Yankeys Now: Immigrants in the Antebellum United States, 1840-1860 (review)

Yankeys Now: Immigrants in the Antebellum U.S., 1840-1860. By Joseph P. Ferrie (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999) 223 pp. $49.95

As one critic of the erstwhile New Urban History noted, scholars "started out by asking, 'Was it easier to get ahead in the past?' and ended up asking 'Where did all those people go?'" ¹ The low levels of geographical persistence across census decades were not to be easily explained. Another problem with studies involving immigrants is the difficulty in determining to what extent ethnic variations in social mobility resulted from differences in resources and human capital brought from the home country, or from different treatment in the American labor market. This ambitious study goes a long way toward answering all of these questions.

Exploiting newly available census indexes and samples, Ferrie takes a 5 percent sampling of adult male immigrants who arrived in New York between 1840 and 1850 and attempts to locate them in the 1850 and 1860 census manuscripts. He traces another nationwide 1 percent Public Use Sample of men forward from the 1850 to the 1860 census. Although linkage rates were low (15 percent or less), in part because no links were attempted for persons with commonly occurring names, Ferrie makes a good case for the representativeness of his samples. He is also aware of imprecision and potential inaccuracies in the passenger lists, but devises ingenious ways of dealing with these problems.

With techniques ranging from simple cross-tabulations to hazard models and linear and logistic regression, Ferrie analyzes occupational change and wealth mobility and their interrelationship with geographical location and shifts. Compared with earlier studies that focused entirely on persisters, he finds more of both upward and downward mobility among persons who migrated between censuses. But the "floating proletariat" (hypo)thesis can be safely laid to rest: Unskilled immigrants were more likely to move up the occupational and wealth scales if they were non-persisters. The overall picture of wealth mobility of immigrants is positive (though more so among British and Germans than among Irish); average annual gains were close to 15 percent and opportunities particularly good in the Midwest.

More historical economics than economic history, the book includes sections that address only a small circle of econometricians, but its conclusions are always clearly summarized in nontechnical language. The immigrants who wrote home that they were "Yankeys now" are among just a handful of individuals mentioned by name. Ferrie makes good use of substantive and methodological findings of historians, though he does overlook the work of the Philadelphia Social History Project (including some pertinent investigations of census coverage, and the wealth characteristics associated with common, versus uncommon, names), and an unpublished study involving nationwide tracing of statewide census samples that parallels his own approach. ²

The economist occasionally shows through in such assumptions as that flatboats could travel up the Mississippi (56), that undocumented immigrants who legalized their status in the late 1980s benefited from a lottery rather than an amnesty (159), or that the Know Nothing movement of the 1850s resulted only from all-time high immigration levels without help from the political vacuum following the collapse of the existing party system. Least convincing for this historian is Chapter 8, which attempts to measure the impact of immigration on natives during the 1850s using hypothetical incomes imputed by occupational title. It totally ignores the changes in real wealth (in both senses of the term) of the 4,271 native-born traced between 1850 and 1860, which could have been investigated in relation to the immigrant presence, or influx, in their county of residence. Such reservations notwithstanding, this book deserves to be widely read also by historians, geographers, and sociologists--even if not page by page.

Walter D. Kamphoefner
Texas A&M University

Notes

1. Eric H. Monkkonen, America Becomes Urban: The Development of U.S. Cities & Towns, 1780-1980 (Berkeley, 1988), 27.

2...