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Flaherty, Jeremy

History

2006

MA

Migration has been an important factor in the historical development of the United States. Urbanization and the westward movement of the frontier through the nineteenth century were fed by native-born Americans from the East. Who these migrants were has yet to be adequately explained, though. The methods used by previous researchers, which typically included only simple cross-tabulations of data, have been unable to clearly explain the determinants of emigration and persistence because they fail to account for the correlations between independent variables. Social mobility, typically operationalized as occupational mobility, has been tied to emigration. Many historians have claimed that emigrants made up a vast floating proletariat, a group of people who moved from place to place never finding success. No evidence has ever been presented to support this claim, though, because it was impossible to locate emigrants after they left their homes. The purpose of this thesis is to create a better understanding of geographic and social mobility in Vermont by applying more sophisticated quantitative techniques and by exploiting the computerized census indices that have been developed over the past decade to trace emigrants to their new homes. Regression models were estimated to determine what variables were the most important predictors of emigration and to reveal whether emigrants made up a group that could reasonably be classified as a "floating proletariat."
The results indicate that most of the usual predictors of emigration (occupation, wealth, age, marital status, birthplace, etc.) were of little importance, and that the determinants of emigration varied from town to town. In Peacham, Vermont, it seems that only those adult males who were church members or who were relatively wealthy were likely to persist in town fiom 1850 to 1860. Length of residence and the size of one's kinship network, both indicators of attachment to the community, were of little consequence, suggesting that many people who would have preferred to remain in Peacham moved elsewhere. In Albany, Vermont, community attachment was the main determinant of emigration, with those who were most attached to Albany remaining. In Albany, youthfulness also increased one's odds of emigrating. Among the sons of the heads of household, age and family size were the most important indicators. Sons in their mid-twenties emigrated at the highest rates, and the probability of emigrating increased with family size. There was no support for the assertion that emigrants made up a vast floating proletariat. Emigrants were more successful than persisters at improving their occupations, and there was little difference in wealth levels between the two groups.