The American growth rate after 1870 was actually lower than it had been between 1820 and 1870. In part the American economy was growing because the United States was growing. Its population would double from 31.4 million to 62.9 million in the thirty years following 1860. The United States grew steadily but, at least compared with nations that industrialized in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, unspectacularly over the course of the nineteenth century.
