United States

The population of the continental United States in 1880 was slightly above 50,000,000. In 1900 it was just under 76,000,000, a gain of more than 50 percent, but still the smallest rate of population increase for any 20-year period of the 19th century. The rate of growth was unevenly distributed, ranging from less than 10 percent in northern New England to more than 125 percent in the 11 states and territories of the Far West. Most of the states east of the Mississippi reported gains slightly below the national average.

Immigration

Much of the population increase was due to the more than 9,000,000 immigrants who entered the United States in the last 20 years of the century, the largest number to arrive in any comparable period up to that time. From the earliest days of the republic until 1895, the majority of immigrants had always come from northern or western Europe. Beginning in 1896, however, the great majority of the immigrants were from southern or eastern Europe. Nervous Americans, already convinced that immigrants wielded too much political power or were responsible for violence and industrial strife, found new cause for alarm, fearing that the new immigrants could not easily be assimilated into American society. Those fears gave added stimulus to agitation for legislation to limit the number of immigrants eligible for admission to the United States and led, in the early 20th century, to quota laws favouring immigrants from northern and western Europe.

Until that time, the only major restriction against immigration was the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed by Congress in 1882, prohibiting for a period of 10 years the immigration of Chinese labourers into the United States. This act was both the culmination of more than a decade of agitation on the West Coast for the exclusion of the Chinese and an early sign of the coming change in the traditional U.S. philosophy of welcoming virtually all immigrants. In response to pressure from California, Congress had passed an exclusion act in 1879, but it had been vetoed by President Hayes on the ground that it abrogated rights guaranteed to the Chinese by the Burlingame Treaty of 1868. In 1880 these treaty provisions were revised to permit the United States to suspend the immigration of Chinese. The Chinese Exclusion Act was renewed in 1892 for another 10-year period, and in 1902 the suspension of Chinese immigration was made indefinite.

Westward migration

The United States completed its North American expansion in 1867, when Secretary of State Seward persuaded Congress to purchase Alaska from Russia for $7,200,000. Thereafter, the development of the West progressed rapidly, with the percentage of American citizens living west of the Mississippi increasing from about 22 percent in 1880 to 27 percent in 1900. New states were added to the Union throughout the century, and by 1900 there were only three territories still awaiting statehood in the continental United States: Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico.

Urban growth

In 1890 the Bureau of the Census discovered that a continuous line could no longer be drawn across the West to define the farthest advance of settlement. Despite the continuing westward movement of population, the frontier had become a symbol of the past. The movement of people from farms to cities more accurately predicted the trends of the future. In 1880 about 28 percent of the American people lived in communities designated by the Bureau of the Census as urban; by 1900 that figure had risen to 40 percent. In those statistics could be read the beginning of the decline of rural power in America and the emergence of a society built upon a burgeoning industrial complex.

The West

Abraham Lincoln once described the West as the “treasure house of the nation.” In the 30 years after the discovery of gold in California, prospectors found gold or silver in every state and territory of the Far West.

The mineral empire

There were few truly rich “strikes” in the post-Civil War years. Of those few, the most important were the fabulously rich Comstock Lode of silver in western Nevada (first discovered in 1859 but developed more extensively later) and the discovery of gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota (1874) and at Cripple Creek, Colorado (1891).

Black Hills; immigrantImmigrants bound for the goldfields in the Black Hills of South Dakota filling the waiting room of the Union Pacific Railroad in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1877.Rare Book and Special Collections Division/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.