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On their stony smallholding in Småland, Karl Oskar and Kristina Nilsson endure repeated crop failures and bank debt. Kristina had resisted leaving Sweden, but after Anna's death she agrees to emigrate, and the family sails for America in 1850.
The emigrant party is not driven by one cause. Each member is escaping a different part of the same rigid society. Karl Oskar flees poverty on land that cannot feed him. His brother Robert is a farmhand who flees a master's legal right to beat servants. Danjel's pietist group flees prosecution under the Conventicle Act. Ulrika, a former prostitute, flees permanent social stigma. A migration wave forms when economic, religious, legal, and moral pressures together make staying intolerable for people who share nothing but the need to leave.
Karl Oskar takes over his parents' farm. Under a retirement contract, he must also support them from its harvest. So a plot too poor to feed one household must feed two. Inherited land is repeatedly split and burdened with these obligations to the older generation. As a result, hard work cannot build surplus, and a single bad harvest pushes the family into debt.
Moberg presents the departure of the Swedish poor as a quiet rebellion. People who could not change the power of the landowners, the state church, or the Crown chose to withdraw themselves instead. Seen this way, a population leaving in large numbers is a political verdict on the society it leaves. It costs the old order labor and legitimacy without any open confrontation.