Immigration and Urbanization

The American population in the early nineteenth century was not only mobile, it was also expanding. Rapidly. In 1790, for example, close to four million people lived in the United States. In 1820, just thirty years later, the nation's population had more than doubled to nine million. The 1830 Census counted nearly 13 million people in the United States.

The population growth between 1790 and 1830 came primarily from Americans’ high reproduction rates. Subsistence farm families frequently depended on the productivity of children. In the years that followed, immigration became a factor in the nation's population growth. Indeed, in the 1830s and 1840s, over four million immigrants arrived in America. By 1850, twelve percent of the nation's population was foreign-born.

Years		Irish		Germans
1831-1840		207,381		152,454
1841-1850		780,719		464,626
1851-1860		914,119		951,667
1861-1870		435,778		787,468
1871-1880		436,871		718,182
1881-1890		655,482		1,452,970
1891-1900		388,416		505,152
Total		3,818,766		5,000,519

Many of the immigrants, especially the Irish, settled in the cities of the Northeast. This contributed to a growing urbanization in America. Between 1820 and 1850, the number of U.S. cities of 5,000 or more rose from 12 to 150. Most of the cities in the Northeast more than doubled. The population of the nation's largest city, New York, topped half a million by 1850.  

Identify the effect of the causes listed below:

This added to the already large wave of settlers moving westward in the early 1800s. Speculators and farmers clamored to purchase the cheap public lands.

Tens of thousands of Irish seeking to escape the famine immigrated to the United States.