The "Antebellum Puzzle" has been the subject of comment since the 1980s. It involves the paradox that, although the American economy was experiencing rapid economic growth in the several decades prior to the Civil War (1861-1865), the stature of native-born white males had been declining for the...

This paper describes the first step in a larger project to build up regional estimates of economic growth before 1800 in the parts of North America that became the United States. In it we employ the method of conjectural estimation to develop new estimates of the rate of economic growth in the...