Health, Information, and Migration: Geographic Mobility of Union Army Veterans, 1860–1880

Abstract

This article explores how injuries, sickness, and the geographic mobility of Union Army veterans while in service affected their postservice migrations. Wartime wounds and illnesses significantly diminished the geographic mobility of veterans after the war. Geographic moves while carrying out military missions had strong positive effects on their postservice geographic mobility. Geographic moves while in service also influenced the choice of destination among the migrants. I discuss some implications of the results for the elements of self-selection in migration, the roles of different types of information in migration decisions, and the overall impact of the Civil War on geographic mobility.How did medical events and the geographic mobility of Union Army veterans while in service affect their postwar migration? The main purpose of the present research is to understand the effects of health and information on migration decisions in nineteenth-century America. It is widely accepted that information is a key determinant of geographic mobility and location choice, and that health is an important element of a person's human capital that can affect both the cost and benefit of migration. Only a few studies have explicitly investigated the effect of information on migration, and those have relied mostly on highly indirect measures of information, such as the extent of chain migration. Even less is known about the link between health and geographic mobility. To my knowledge, this study is the first to attempt to consider explicit measures of health and improved information together with other conventional variables on human capital attributes as determinants of migration.The longitudinal data on Union Army veterans used in this study provide a unique opportunity to examine the effects of health and prior mobility on migration. Military service during the Civil War seriously damaged the health of a large number of recruits who survived the war. Because most battles were fought in either border or southern states, recruits from the North were deployed to distant regions, and thus had opportunities to gain first-hand knowledge about other locations. Wartime medical experiences and geographic moves were unanticipated events, not related to the choice or characteristics of the soldiers. By exploiting these special features of wartime experiences, I can mitigate potential problems of endogeneity and selfselection bias commonly confronted by previous studies on migration. Also, the data allow a rare opportunity to examine the association between health and mobility at relatively young ages thanks to the wide variations in wartime medical experiences.My study deepens our understanding of the determinants of migration in the nineteenth-century United States in several ways. First, it provides the very first rigorous evidence of how particular wounds and diseases influenced the probability of migration and the choice of destinations among migrants in the nineteenth-century United States, where geographic mobility was exc...

Health, human capital, and African-American migration before 1910

“…Since the discharge state will always be well correlated with the enlistment state, and is exogenous to the troop himself, this robustness test serves two purposes. The first is to see if place of discharge alters the marginal effect of literacy on the propensity to migrate, as Lee (2005) found for white veterans, and also to see if the inclusion of health shocks lowers that probability in the same manner as in Tables 5 and 6. The results confirm the findings of Tables 5 and 6 on both counts.…”

“…Health, however, is more likely to be a complement to the social network. If one believes himself to be in good health, they may be more likely to migrate if they believe that they stand a good chance of weathering any potential stress brought on by the new location, but knowledge of the nature and extent of these stresses or potential success in the new location would still come from the social network (see Lee 2005). …”

Union Army veterans, all grown up

“…Part of the stress experienced by soldiers was serious wounds and injuries, the consequences of which could follow soldiers in many areas of their lives. For instance, Lee (2008) finds that wartime wounds and illnesses significantly diminished the veterans’ geographic mobility after the war. On the health front, Wilson (2003) found that soldiers hospitalized for infectious disease during the war had significantly higher rates of chronic respiratory disease later in life.…”

“…These include the benefits of social networks (Costa and Kahn 2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2010); labor force participation and retirement (Costa 1998; Lee 1998, 2001, 2007); the relationship between wealth accumulation, economic mobility and health (Lee 2005, 2008); marriage patterns (Hacker 2008); survival in urban environments (Cain and Hong, 2009); extreme aging (Costa and Lahey, 2005); and the epidemiology, social ecology, and economic consequences of important diseases, such as arteriosclerosis (Costa, Helmchen and Wilson 2005), arthritis (Canavese and Fogel 2009), malaria (Hong 2007), and chronic respiratory disease (Wilson 2003). …”

Evaluating the Internal Labor Migration Effects of Compulsory Peacetime Conscription

“…Indeed, a number of reasons suggest that migration patterns among veterans documented by previous research might not extrapolate to former peacetime conscripts. Prominent among these reasons is health: The incidence of wounds and diseases in the population of U.S. veterans, which is composed overwhelmingly of war veterans, is much higher than among former peacetime conscripts, and there is evidence that poor health strongly diminishes geographical mobility (Lee 2008). An alternative pathway by which military participation affects U.S. veterans' mobility is through difficulties in readjustment to civilian life after war in the form of joblessness or ostracism (Lee 2008), but these difficulties seem less likely to pose a problem for peacetime conscripts.…”