What If America Had Lost the Revolutionary War? A Fourth of July thought experiment

The Atlantic ^ | July 4, 2014 | Uri Friedman, senior associate editor

[expat2]

That may have been a factor, but was short-sighted thinking if so. The French were still in Quebec and much of Canada and were still considered a serious threat. The indians weren’t going away — as we know, they continued to be a problem for America for another 100 years.
While the french and the indians had been driven back, the increased territory gained by the Brits meant that there was now a larger and more-cost;y perimeter to defend. The F&I war had been very costly to the British government and it felt that taxes and controls on colonial expansion were needed.

[Sherman Logan]

The French were still in Quebec and much of Canada and were still considered a serious threat.

Not realistic to think so, if anybody really did. The French menace had always been from the French government and regulars based in Canada, not the Canadian population as such, though the Canadian militias and Indians reinforced them.

In 1776 the population of the 13 colonies was between 2.5 and 3 million. That of Canada was well under 100,000.

No reasonable person could have considered the tiny population of leaderless French Canadians a threat to the 25x larger population of the British colonies.

To put that into something like perspective, it's the present difference in population between USA and Cuba. Cuba's never been anything like a threat, unless backed up by a large imperial power.

[expat2]

Also seems very likely the British Empire would not have expanded as much as it did into India, Africa and other parts of the world

Perhaps, but remember that this expansion had nothing to do with wanting territory. The Brits were the biggest trading nation and were making large sums of money from buying up spices and tea in Asia, bringing them West by ship, and selling them in Europe. They needed ports on the route out and back to take on water, food, and other provisions. Hence their footholds on the shores of India and Ceyon/Sri-Lanka, and Africa (e.g. Capetown). Protecting those enclaves ended up requiring more territory around them.

[expat2]

No reasonable person could have considered the tiny population of leaderless French Canadians a threat to the 25x larger population of the British colonies.

I'll bet the British settlers in the new weakly-held territories didn't agree, especially since they knew that the French and Indians would be allies in any further hostilities.

[Impy]

Not possible, once the redcoats started raping women left and right as a show of force, their defeat was sealed, Americans weren’t about to stand for that.

[MUDDOG]

Maybe we could get a handle on number of slaves imported after 1807 by doing a demographic study, i.e., compare the actual increase in number of blacks in the US against the expected increase from births/deaths.

Here's a very VERY rough estimate using my World Almanac.

The almanac doesn't have 1810 data, but it does have 1820, 1860, and 1900.

Black population in 1820: 1.77 million. 1860: 4.44 million. 1900: 8.83 million.

The 1860 number was 2.5 times the 1820 number. 1900 was 2.0 times 1860.

Since there was no importation of slaves and probably very little immigration of blacks from 1860 to 1900, we take 2.0 as the natural increase. Applying this to the 1820 population, we'd expect 3.54 million blacks in 1860.

But there were actually 4.44 million. So we estimate that 900,000 were brought in.

Yep, it's VERY rough. But it illustrates the kind of thing that could be calculated, if you could get a good estimate of the expected natural birth/death rates in the pre-1860 period.

[Sherman Logan]

Not an unreasonable assumption. However, I think the birth rate for both white and black Americans dropped off in the second half of the 19th century, down from the explosive growth rate of the previous two centuries.

Your projection of course assumes the exact same birth rate in 1860 to 1900 as in 1820 to 1860. Even a quite small drop in birth rate would throw the numbers off a lot.

Here’s a paper that looks very interesting. Frankly, I don’t have time to thrash about in its weeds, but changes in both death and birth rates from the 1st to the 2nd half of the 19th century would significantly impact the number alive in 1900 vs. 1860.

http://www.nber.org/papers/h0056

[MUDDOG]

The paper is short on statistical tables. There are a few at the end, but the only rates he gives are birth and infant mortality rates, and for blacks, not even that before 1850.

The World Almanac data I used gives a multiplier of 2.5 for black population from 1820 to 1860. Given the starting population of 1.77 million, that means every 0.1 in the multiplier translates to 177,000, i.e., if the natural increase was a multiplier of 2.4 (out of the total multiplier of 2.5), that would still leave 177,000 imported.

What I did is all back of the envelope stuff. Like you, I've got other things to do! But I think a serious study of the demographics could narrow the estimates down to the point of some validity.

[MUDDOG]

BTW here are his black birthrates per thousand per annum:

1850s: 58.5

1860s: 55.0

1870s: 55.4

1880s: 51.9

1890: 48.1

1900: 44.4

(It's only in 1890 that he starts breaking it out by year rather than aggregated by decade, for blacks.)

So it looks like the average black birthrate betwen 1860 and 1900 is about 52. Let's increase the 1850s rate on the assumption it was higher for the whole period 1820-1860, let's say 62.

So without adjusting for deaths, that would mean the ratio of natural increase between periods was 62/52, or 1.2 higher in 1820-1860 than in 1860-1900.

So we take the 2.0 multiplier of 1860-1900 and adjust it by 1.2 times to get 2.4 as the natural increase to apply to 1820 to 1860.

So we get for 1820-1860 a natural increase multiplier of 2.4, which subtracted from the total multiplier of 2.5, leaves for imports of slaves, 177,000.

That's about 200,000 slaves imported between 1820 and 1860.

Maybe that's not unreasonable.

[Sherman Logan]

Except that the birth rate declined throughout the latter half of the 19th century, which implied it also declined in the first half. It is also reasonable to assume the death rate declined throughout this century.

To use the difference in numbers at the end of the period versus that at the beginning of the period to calculate the number “imported,” I think you’d need to know both the birth and death rates throughout the period in question.

And then it would be well beyong my mathematical abilities to calculate.

Personally, I suspect the number is pretty small. American ships were not subject, after the War of 1812, to search by the RN, but after 1820 or so the American Navy kept a squadron off the African coast to catch them. The sailors got prize money for slavers captured, so they had a huge incentive to be enthusiastic about their work.

Officers and even sailors on the slaveships were subject to huge fines and long jail time if captured, though there was no real risk till after 1860 of their being executed. I don’t know what they were paid, but it seems likely the reward wasn’t commensurate with the risk.

The investors ran the very real risk of having their ship confiscated as a naval prize simply for having it outfitted as a slaver, whether there were any slaves aboard when captured or not. That was an immense financial risk, and the trade being illegal it wasn’t possible to ensure the ship against loss. I’m not sure whether they were also subject to potential criminal prosecution.

The biggest factor that leads me to believe there were few slaves imported after 1808 is that the immense illegal trade this would have represented AFAIK was not used by abolitionists at the time or liberals today to denounce the wickedness of the South or of America. Obviously a massive smuggling trade in such a bulky commodity could not have continued without officials looking the other way.

[MUDDOG]

Good points.

On the math side, you would indeed need to use the death rates as well. Since the death rates were presumably higher in the 1820-1860 period than in 1860-1900, this would decrease the ratio of natural increase of 1820-1860 to 1860-1900, if the increase in the death rate was greater than the decrease in birth rate. (Otherwise it would go the other way!)

I tried to take into account changing birth rates during 1820-1860 by using 62 as the rate for the period, which was an increase from the 58.5 the paper reported for the 1850s.

A real demographic analysis would have to be a lot more detailed. First and foremost, it would require a lot more data. The computation would be done year-by-year if possible, rather than lumping everything together into the whole period. And crucially, the surrounding historical facts would have to kept constantly in mind, as you have done. I do think a serious demographic study might yield some valid results.