Demography and War
Demography and War.Rapidly growing populations are often aggressive. They both enjoy and suffer from an abundance of young men seeking new places for themselves in the world because a plurality of sons cannot all inherit a father's property without suffering an unacceptable decline of living standards. As long as the majority of Americans lived on farms and had lots of children, this circumstance fueled rapid frontier expansion at the expense of Indian peoples. Easy victories in sporadic warfare were essential to the expansion of American settlement, beginning in the 1630s and lasting until 1890, when the final armed clash between the U.S. Army and an Indian people took place at the Battle of Wounded Knee, South Dakota (1895). American military successes in turn reflected an abundance of armed men—militiamen in colonial times supplemented after independence by professional soldiers—who were willing and ready to invade...
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