Mass Migration under Sail: European Immigration to the Antebellum United States (review)

Cohn presents an incisive examination of the causes and consequences of antebellum U.S. immigration from the perspective of two disciplines and both sides of the Atlantic. He has synthesized a broad swath of research by economists and historians, combining it with his own sampling of nearly 600,000 passengers listed on 2,643 ships arriving in the United States between 1820 and 1860, and his tabulations from the ipums U.S. census samples. Specialists will be familiar with much of the material from Cohn's earlier articles, but like non-specialists, they will benefit from having all of this work in one place with its interrelations explored.

Cohn finds a high positive selectivity of emigration at the outset, declining over time with falling costs of transportation. More surprising is his conclusion that German immigrants were more highly qualified than British immigrants (98). The predominance of five leading ports (Liverpool, Le Havre, Bremen, Hamburg, and London, in that order) was largely determined by freight trade. In contrast to anecdotal reports of horrendous mortality rates, Cohn finds overall losses to be under 1 percent (1.5 including deaths soon after arrival), and even that figure was highly concentrated in a few ships experiencing epidemics. Neither push nor pull factors explain all of the swings in immigrant volume, but the unprecedented impact of immigration relative to the size of the receiving population between 1845 and 1854 explains much of the nativist movement in the United States, which in turn triggered the precipitous immigration downturn in 1855. The aggregate occupational profile confirms that "immigrants experienced success in the U.S. labor market" (176).

The author is always scrupulous in exploring the limitations and possible biases in his data. He discusses the tradeoffs involved in using only "good" passenger lists or including also those which recorded an occupation such as "farmer" or laborer" for the initial passenger and dittoed it for pages on end. As someone who has compared many passenger list entries with those in German emigration permits, I place less faith even in the "good" lists than Cohn does. The "farmer" category doubtless includes many farm laborers and tenants along with a minority of landowners, at least among northwest Germans. With southwest Germans, there is the pervasive problem of artisanship combined with agriculture that makes it difficult to distinguish main occupation from sideline. Although Cohn proposes among his suggestions for further research a full computerization of all passenger lists, it is not clear how it would overcome the weaknesses of the underlying data. Another rough method of approximating immigrant selectivity or "quality" (more practicable since the advent of the ipums) would be to compare the degree of age heaping among immigrants with that in the census source populations, but Cohn has not attempted to do so.

Although Cohn gets most of the local details right, he erroneously allocated the (Bavarian) Palatinate to Prussia (32, 44). Southwest Germany was not "almost entirely Protestant" (86); Baden was two-thirds Catholic. These errors, and a few other minor ones, notwithstanding, Mass Migration under Sail represents the definitive account of the economics of antebellum immigration.