“The Rich and the Dead: Socioeconomic Status and Mortality in the U.S., 1850-1860”

A new sample of 175,000 individuals is analyzed to assess the effect of socioeconomic status on mortality in the nineteenth century U.S. The sample consists of decedents from the mortality schedules and survivors from the population schedules of the 1850 and 1860 federal censuses. In 1850, for males age 20-44 in fifty rural counties, occupation was a poor predictor of all-cause mortality, though deaths from consumption (tuberculosis) were substantially more likely among craft and white collar workers than among farmers and unskilled laborers. For males and females of nearly all ages in eleven rural counties in Alabama and Illinois in 1850 and 1860, there was no clear relationship between family real estate wealth and mortality. There was, however, a large and statistically significant negative relationship between family personal wealth and mortality in 1860. For example, among both infants and adults age 20-44, those in families with no personal wealth were more than twice as likely to die in the year before the census as those in families with any personal wealth. Even when the U.S. was largely rural and agricultural, then, disparities in mortality by socioeconomic status of the sort observed in modern data were quite common.