Multiplying Frontiers

In deriding Abraham Lincoln's "House Divided" speech during his debate with Lincoln at Jonesboro, Illinois in 1858, incumbent U.S. Senator from Illinois Stephen Douglas lashed out at what he considered his rival's delusion. Rather than threaten the republic, as Lincoln would have it, Douglas claimed that the very principle of coexistence between a North without slavery and a South with slavery had allowed the United States to evolve from a "weak and feeble power" when the Constitution was drafted in 1787 into a nation so strong and large that it was now "the terror and admiration of the civilized world." Not that Douglas attributed the growth he celebrated simply to the nation being half slave and half free. Rather, Douglas also detected a symbiosis between his country's swelling population since 1787 and its acquisition of territorial domain: "During that period we have increased from four millions to thirty millions of people; we have extended our territory from the Mississippi to the Pacific ocean; we have acquired the Floridas and Texas, and other territory sufficient to double our geographical extent." ¹

However repugnant today Douglas's tolerance for regional self-determination regarding slavery, he recognized that America's remarkable territorial growth during the first half of the nineteenth century sustained itself upon an astounding population explosion. In fact, even before the War for Independence, Benjamin Franklin had observed a relationship between the fecundity of young Americans and America's potential power, as Walter Nugent reminds us in his remarkable new book Habits of Empire. In Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c. (1751), Franklin asserted that natural increase had caused the English colonies to double in population every two decades. Franklin praised princes who acquired additional lands by removing natives and urged that, in any boundary settlement with France, Britain provide ample space for her multiplying colonists.

Nugent's ambitious synthesis of America's course to continental empire, overseas imperialism, and world power joins an ample historiography. Numerous scholars have provided provocative overviews on the U.S. ascendancy, though their chronological emphases and interpretations vary widely. ² Books constantly appear on the subject; in fact, Nugent's tome shares a page in the Knopf fall 2008 catalog with Richard Kluger, Seizing Destiny: The Relentless Expansion of American Territory (2007). But Nugent is the first scholar to put demography at the center of his analysis. Nugent not only patiently revisits how population pressures, largely because of Indian susceptibility to European diseases, facilitated Anglo takeovers of Native American lands. He also meticulously details how American population threats gave U.S. leaders advantages in expansionist confrontations with foreign powers.

Nugent devotes approximately 75 percent of his text to the U.S. acquisition of its enormous continental land mass (including Alaska), showing that in nearly every instance when the U.S. significantly grew its national domain, demography played an important, sometimes decisive role. (Exceptions were the absorption of Transappalachia in the settlement ending the American Revolution, U.S. annexation of California, and William Seward's purchase of Alaska.) Nugent reports that America's "rate of population increase was beyond anything known in Europe for hundreds of years, if ever" (p. 51). U.S. frontiers filled up "with new people at speeds unknown in Europe since the Middle Ages" (p. 99). Kentucky's white population alone "exploded" from a few hundred residents in 1780 to some 250,000 by 1803, the year of the Louisiana Purchase. U.S. families migrating into Louisiana before the Purchase had an average of eight children. Nugent suggests that the U.S., partly because of soil fertility and superior nutrition, defied Thomas Mathus's prognosis in 1798 (in An Essay on Population) that mankind, because of high reproduction rates, unless using remedial measures like delaying natural instincts to marry and procreate at young ages, tended to outstrip the planet's food resources. ³ Malthus rightly acknowledged America's demographic exceptionalism, noting how the New England colonies previously had...