mining, industries of growing importance in Pennsylvania, “show less tendency to regularity of distribution.” (p. 504n).

37 Williamson and Swanson, “The Growth of Cities in the American Northeast,” pp. 3–9, catalogues some of these, as does Lampard, “The Evolving System of Cities in the United States,” pp. 83–94, and Mills, Edwin S., Studies in the Structure of the Urban Economy (Baltimore, 1972), especially p. 63Google Scholar. But Harvey S. Perloffhas noted that even the application of these models to current data, while valuable, does not “substantially broaden our understanding of why various places grow and decline at certain rates.” “The Development of Urban Economics in the United States,” Urban Studies, 10 (October, 1973), p. 296Google Scholar, italics in original.

38 For a discussion of this “convergence” phenomenon in the wider context of northeastern urbanization see Williamson, Jeffrey G., “Urbanization in the American Northeast, 1820–1870,” in Fogel, Robert W. and Engerman, Stanley L., eds., The Reinterpretation of American Economic History (New York, 1971), pp. 430–431Google Scholar.

39 Lampard describes the “expansion of all [American cities between 1790 and 1820], with the possible exception of Philadelphia,” as “essentially a commercial-servicing growth due to the swelling of trade as more resources from the continental interior became available.” See “The History of Cities in the Economically Advanced Areas,” p. 117, italics in original.

40 Further information and the worksheets relating to these calculations are available from the author upon request.

41 Age is measured here by the length of time an urban place has been listed in the federal population census with a population of 2,500 or more. Thus an urban place aged “0” in 1840 has only reached that size in the 1840 census, while those aged “10” first appeared in 1830, and so on.

42 These results should be compared with those obtained by Williamson, “Urbanization in the American Northeast, 1820–1870,” pp. 433–434, where the ratio, of estimated manufacturing employment to total employment in urban places is used to measure the degree of urban industrialization.

43 Whether the age of a given urban place at any point in time will encourage or inhibit growth in an ensuing period is unclear. Williamson and Swanson, “The Growth of Cities in t he American Northeast,” pp. 42–43, argue that “new” cities should “exhibit more successful growth performance than the old apart from size.” Pred, Allan R., “Industrialization, Initial Advantage, and American Metropolitan Growth, The Geographical Review, 55 (April 1965), pp. 158–185CrossRefGoogle Scholar, focuses upon size (larger urban places being older) as conferring initial growth advantages during urban industrialization. But Higgs, “Williamson and Swanson on City Growth: A Critique,” argues that “Age itself implies nothing about city growth except inasmuch as there are time trends in the parameters of the demand or cost curves for a city's output” (p. 210). The testability of these hypotheses is handicapped by the obvious fact that the newest urban places are invariably among the smallest and a high percentage change in size is obtained by a smaller absolute increment in population in smaller cities than larger ones.

44 The urban places referred to here include the adjacent suburbs which were not formally incorporated into the metropolitan centers by 1850. Similar calculations performed without them yielded similar results.

45 This is an interesting exception to Madden's, “Some Spatial Aspects of Urban Growth,” where the national trend toward an initial scattering of urban places was replaced by a “filling in” of urban places near existing centers only in the twentieth century (p. 379). There was an overall growth of population density in the east, however, particularly around existing urban centers (p. 385).

46 Two measurement problems could conceivably have played a part in generating these variations. First is the arbitrary definition of an urban place. There were numerous villages in the mid-Atlantic states with populations below 2,500 in 1840, but which contained enterprises such as mills, forges, tanneries, etc. While not urban by our definition, they were not exactly rural either. Secondly, the census may have surveyed urban manufacturing more accurately than that in the less accessible rural areas, biasing the urban manufacturing share upward. In the absence of contrary evidence, I have assumed these errors to be randomly distributed and the variations discussed in the text to be real and explicable.

47 Lemon, The Best Poor Man's Country, pp. 206–207, provides an illustration of this with maps of Lancaster and Chester Counties in 1758–1759 and 1781–1782.

48 Bining, Arthur Cecil, Pennsylvania Iron Manufacture in the Eighteenth Century (Harrisburg, Pa., Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1938), especially pp. 19–54Google Scholar.

49 Goodrich, Carter, Rubin, Julius, Cranmer, H. Jerome, Segal, Harvey H., Canals and American Economic Development (New York, 1961), pp. 67–114Google Scholar, discusses the Pennsylvania Mainline Canal in particular.

50 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., “Anthracite Coal and the Beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in the United States,” Business History Review, 46 (Summer 1972), pp. 141–181CrossRefGoogle Scholar, touches upon this, but an unpaginated map in Lesley, John P., The Iron Manufacturer's Guide (New York, 1859)Google Scholar, entitled “Map Showing the Positions of the Furnaces, Forges and Rolling Mills in Eastern Pennsylvania …,” illustrates the clustering very clearly. Lampard, “The History of Cities in the Economically Advanced Areas,” cites a resistance to technological change as well as characteristics of the process itself in the British iron industry to explain the relative slowness of that industry to become urbanized, pp. 112, 119.

51 Shaw, Ronald E., Erie Water West; A History of the Erie Canal, 1792–1854 (Lexington, Ky., 1966), especially pp. 260–300Google Scholar.

52 Cole, Arthur H., The American Wool Manufacture (Cambridge, Mass., 1926), p. 280Google Scholar, provides a well-known illustration of the collapse of household woolen manufacture in counties adjacent to the Erie Canal.

53 Bining, Pennsylvania Iron Manufacture in the Eighteenth Century, p. 37, discusses the typical location of the various branches of the iron industry.

54 Hoffecker, Carol E., “Nineteenth Century Wilmington: Satellite or Independent City?” Delaware History, 15 (April 1972), pp. 1–18Google Scholar, illustrates the importance of the careful use of the term “satellite” when describing interurban economic relationships.