The Growth of Real Product in the United States Before 1840: New Evidence, Controlled Conjectures

Scholarly opinion currently evinces disturbing symptoms of latent schizophrenia on the subject of economic growth in the ante-bellum United States. Virtually every student of the era now appears convinced that the long-term rate of growth of aggregate product per capita underwent a significant acceleration “somewhere during the period between 1815 and 1860,” as Douglass North recently phrased it. And, if many economic historians protest W. W. Rostow's labeling the years following 1843 as the period of the U.S. “take-off,” most do not seem to balk at accepting the guess hazarded by Raymond Goldsmith: “a fairly sharp break in the trend of real national product per head … occurred not very long before 1839,” quite probably during the 1830's. To the uninitiated, it might seem obvious that everybody also subscribes to an explicit set of assertions about the secular rate of growth of per capita product during the period from, say, the founding of the nation to the date of the putative acceleration; otherwise, how could all agree that a significant alteration in the trend had occurred?