Library of Congress Subject Headings, 21st edition, 1998

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LC Subject Headings:

• Cotton textile industry -- Southern States -- History.
  
• Cotton manufacture -- Southern States -- History.
  
• Textile workers -- Southern States.
  
• Working class -- Southern States.
  
• Mountain whites (Southern States) -- Employment.
  
• Southern States -- Economic conditions.
  

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SERIES XXXIX No. 2
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY STUDIES
IN
HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
Under the Direction of the
Departments of History, Political Economy, and
Political Science

THE RISE OF COTTON MILLS IN
THE SOUTH

BY

BROADUS MITCHELL, PH.D.
Instructor in Political Economy

BALTIMORE
THE JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS
1921

COPYRIGHT 1921
THE JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS
PRESS OF
THE NEW ERA PRINTING COMPANY
LANCASTER, PA.

CONTENTS

• PREFACE . . . . . vii
• CHAPTER I. The Background . . . . . 9
• CHAPTER II. The Rise of the Mills . . . . . 77
• CHAPTER III. The Labor Factor . . . . . 160
• CHAPTER IV. The Rôle of Capital . . . . . 232

PREFACE

        In prefacing some observations on the history of the South a writer has said: "It will be something if these papers shall make it plain that my subject is a true body of human life--a thing, and not a mass of facts, a topic in political science, an object lesson in large moralities. To know the thing itself should be our study; and the right study of it is thought and passion, not research alone."1

        1 William Garrott Brown, The Lower South in American History.

        2 Mr. J. C. Hemphill.

        In point of view I owe most to my Father, accepting his concise explanation that the South was overcome at Appomattox because it placed itself in opposition to the compelling forces of the age--by agency of the invention of the cotton gin held to slavery instead of liberty, insisted upon States' rights in place of nationality, and chose agriculture alone rather than embracing the rising industrialism. As a result, the task since 1865 has been to liberalize the South in thought, nationalize it in politics, and industrialize it in production. "Would we make cotton king? Let us aspire to spin every fibre of our exhaustless fields. By such alignments with this wondrous mother-age, we shall enable the South to take her rightful part in determining the national

destiny."3

        3 Samuel Chiles Mitchell, "Educational Needs of the South," in The Outlook, N. Y., vol. lxxvi, no. 7, p. 415 ff.

        Formerly, a landed aristocracy shut out the average man from economic participation; but with the rise of cotton mills, the poor whites were welcomed back into the service of the South. As a conclusion from my survey I cannot but express the anxiety that through lessons of the old mistake we shall avoid the new error, insuring that an aristocracy of capital shall not now preclude industrial democracy.

        My purpose has been to describe the birth of the industry in the South rather than its development. In only a small number of instances has this plan been departed from; many topics rich in interest have not been broached.

        I regret that two books did not come into my hands in time to be used in this study. Holland Thompson's "The New South," and George T. Winston's "A Builder of the New South" (the story of the life work of D. A. Tompkins), are contributions which will be found valuable.

        I owe thanks for special assistance to Professor Jacob H. Hollander and Professor George E. Barnett, of The Johns Hopkins University, who guided the investigation; the proprietors of the Manufacturers' Record, who permitted me to use the early files of the paper; Mr. T. S. Raworth, of Augusta; Mr. William M. Bird, of Charleston; Professor Yates Snowden and Mr. August Kohn, of Columbia, all of whom made documentary material available to me. Others have given me hardly less generously of their time and thought; footnote references to interviews and correspondence with these must serve as acknowledgment in each case.

B. M.

THE RISE OF COTTON MILLS IN THE SOUTH

CHAPTER I
THE BACKGROUND

        This opening chapter undertakes a brief survey of the historical and economic background out of which the cotton manufacturing industry of the South, as a distinct development, emerged. It may be said that thus to begin the story of the rise of the mills with discussion of a period which lies a century in advance, is not unlike the production of a play hopeful in conception, robust in theme and rapid in action, but in which the curtain first lifts to show a stage which, except for a few unrelated characters, remains empty throughout an entire act.

        It is a purpose here to refer to the views of some observers who believe they have caught glimpses of men and facts in these prior years not only presaging but causally related to the main action later. The total of this chapter will show, however, that the development, as such, first substantially showed itself and had its complete genesis about the year 1880.

        In the neglect of Southern economic history, information of the early period is not abundant, yet there is less dispute as to findings of fact than as to right interpretation of material evidences agreed upon. In bringing the several beliefs into parallel presentation it will be seen that concerning the rise of cotton mills in the South a little body of theory exists. Several of the statements that will be given are not well-informed, and others are almost too studied, so that they lose perspective. Interpretations will be cited in connection with the different stages under discussion, so that the relative weighting of these stages, as intended by writers, will appear.

        It is first useful to notice the limits of divergence of views. One who wrote with empirical purpose and may be believed to have been not deeply interested in the historical setting of the mills, has said of one State, taken by him as typical: "The story of the development of the cotton manufacturing industry in South Carolina is not wanting in impressive elements. From the beginning in 1790 till 1900 it was a struggle of gradually increasing intensity and extension."1

        1 P. H. Goldsmith, The Cotton Mill South, p. 4.

        2 D. A. Tompkins, in The South in the Building of the Nation, vol. ii, p. 58. For a more summary statement, cf. ibid., Cotton Mill, Commercial Features, pp. 108-109. Cf. also ibid., History of Mecklenburg County, vol. i, pp. 133-137; The Tariff and Reciprocity; Road Building and Repairs, p. 24; W. L. Trenholm, The Southern States, quoted in C. D. Wright, Industrial Evolution of the United States, pp. 145-146; J. A. B. Scherer, Cotton as a World Power, p. 168 ff.; Walter H. Page, The Rebuilding of Old Commonwealths, p. 139.

        Not so categorical as one opinion that "from 1810 to 1880 the South was industrially a desert of Sahara," this view still makes it clear that from a point early in the century until a date subsequent to the Civil War, absorption in cotton culture threw manufacturing of all sorts into the discard.

        There is sufficient evidence that in what may be roughly called the Revolutionary Period, the South was well started toward a balanced economic development, with manufactures as well as agriculture.3

        3 "Upon the whole, the last half of the Eighteenth century, before the influence of the cotton gin and Arkwright's inventions were fully felt in the South, was a period when agriculture yielded some ground in primary manufactures and household industries." (V. S. Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. v, p. 308). Cf. Tompkins, The South's Position in American Affairs, p. 1. Of North Carolina a careful student has said: "Though there were no towns of any size, the number and skill of the artisans was such that, in 1800, it seemed probable that the logical development would be into a frugal manufacturing community, rather than into an agricultural state" (Holland Thompson, From the Cotton Field to the Cotton Mill, p. 25). See, especially with reference to iron making in this period, Richard H. Edmonds, Facts About the South (ed. 1894), p. 3 ff. There is importance in the founding of the Manumission Society, with 1600 active members as late as 1826 (ibid., pp. 26-27).

        4 August Kohn, The Cotton Mills of South Carolina, pp. 10-11.

        5 Ibid., pp. 9-10. In an appropriation bill of 1809, the sum of $1000 was advanced to Ephraim McBride "to enable him to construct a spinning machine on the principles mentioned in a patent he holds from the United States" (ibid., pp. 10-11). In the same year the request of the president of the Homespun Company of South Carolina for a loan on account of a patent was unfavorably received by a legislative committee, but it was recommended that he be allowed until the next meeting of the legislature "to report on the utility of the machine called the Columbia Spinster, so as to entitle, in case the same be approved, the inventor of the same to the sum provided by law for his benefit" (ibid., p. 11). Cf. ibid., pp. 11-13.

The South shared in the national impulse toward economic self sufficiency consequent upon the stoppage of colonial commerce with England and the Revolution. Proceedings of the Safety Committee in Chowan County, North Carolina, for March 4, 1775, show that "the committee met at the house of Captain James Sumner and the gentlemen appointed at a former meeting of directors to promote subscriptions for the encouragement of manufactures, informed the committee that the sum of eighty pounds sterling was subscribed by the inhabitants of this county for that laudable purpose." The chairman offered ten pounds to the first producer in a certain time of fulled woolen cloth. The provincial congress took steps the same year to stimulate, by bounties, the manufacture of gunpowder, rolling and slitting mill products, cotton cards, steel, paper, woolen cloth and pig iron.6

        6 For these facts the writer is indebted to a MS. of M. R. Pleasants, "Manufacturing in North Carolina before 1860."

        Although their objects were possibly political as well as industrial, mechanics' societies existed at Charleston and Augusta before and about the year 1810; in Augusta were made some of the earliest attempts in this country to improve the steam engine.7

        7 Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. v, p. 310.

        8 Kohn, Cotton Mills of South Carolina, p. 7.

        Glimpses at individual establishments show the textile industry of the South in this Revolutionary Period to have

been generally of the domestic character. Manufacturing was conducted by individuals rather than corporations, and was usually directly connected with plantations. Daniel Heyward, a planter, in a letter in 1777, declared with reference to his "manufactory" that if cards were to be had "there is not the least doubt but that we could make six thousand yards of good cloth in the year from the time we began."9

        9 Ibid., p. 7.

        10 South Carolina and American General Gazette, Jan. 30, 1770, quoted in ibid., p. 7. Cf. ibid., pp. 6-7.

        A few plants may have approached a commercial character. In 1790 it was related that "a gentleman of great mechanical knowledge and instructed in most of the branches of cotton manufactures in Europe, has already fixed, completed and now at work on the high hills of the Santee, near Stateburg, and which go by water, ginning (?) carding and slubbing machines, with 84 spindles each, and several other useful implements for manufacturing every necessary article in cotton." This establishment was coincident with Slater's famous factory at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, founded in 1790, and may have antedated it, though comparative credit to the Stateburg enterprise is perhaps diminished by information that while some long staple cotton was imported from the West Indies, and a variety of goods were made, it was conducted as an adjunct to a plantation, parts of its equipment were later removed to and set up on another plantation, and much of its yarn was spun for persons in the vicinity. It is notable, however, that the machinery was made in North Carolina.11

        11 American Museum, viii, Appendix iv, part 2, July 1, 1790, cited in ibid., p. 8. The question mark is Mr. Kohn's. If Mr. Kohn is correct in believing that "a regular cotton mill" was established by Mrs. Ramage, a widow, on James Island, Charleston District, in 1778, the fact is highly interesting, because the date is nine years antecedent to that of America's "first factory," at Beverly, Massachusetts. The South Carolina mill was operated by mule power; no traces survive (ibid., p. 8. Reference is particularly to the City Gazette and Daily Advertiser, Charleston, Jan. 24, 1779).

        The textile industry in the South in the latter part of the eighteenth and earlier part of the nineteenth centuries was stamped with the hallmark of domestic production.12

        12 Referring especially to the establishments just noticed and to water-driven spindles near Fayetteville, Mr. Clark has said: "Small mills may have started in the Carolinas and Georgia, and after a brief infancy have vanished and left no name; but, if so, the fact is curious rather than significant, for it had no relation to the subsequent history of the industry" (History of Manufactures in the United States, 1607-1860, p. 537). As indicating further the lack of causation in these ventures, it is observed: "Maryland is hardly typical industrially of the Southern states. Its factories date from the Revolution . . . " (ibid., in South in Building of Nation, vol. v, pp. 328-329). " . . . prior to the war of 1812 the advance of Southern manufactures was principally in what were then household arts--those that produced for the subsistence of the family rather than for an outside market. These manufactures continued generalized and dispersed rather than specialized and integrated" (ibid., p. 312). Cf. ibid., p. 310, and W. W. Sellers, A History of Marion County, p. 26.

        13 Carroll D. Wright, "The Factory System of the United States," p. 6, in U. S. Census of Manfactures, 1880.

        14 The Bolton Factory was built in 1811 on Upton Creek, Wilkes County, Ga. In 1794 on this site had been erected one of Whitney's first cotton gins, propelled by the water power that later ran the cotton mill. It is said that Lyon here conceived important improvements in the Whitney invention, making a saw gin (Southern Cotton Spinners' Association, proceedings, seventh annual convention, p. 41 ff.). Here is a suggestion of the fact that the South was on the right road--a gin, so far from diverting attention entirely to the cultivation of the staple, was succeeded by a cotton mill on the same spot, operated by the same power. Perhaps Helper was in bounds when the declared: "Had the Southern States, in accordance with the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, abolished slavery at the same time the Northern States abolished it, there would have been, long since, and most assuredly at this moment, a larger, wealthier, wiser, and more powerful population, south of Mason and Dixon's line, than there now is north of it" (H. R. Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South, ed. 1860, pp. 161-162).

        The nature of the mills up to 1810, then, is clear. Coming now to those established in decades just following, a subject is entered in which some controversy is involved. These plants I have chosen to call the "old mills." A distinction is to be observed between influence of these factories upon the later great development and the proper character to be ascribed to them as of themselves. A manufacture which is forerunner in time is not necessarily antecedent in effect. To substantiate a view that the Civil War interrupted a course which was clearly laid down in years previous, it ought to be demonstrable that the old mills had essentially the same features as those of the later development, with only those lacks which were inherent in an industry in formative stage.15

        15 A North Carolinian of post-bellum experience, but who has been identified with one of the foremost industrial communities of the South, thought it had been "a clear case of arrested development; it would have all come sooner, but for the War. It might be said that had slavery continued, manufacturing would never have come in the South, but it is also true that slavery was doomed. There is no use in talking about what might not have happened had slavery continued" (W. F. Marshall, interview, Raleigh, N. C., Sept. 16, 1916). Loose, unsupported statements are frequent: "The first cotton mill . . . in North Carolina was built at Lincolnton in 1813 by Michael Schenck. . . . This mill was the forerunner of that remarkable industrial development which has taken place in North Carolina since that time" (Pleasants MS.).

the later date. The mere fact that the old mills were known to the later builders is hardly enough.16

        16 "In the older mills, before the War, the seed had been planted, and cultivation was renewed after the War. The ante-bellum mills were pretty well known throughout the country. The woolen mills at Salem, and the cotton mills in Alamance and a few in Gastonia were known. The fact that such goods as 'Alamance' had a name already was an advantage" (John Nichols, int., Raleigh, N. C., Sept. 16, 1916). He continued to speak of these mills in close conjunction with the names of the families and manufacturers who owned them--the personal factor stood out in his mind more strongly than any other.

        Not a few plants in the South have been in continuous operation since an early date. But this does not mean that many of these, so far from inspiring the later development, were not themselves by its stimulus so greatly changed as to be radically different from their former character.17

        17 Mr. Kohn believes that the one with the longest record is that founded at Autun, near Pendleton, S. C., in 1838, by B. F. Sloan, Thomas Sloan, and Berry Benson (Cotton Mills of S. C., p. 15). Cf. Charlotte (N. C.) News, Textile Industrial Edition, Feb., 1917, with reference to the Rocky Mount Mill. One long-established enterprise fell under local dislike as late as the seventies, a generousminded father being suceeded in the management by reckless sons; the strength of the personal factor was thus a danger; in spite of undiscriminating statements that this mill afforded a manufacturing tradition to the community, it really lost all public character.

        18 Suggested by Mr. Charles E. Johnson in an interview, Raleigh, N. C., Sept. 16, 1916. For a clear distinction between first establishments in Philadelphia and New England and genuine factory development, cf. Wright, in U. S. Census of Manufactures, 1880, "Factory System of U. S.," p. 6; Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. v, p. 319.

        The history of the mills of the thirty years following 1810 is rather hazy.19

        19 For a careful narrative of the establishments of the settlers who moved into the South from New England about 1816, with details of the factories of the Hills, Shelden, Clark, Bates, Hutchings, Stack, the Weavers, McBee, Bivings, etc., cf. Kohn, Cotton Mills of S. C., and The Water Powers of South Carolina. For those in North Carolina, Holland Thompson is useful; cf. also Southern Cotton Spinners' Association, Proceedings 7th Annual Convention, p. 41 ff., and Tompkins, Cotton Mill, Commercial Features, pp. 301-302.

There was little localization of the industry. There was a good deal of moving about from one water-power to another, the machinery being hauled from place to place with apparent convenience.20

        20 Wood for the boiler of the Mount Hecla Mills growing scarce, the machinery was taken to Mountain Island and there run by water (Thompson, pp. 48-49).

        21 Kohn, Cotton Mills of S. C., p. 14.

        22 That for the Mount Hecla Mills about 1830 was shipped from Philadelphia to Wilmington, N. C., up the Cape Fear River to Fayetteville, and then across country by wagon to Greensboro. The equipment of six or seven hundred spindles for the Hill factory in Spartanburg County fifteen years earlier was brought by wagon from Charleston (Kohn, Cotton Mills of S. C., p. 14). Cf. Charlotte News, Textile Ed., 1917, with reference to Rocky Mount Mill, and Thompson, p. 45 ff.

        23 The Bivingsville mill (J. B. Cleveland, int., Spartanburg, S. C., Sept. 8, 1916), and Shenck mill (Thompson, p. 45 ff.) are cases in point. Cf. Thompson, pp. 42-43.

        24 W. J. Thackston, int., Greenville, S. C., Sept. 12, 1916.

        Or through collateral business connections or marriage they were brought into the business. Simply private investment

enlisted participation of men in various callings. Of course these same forces operated afterwards, but in the earlier time there was no response to a public enthusiasm or a social demand that acted like a magnet in drawing into the industry men who otherwise would never have entered it, certainly not as entrepreneurs.

        A plant turning out iron products was operated in connection with the Schenck mill.25

        25 Ibid.

        Perhaps the most striking confirmation of the view here taken of the restricted and semi-domestic character of the old mills is found in the facts relating to the marketing and consumption of their products. A commercial nature is ascribed to the establishment of General David R. Williams on his plantation in Darlington County, South Carolina, which "in 1828 . . . was turning his cotton crop, of 200 bales annually, into what was said to be the best yarn in the United States. He marketed part of his crop in New York and wove part of it into negro cloth for home use," and twenty years later distant and local demands were being supplied. Evidence hardly supports the suggestion that the product of such small Southern mills as this "controlled the Northern yarn market."26

        26 Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. v, p. 321; cf. Kohn, Cotton Mills of S. C., pp. 18-19, giving quotation from Columbia Telescope. Contrast, however, William Gregg, Essays on Domestic Industry (1845), p. 11: "Limited as our manufactures are in South-Carolina, we can now, more than supply the State with Coarse Cotton Fabrics. Many of the Fabrics now manufactured here are exported to New-York, and, for aught I know, find their way to the East-Indies."

        On the other hand, local consumption and the link with domestic industry, noted in the above instance, were prevalent. How closely these old mills were joined with the countryside is seen in the fact that into their coarse, homely fabrics went hand-spun linen warp. The domestic character

was thus ingrained.27

        27 Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. v, p. 321. Of the Rocky Mount mill in North Carolina it is said that "For some years prior to and during the Civil War, the mill was a general supply station for warps which the women of the South wove into cloth on the old hand looms." So beneficial did this prove during the War that a cavalry troop of Federals was sent up from New Bern in 1863 and burned the mill (Charlotte News, Textile Ed., 1917). It is remarked that making only twelve to fifteen hundred pounds, of 4s to 12s daily, the mill could not get a steady market for its wares (Thompson, pp. 48-49). Until 1851 slaves and a few free negroes were worked in this mill. This distinguishing difference between the old mills and those of the later development, when the labor of negroes was far from the thoughts of builders and managers, will be dwelt upon in another place. The McDonald Mill at Concord, during the Civil War, dealt in barter. A gentleman in a nearby town said he remembered as a boy trading a load of corn for yarn to be woven by the women at home (Theodore Klutz, int., Salisbury, N. C., Sept. 1, 1916). In 1862 the Confederate Government commandeered the Batesville factory, in South Carolina, and took nearly all of the product. That portion allowed to private purchasers was always sold by 10 o'clock in the morning (W. J. Thackston, int., Greenville). Of the three small plants running in Spartanburg County before the War, one was on Tyger River, spinning yarns on half a dozen frames, and people drove twenty to twenty-five miles to the door of the mill for the product, although it was sold, also, in the country stores (Walter Montgomery, int., Spartanburg, S. C., Sept. 5, 1916). The first woolen mill of Francis Fries at Salem, N. C., had a little fulling and dyeing plant for finishing cloth woven by the farmers' wives and daughters (Tompkins, Cotton Mill, Commercial Features, pp. 183-184). Cf. Thompson, p. 31.

        28 W. J. Thackston, int., Greenville. The old mills were "able to barter for the small quantities of local raw cotton which they used. The standard of exchange, the par, was one yard of three-yard sheeting for a pound of raw cotton, which was a third of a pound, made into cloth, for a pound in the raw state. But this was a retail and not strictly a manufacturing profit" (John W. Fries, int., Winston-Salem, N. C., Aug. 31, 1916).

        A banker intimately connected with the textile industry in one of the oldest industrial communities and a member of a family to which many writers are quick to point as founders of cotton manufacture in the South through conspicuous

participation in the business since the early thirties, said:

        The mills built after the war were not the result of pre-bellum mills. This is trying to ascribe one cause for a condition which probably had many causes. The industrial awakening in the South was a natural reaction from the War and Reconstruction. Before the War there was first the domestic industry proper. Then came such small mills about Winston-Salem as Cedar Falls and Franklinsville. These little mills were themselves, however, hardly more than domestic manufactures. When, after the War, competition came from the North and from the larger Southern mills, the little mills which had operated before and had survived the war lost their advantage, which consisted in their possession of the local field. . . . The ante-bellum domestic-factory system did not produce the post-bellum mills.29

        29 John W. Fries, ibid. It is not to be forgotten that lack of transportation facilities necessarily cramped the old mills, and that this operated also to keep out competing product, but their essential character was independent of this consideration. The superior trend of capital into agriculture limited ante-bellum cotton mills by preventing profitable extension of plant and embarrassing advantageous marketing of product which might require some waiting. Cf. Edward Ingle, Southern Sidelights, pp. 70-71. Another with a broad view of the history of the industry was willing to include the Graniteville enterprise, about which some controversy has clustered, in his judgment: "The cotton mills in the South before the War were third-rate affairs. I speak of Graniteville and Batesville and such plants as these. I remember my mother's telling me that the warp . . . used to be supplied by the mills for use in the homes of the housewives. They were not regular cotton mills as the plants of later establishments have come to be" (W. W. Ball, int., Columbia, S. C., Jan. 1, 1917). "The mills built in the eighties were a part of a new spirit from the ante-bellum mills. The old mills--Bivingsville, Valley Falls, Crawfordsville, in Spartanburg County--were small and insignificant affairs. They lived from hand to mouth" (Cleveland, int., Spartanburg).

        It must be obvious from foregoing considerations that a census enumeration of mills of the period cannot show internal characteristics which are all-important. But even the census returns, counting one plant like another, display the Southern industry at this stage as being feeble. Some primary descriptive factors are lacking in the earliest reports of the census which are at all useful, but taking the four Southern States which were farthest advanced in the years 1840 and 1850--Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia--and comparing the whole of the South with New England, the showing may be summed up thus.30

        30 U. S. Census of Manufactures, 1900, "Cotton Manufactures," p. 54 ff. (a) Thompson gives 700 looms and 7000 bales consumed (p. 49 ff. (b) An obviously incomplete summary.

        

	Census	Plants	Capital	Ops.	Spin.	Bales Consumption
Virginia . . . . .	1840	22	$1,299,020	1,816	42,262	17,785
	1850	27	1,908,900	2,963
N. Carolina . . . . .	1840	25	995,300	1,219	47,934	(a)
	1850	28	1,058,800	1,619	531,903	13,617
S. Carolina . . . . .	1840	15	617,450	570	16,353
	1850	18	857,200	1,119		9,929
Georgia . . . . .	1840	19	573,835	779	42,589
	1850	35	1,736,156	2,272		20,230
So. States . . . . .	1840	248	4,331,078	6,642	180,927b
	1850	166	7,256,056	10,043		78,140
New England . . . . .	1840	674	34,931,399	46,834	1,497,394
	1850	564	53,832,430	61,893		430,603

        Many single mills in the South today represent more than the extent of the whole industry in the most forward Southern State in 1850.31

        31 Cf. Thompson, p. 49 ff. "The number of small carding and fulling mills and of little water-driven yarn factories, in this section [the South] before 1850, may have approached the number of textile factories in the same region today; . . . but few of these establishments became commercial producers" (Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. v, pp. 319-320). A map showing distribution of cotton spindles in 1839 indicates a good representation for all the Southern States except Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida, as to mills of small size, but the localization both as to plants and spindles in New England is marked (Clark, History of Manufactures, pp. 533-560). See the whole section for an excellent discussion of both historical and economic phases). "Few mills south of Virginia had power looms prior to 1840" (ibid., in South in Building of Nation, vol. v, p. 321). Notice omission of looms for Southern States in census returns referred to above.

        Some writers have pointed to evidences of industrial activity in the period to 1840 as presaging the later development. A localizing tendency in the textile manufacture along the fall line of rivers in the decade following 1830, has been called a "slow and unconscious development."32

        32 Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. v, p. 322.

        33 "Progress of the United States in Population and Wealth in Fifty Years," referred to by William E. Dodd, in South in Building of Nation, vol. v, pp. 566-567.

North Carolina industrial history of the period has led to the conclusion that "The people of the state became interested and soon a class of small manufacturers . . . came into prominence and continued to thrive down to 1860."34

        34 Pleasants. Reference is had especially to items in State papers and in Niles' Register. The Tarboro Free Press declared that should a tariff measure of the time meet with success, the people of the Carolinas would have to "join in the scuffle for the benefit anticipated from this new American system, and they will have to bear a portion of its burdens and buffet the Northern manufacturer with his own weapons." It is noticed that a report to the North Carolina legislature in the late twenties, looking back upon the disintegrating process of the preceding two decades, said: "There must be a change. But how is this important revolution to be accomplished? We unhesitatingly answer--by introducing the manufacturing system into our own state and fabricating at least to the extent of our wants. . . . Our habits and prejudices are against manufacturing, but we must yield to the force of things and profit by the indications of nature. The policy that resists the change is unwise and suicidal. Nothing else can restore us."

        It is questionable, however, whether it may be truly said that "the people of the state became interested"; certainly there was nothing like the sweep of public sentiment that appeared in 1880, and the suggestions relied upon in making the inference show as much against as for the likelihood of their taking effect.35

        35 With preemption of land into large estates and consequent injury to small farming, discovery of gold, agitation for railroads and improvements in cotton manufacturing machinery, the people of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, "many years before the war were beginning to realize the importance of diversified industries. . . . An industrial crisis was imminent, and the problem would have solved itself by natural agencies within a few more years, had not sectional differences brought on the war" (Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg, vol. i, p. 124). Cf. ibid., pp. 126-127; Kohn, Cotton Mills of S. C., pp. 18-19. That the war did come to render such an industrial impulse impossible of effects shows the relative weakness of the spirit at this time. The preoccupation with intersectional differences was of greater potency than the intrasectional change of mind, if such there were.

        The foregoing paragraphs lead up to a more important judgment of Mr. Clark that "In the South the most striking feature of this period [1840-1860] was the gradual breaking down of a traditional antipathy to manufactures. This hostility was opposed to the obvious interests of a region where idle white labor, abundant raw materials, and ever-present water-power seemed to unite conditions so

favorable to textile industries. Cotton planting engaged the labor and the thought and capital of a directing white class, but the natural operative of the South remained unemployed, and the capital of the Noth and of Europe was mobile enough to flow to the point of maximum profit without regard to sectional or national lines, were such a profit known to be assured by Southern factories. Slavery as a system probably had less direct influence upon manufactures than is commonly supposed, but the presence of the negro through slavery was important."

        It is frankly recognized that white immigration from Europe, which at this time supplied the most considerable mechanical skill, avoided districts heavily populated with negroes; that plantation self-sufficiency meant isolation with small need for good communicating roads; that the market for middle-grade goods was restricted by the servile character of the colored inhabitants; that the credit system, by which factors controlled the directioning of productive capital, rested upon cotton culture by negro labor; that while the corn laws held in England, reciprocity between the Southern States and the mother country tended to discourage manufactures in this section while the conditions of commerce favored manufacture in the North. "These business interests, supported by social traditions and political sectionalism, were strengthened in their opposition to new industries by a widespread popular prejudice against organized manufactures. . . . Nevertheless the South chafed continually under the discomfort of an ill-balanced system of production. . . . " Mention is made of the canal at Augusta and of cotton mills at Charleston, Mobile, Columbus, New Orleans and Memphis directly following the writings and object lesson of William Gregg in his Graniteville factory, and it is concluded that "modern cotton manufacturing in the South dates from the founding of Graniteville rather than from the post-bellum period. . . . However, viewed in comparison with the cotton manufactures of the North, those of the South were still insignificant. . . .

Nevertheless, the present attainment of the industry assured its definite future growth, and ultimate national importance."36

        36 Clark, History of Manufactures, p. 553 ff. Cf. ibid. in South in Building of Nation, vol. v, pp. 213-214, and p. 316 ff. Cf. Kohn (Cotton Mills of S. C., p. 16): "The real and the lasting development of cotton mills in South Carolina might be started with the Graniteville Cotton Mill. . . . " Cf. Gregg, Domestic Industry, pp. 24-25.

        It is not hard to justify disagreement with this view. The basis of probable industrial development before the War appears in hindsight only if the pervasive numbing influence of slavery, made more powerful in the last years through the frantic effort at its maintenance through extension, is forgotten. Well enough to assert that the capital of the North and of Europe was mobile enough to flow across the Atlantic and across Mason and Dixon's line were a profit in manufacture in the South known to be assured, but the fact is that capital did not come in for industrial purposes because bright prospects had not been proved, and this largely because home enterprise was a laggard while slavery claimed the section's capital resources for cotton cultivation.37

        37 "Cheapness of cotton, abundance of water-power, the resources of the coal-fields, when steam began to supplant the dam, the other mineral resources, and the wealth of forests . . . did not even attract from other parts sufficient capital to develop the section to anything like its full extent. No artificial expedients were necessary there. But capital did not come" (Ingle, p. 73). A propagandist of the early eighties, desiring to organize small cotton mills in the South, quoted with approval a correspondent of the Morning News of Savannah, declaring that before the War the planters saw the advantage for such establishments but were deterred from manufacturing because "slavery and the factory were declared to be incompatible institutions. They could not exist together" (W. H. Gannon, The Landowners of the South, and the Industrial Classes of the North, p. 9 ff.).

view of the independent white workman the presence of the negro in slavery held as a far more forcible objection than the presence of the negro in freedom. His killing economic competition and radiated social poison were beyond dispute and beyond prospect of remedy until he was made at least a free producer. Any prospect of immigration for the South has taken its rise from the Civil War.

        It was slavery that made plantation self-sufficiency in primitive needs universal, that made isolation and physical barriers to intercourse. The credit system in its heyday rested in large degree upon supply by the factor of all industrial products, which needs must be sustained so long as every local energy was foredoomed for absorption into cotton growing.

        It cannot rightly be said that the traditional antipathy to manufactures was "opposed to the obvious interests of a region where idle white labor, abundant raw materials, and ever-present water-power seemed to unite conditions so favorable to textile industries," if it is meant that these interests, clear enough to us now, were obvious to Southern consciousness and purpose then. This applies particularly to the labor factor. It will be seen later that in the period before the War the mills often employed slaves as the exclusive operatives; in some cases negroes were employed with whites, and finally and more importantly, through Reconstruction years and at the very outset of the cotton mill era the inclination of establishers of factories was frequently to engage negro hands and to induce operatives to come from the North and even from England and the Continent--overlooking the native white population as a useful supply of workers as though it had not been there. Before the War the presence of raw cotton was certainly thought of rather as a guarantee of economic independence than as a stimulus to produce within the section those products of manufacturing which the staple was potent to purchase from outside.

        It is not implied that conspicuous promulgators and exemplars

of the need for a change in economic activity, such as William Gregg and some others, were not products of a reaction that showed itself from the long continuance of slavery, but they stand out, impotent as they are striking, against a dull and motionless background of prevalent system. They cried in a wilderness.

        Materials and viewpoint are both too well understood to require further demonstration of the preventive influence which slavery and cotton had upon industry in the South. Yet a few observations of Southern men are interesting just at this point. Henry Watterson has said: "The South! The South! It is no problem at all. The story of the South may be summed up in a sentence: she was rich, she lost her riches; she was poor and in bondage; she was set free, and she had to go to work; she went to work, and she is richer than ever before. You see it was a groundhog case. The soil was here, the climate was here, but along with them was a curse, the curse of slavery."38

        38 Quoted by A. B. Hart, The Southern South, pp. 231-232.

        In our opinion, an opinion which has been formed . . . from assiduous researches, . . . the causes which have impeded the progress and prosperity of the South, which have dwindled our commerce . . . into the most contemptible insignificance; sunk a large majority of our people in galling poverty and ignorance, rendered a small minority conceited and tyrannical . . . ; entailed upon us a humiliating dependence upon the Free States; disgraced us in the recesses of our own souls, and brought us under reproach in the eyes of all civilized and enlightened nations--may all be traced to one common source, and there find solution in the most hateful and horrible word that was ever incorporated into the vocabulary of human economy--Slavery!39

        39 Helper, p. 25.

        Tompkins saw clearly and in effect said again and again, "the result of the introduction and growth of the system of slavery was revolutionary; it turned the energies of the people almost wholly to the cultivation of cotton; it practically destroyed all other industries. . . . "40

        40 Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg, vol. i, p. 100. "There were no industries requiring skill or thought, and there was no necessity for scientific farming or anything else scientific. . . . Slavery not only demonstrated that people will not think unless it is necessary, but also that they will not work unless it is necessary (ibid., pp. 98-99). This statement is strongly influenced by Tench Coxe. It has been said of the Irish people by Lord Dufferin that "the entire nation flung itself back upon the land, with as fatal an impulse as when a river, whose current is suddenly impeded, rolls back and drowns the valley which it once fertilized." Sir Horace Plunkett comments: "The energies, the hopes, nay, the very existence of the race, became thus intimately bound up with agriculture" (Sir Horace Plunkett, Ireland in the New Century, p. 20). "By the influence of the negro the South lost its manufactures and largely its commerce, and became practically a purely agricultural section of the nation" (Tompkins, ibid., vol. ii, pp. 200-201; cf. ibid., Cotton Growing, pp. 3-4). As to the usefulness of negroes in latter-day cotton mills, this manufacturer advised: "Dependence upon the negro as a laborer has done infinite injury to the South. In the past it brought about a condition which drove the white laborer from the South or into enforced idleness. It is important to reestablish as quickly as possible respectability for white labor" (ibid., Cotton Mill, Commercial Features, pp. 109-110). Cf. ibid., Building and Loan Associations, p. 43; The Cultivation, Picking, Baling and Manufacturing of Cotton, from the Southern Standpoint, pp. 5-6; F. T. Carlton, History and Problems of Organized Labor, pp. 19-20.

        Not only did slavery hold the South down to supplying the raw material, but while its baneful influence lasted few improvements were made in the methods or appliances even for the growing and preparation of cotton for the market. As in India and China today, the cheapness of labor made ingenuity, enterprise and machinery unnecessary. Except in size and superficial appearance there was no change in the ante-bellum gin, gin-house and screw from 1820 to 1860. But after the War came a feeder, a condenser, a handpress in the lint room, and cotton elevators.41

        41 "The cotton was packed by hand, carried into the gin-house in baskets by laborers, carried to the gin by laborers, pushed into the lint rooms, carried to the screw, packed in the box of the screw and bound with ropes, all by hand," but since the abolition of slavery "all the machinery and appliances for preparing cotton for the market have been revolutionized" (Tompkins, Cultivation, Picking, etc., of Cotton, pp. 5-6). See others of his writings for a full discussion of this point. Cf. M. B. Hammond, The Cotton Industry, pp. 77-78, and, for a detailed account of bad preparation of cotton down to 1880, Edward Atkinson, in U. S. Census of Manufactures, 1880, "The Cotton Manufacture," p. 4 ff. "No slave-holding people ever were an inventive people. In a slave-holding community the upper classes may become luxurious and polished; but never inventive. Whatever degrades the laborer and robs him of the fruits of his toil stifles the spirit of invention and forbids the utilization of inventions and discoveries even when made" (Henry George, Progress and Poverty, twenty-fifth anniversary ed., p. 523).

        If Cotton was King, the monarch was an imperious and

narrow-minded tyrant, who cramped the development and put blinders to the vision of the country. Said William Gregg in 1845:

        Since the discovery that cotton would mature in South-Carolina, she has reaped a golden harvest; but it is feared it has proved a curse rather than a blessing, and I believe that she would at this day be in a far better condition, had the discovery never been made. . . . Let us begin at once, before it is too late, to bring about a change in our industrial pursuits. . . . let croakers against enterprise be silenced. . . . Even Mr. Calhoun, our great oracle . . . is against us in this matter; he will tell you, that no mechanical enterprise can succeed in South-Carolina . . . that to thrive in cotton spinning, one should go to Rhode Island. . . . 42

        42 Domestic Industry, pp. 18-19.

        "The invention of the cotton gin," wrote Tompkins, " . . . before 1860 . . . was nearer anything else than a blessing. It was primarily responsible for the system of slavery. . . . Cotton . . . in its manufacture . . . is the life of the South, but we could probably have done as well without it until we began to manufacture it."43

        43 History of Mecklenburg, vol. i, p. 194. For a careful description of the circumstances surrounding the invention of the cotton gin, and the legal documents in the dispute over the rights to it, cf. ibid., Cotton and Cotton Oil, pp. 19-31, and appendix. "We abandoned a once leading factory system; we imported slaves; we let all public highways become quagmires; we destroyed every possibility for the farmer except cotton and by cutthroat competition amongst ourselves we reduced the price to where there was not a living in it for the cotton producer. We made cotton in a quantity and at a price to clothe all the world excepting ourselves" (ibid., Road Building, p. 24). "The economic history of the South from the Revolution to the Civil War is a record of the development of one natural advantage to the neglect of several others. Fitted by nature to support a large population engaged in a variety of pursuits based upon agriculture, it had a small population occupied in the production of raw material that contributed to the maintenance of a dense population in regions where artifice contended against harsh climate and a stubborn soil" (Ingle, p. 47). Cf. Burkett and Poe, Cotton, pp. 312 and 313; E. C. Brooks, The Story of Cotton, p. 157; Thompson, pp. 44; Miller and Millwright, quoted in Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, Feb. 22, 1883. Gregg showed that cotton, the great god, drove agricultural enterprise from South Carolina, for, with the returns to its cultivation under ordinary management amounting to only 3 or 4 and in some instances only 2 per cent, the inclination for planters to remove with their slave capital to the richer Southwest was strong, thus keeping the population of the State at a standstill (Domestic Industry, p. 18). "Perhaps the most striking economic change that the new industry [cotton culture] effected in the South after the reintroduction of slavery was the speedy abandonment of manufactures. . . . What was the use of nerve-racking investment in elaborate and costly machinery when a land-owner could reap ten per cent net profit from a few negroes and mules and a bushel or two of the magical cotton seed? And yet the South had unusual manufacturing facilities. . . . " (Scherer, p. 168 ff.; cf. ibid., pp. 243, 254; Ingle, pp. 49, 139; New York Herald, quoted in News and Courier, Charleston, March 9, 1881; F. L. Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, p. 138). The social difference between North and South before the War, so often remarked as existing of itself apart, is accounted for by slavery, which arrested development on Southern soil of the industrial type of American civilization (A. D. Mayo, in The Social Economist, Oct., 1893, pp. 203-204).

        The old South had much in common with mercantilist feeling. Though coin for coffers was not precisely the aim, there was the settled ambition for exportation of a money crop that involved self-exploitation and left no room for sectional introspection. The economic system was full of inhibitions, the all-pervading effect of which cannot be calculated. In accounting in 1856 for the stagnation of Virginia as compared with the industrial activity of New England and Old England, Olmsted wrote:

        It is the old, fettered, barbarian labor-system, in connection with which they [Virginians] have been brought up, against which all their enterprise must struggle, and with the chains of which all their ambition must be bound. This conviction . . . is forced upon one more strongly than it is possible to make you comprehend by a mere statement of isolated facts. You could as well convey an idea of the effect of mist on a landscape, by enumerating the number of particles of vapor that obscure it.44

        44 Olmsted, pp. 140-141, cf. ibid., p. 185; pp. 213-214. "The amount of it, then, is this: Improvement and progress in South Carolina is forbidden by its present system" (ibid., pp. 522-523). And for his general philosophy of the subject, see ibid., pp. 490-491). He took as an average expression of the views "of the majority of those whose monopoly of wealth and knowledge has a governing influence on a majority of the people," the statement of a newspaper in 1854: "African slavery . . . is a thing that we cannot do without, that is righteous, profitable, and permanent, and that belongs to Southern society as inherently, intricately, and durably as the white race itself" (ibid., pp. 298-299).

        Duping of the people through charlatan guidance of political leaders is too evident in the South of today to require description of its operation in an earlier period.45

        45 There are many instances similar to that of a famous election speech in Virginia in the fifties, in which the aspirant declared to his audience: "Commerce has long ago spread her sails, and sailed away from you . . . you have set no tilt-hammer of Vulcan to strike blows worthy of the gods in your iron-foundries; you have not yet spun more than coarse cotton enough, in the way of manufacture to clothe your own slaves. . . . You have rallied alone on the single power of agriculture--and such agriculture! . . . Instead of having to feed cattle on a thousand hills, you have had to chase the stumptailed steer through the sedge-patches to procure a tough beef-steak (laughter and applause). . . . The landlord has skinned the tenant, and the tenant has skinned the land, until all have grown poor together." "And how," asks Olmsted, "does the fiddling Negro propose, it will be wondered, to remedy this so very amusing stupidity, poverty, and debility? Very simply and pleasantly. By building railroads and canals, ships and mills; by establishing manufactories, opening mines. . . . And, 'Hurrah!' shout the tickled electors; 'that's exactly what we want.' " And then he showed that it was much like the quack telling the confirmed paralytic to live generously, take vigorous exercise and grow well; that with the disease of slavery in its vitals the South could not do else than languish; that in promising wholesome measures which contemplated everything but the attacking of slavery the politicians were just laughing at the people (Olmsted, p. 288 ff.; cf. ibid., pp. 179-180).

as sorrowful, however, as the confirmed bias of the people shown in applause to such guidance, is the blindness of the leaders who, no doubt with strong elements of trickery, gave even stronger signs of being themselves duped by a situation. Not that the crowd was believing, but that spokesmen were so largely sincere, was most melancholy. The drug had ceased to lead to remorse, and began to bring hallucinations.46

        46 A passage of Sir Horace Plunkett in comment upon Irish politics is much to the point: "Deeply as I have felt for the past sufferings of the Irish people and their heritage of disability and distress, I could not bring myself to believe that, where misgovernment had continued so long, and in such an immense variety of circumstances and conditions, the governors could have been alone to blame. I envied those leaders of popular thought whose confidence in themselves and in their fellows was shaken by no such reflections. But the more I listened to them, the more the conviction was borne in upon me that they were seeking to build an impossible future upon an imaginary past" (Ireland in New Century, p. 147). Cf. Tompkins, Cotton Mill, Commercial Features, preface to appendix, for an incident related of William Gregg and an opponent in an election campaign, which, despite its incidental happening, shows aptly just the point of preoccupation with politics to which the Southern mind came, the degree of trifling with which the most sober proposals were met, the hopelessness of change from this state of affairs by anything short of a fundamental moral awakening.

ineffectual stirrings while slavery persisted, and were less likely of success because the last years before the War, in which they emerged, were given over to such passionate, defiant advocacy of the "Southern institution."47

        47 "With the line around slavery being drawn more closely . . . the cotton South lagged in the industrial race, and the border States were hampered by the institution that they felt to be a burden, but which they could see no safe way to abolish. Compassed as it was by political compromises, slavery must ultimately have toppled through its own overweight; but in 1860 it was so valuable for the plantation that it was not only not readily converted into the factory, but was an obstacle in the way of the employment of capital and of other labor in that direction" (Ingle, pp. 68-69).

        The deterrent effect of slavery upon immigration has been noticed above. In 1860 only 6 per cent of the white population of the South was foreign-born, but immigrants made up nearly 20 per cent of that of the North. In the decade 1850-1860 the South's quota of foreign-born in the whole country dropped from 14 to 13 per cent.48

        48 Ingle, p. 11.

        Independent white artizans, so important in the industrial history of the North in this period, avoided competition with slave labor; if this drawback to coming to the South was removed by their acquiring slaves themselves where a few had the means, they must then leave mechanical pursuits; many disapproved of slavery anyway.49

        49 Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. v, pp. 213-214. Southern whites were indisposed to welcome those who could not or refused to grow into the slavery system. A newspaper in the fifties betrayed this: "A large proportion of the mechanical force that migrate to the South, are a curse instead of a blessing; they are generally a worthless, unprincipled class--enemies to our peculiar institutions . . . pests to society, dangerous among the slave population, and ever ready to form combinations against the interest of the slaveholder, against the laws of the country, and against the peace of the Commonwealth." But slave-acquiring merchants were cordially received (quoted in Olmsted, p. 511). For interesting facts as to immigration to North Carolina, cf. Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg, vol. ii, p. 204; vol. i, p. 153.

        Communities with strong foreign infusion and slight or no reliance upon slavery, showed a vigor before the War which has been to them a continuing advantage into the present.50

        50 In the fifties it was declared that the most prosperous community in South Carolina was a settlement of Germans in the western part of the State. Here had been founded an educational institution, varied manufactures, farming was successful and capital was invested in a railroad venture. Slavery bore small part (Olmsted, p. 511). In 1865 the northwestern counties of Georgia, strongly opposed to secession and which furnished soldiers to the federal armies, were held to be better disposed toward the national government than any other part of the State; slaves had constituted less than a fourth of the population. Though cruder than those from the seaboard, delegates from this section to the constitutional convention of 1865 were said to have a well-informed outlook for the Commonwealth (Sidney Andrews, The South Since the War, pp. 342-343). Study of the conventions of other States immediately succeeding the War shows "up-country" representatives, as contrasted with those of the "low country," more easily adjusting themselves to the new condition and readier to go ahead with a changed program. It was said that at a time when the average wage of female operatives in Georgia cotton mills was half that paid in Massachusetts, New England factory girls were induced by high wages to go to the Southern State, but returned North because their position was unpleasant in "the general degradation of the laboring class" (Olmsted, p. 543).

        51 Ibid., p. 201.

        The dependence of the ante-bellum South upon the North and upon Europe for the most substantial and trivial appurtenances of civilization was spectacular. It might be argued in apology for the total one-sidedness of the old South, that the section was responding to the principle of comparative economic advantage. Certainly the most absolute adherence to the territorial division of labor could not require a more exclusive devotion to the making of cotton and fuller reliance upon less peculiarly favored districts for manufactured goods and certain foodstuffs and materials, than the South displayed. But however strict in its conformity to superficial dictates of this policy, the program was ruinous to the section and the country, and was hurtful to the economic welfare of the world. Easy yielding

to the principle did not suggest to statesmen that the South after all was in only partial compliance--that even for the most efficient production of cotton as such there needed to be a wholesome admixture of manufacturing and of other agricultural interests. Post-bellum industry brought not a less but a more economical and larger output of the staple.

        The very humor of many passages in the literature of the economic history of the South, describing the need of the section to go to the North for a thousand and one essentials of daily existence, shows the seriousness of the situation. Gregg, too lonely in his advocacy of home industry to treat the subject in other than its fundamental aspects, declared: "A change in our habits and industrial pursuits is a far greater desideratum than any change in the laws of our government . . . ," and "if we continue in our present habits, it would not be unreasonable to predict, that when the Raleigh Rail-Road is extended to Columbia, our members of the Legislature would be fed on Yankee baker's bread. Pardon me for repeating the call on South Carolina to go to work." His own city of Charleston, than which there was no greater sinner, had regulations against the employment of steam engines that stand in striking contrast to the arguments for the comparative advantage of steam as against water power at a later date when the city centered attention upon building a cotton factory.52

        52 "God speed the day when her [South Carolina's] politicians will be exhorting the people to domestic industry, instead of State resistance; when our Clay Clubs and Democratic Associations will be turned into societies for the advancement of scientific agriculture and the promotion of mechanic art; when our capitalists will be found following the example of Boston and other Northern cities, in making such investments of their capital as will give employment to the poor, and make them producers, instead of burthensome consumers; when our City Council may become so enlightened as to see the propriety of following the example of every other city in the civilized world, in removing the restrictions on the use of the Steam Engine, now indispensable to every department of Manufacturing. . . . " And again: "He who has possessed himself of the notion that we have the industry, and are wronged out of our hard earnings by a lazy set of scheming Yankees, to get rid of this delusion, needs only seat himself on the Charleston wharves for a few days, and behold ship after ship arrive laden down with the various articles produced by Yankee industry" (Domestic Industry, p. 9 ff.). "The labor of negroes and blind horses can never supply the place of steam, and this power is withheld lest the smoke of an engine should disturb the delicate nerves of an agriculturist; or the noise of a mechanic's hammer should break in upon the slumber of a real estate holder, or importing merchant, while he is indulging in fanciful dreams, or building on paper, the Queen City of the South. . . . " (ibid., p. 23).

        A decade later Helper reproached a South that had not given heed to Gregg: "It is a fact well known to every intelligent Southerner that we are compelled to go to the North for almost every article of utilty and adornment, from matches, shoepegs and paintings up to cotton-mills, steamships and statuary. . . . All the world sees, or ought to see, that in a commercial, mechanical, manufactural, fiancial and literary point of view, we are as helpless as babes. . . . "53

        53 Helper, pp. 21, 23. Cf. for other interesting illustrations of dependence upon the North, some of which influenced Henry W. Grady. An orator at the Southern Commercial Convention, New Orleans, 1855, adapted for the occasion the famous speech in the British Parliament on taxes, and beginning, in the Southern version: "It is time that we should look about us, and see in what relation we stand to the North. From the rattle with which the nurse tickles the ear of the child born in the South, to the shroud that covers the cold form of the dead, everything comes to us from the North. We rise from between sheets made in Northern looms, and pillows of northern feathers, to wash in basins made in the North . . . ," and continuing in the strain which was a favorite with platform and pen, and many examples of which may be found (Olmsted, p. 544). Cf. Grady, New South, (ed. 1890), p. 188 ff.

        54 Domestic Industry, p. 8; cf. ibid., p. 11. Olmsted instances a case, probably common enough, where a North Carolina planter was buying hay grown in New York or New England with very large charges for carriage (pp. 378-379). Cf. ibid., p. 175. When Southern industrial resources were exploited, the total benefit might not come to the locality. Thus shipwrights at Mobile were from the North (Olmsted, p. 567).

        A newspaper in Richmond chronicled the sale to Northern interests of a large coal field in the State, and in unconscious irony placed in juxtaposition to the notice this confident exhortation:

        It is plain that a new and glorious destiny awaits the South, and beckons us onward to a career of independence. Shall we train and discipline our energies for the coming crisis, or shall we continue the tributary and dependent vassals of Northern brokers and moneychangers? Now is the time for the South to begin in earnest the work of self-development! Now is the time to break asunder the fetters of commercial subjection, and to prepare for that more complete independence that awaits us.55

        55 Olmsted, p. 363.

        Other appeals to domestic industry were as clearly inspired by sectional animosity; they were incidental to political ambition, and are to be contrasted with the generous, wholesome rallying-cries of the cotton mill campaign twenty-five years later, when economic sanity had gotten the better of partisan futilities. Another Virginia paper, wiser than that just quoted, urging manufacturing in the State and particularly textile mills for Richmond, anticipated with different mind the event invited by its contemporary, and foretold what was later too patent: "It must be plain in the South that if our relations with the North should ever be severed--and how soon they may be, none can know (may God avert it long!)--we would, in all the South, not be able to clothe ourselves. We could not fell our forests, plow our fields, nor mow our meadows. . . . And yet, with all these things staring us in the face, we shut our eyes, and go on blindfold."56

        56 Ibid., p. 166. An "Address to the Farmers of Virginia," read at a convention for the formation of a State Agricultural Society in 1852, adopted, reconsidered and readopted with amendments, and finally reconsidered again and rejected on the ground that it contained admissions, however true, which would be useful to abolitionists, contained the words: " . . . thus we, who once swayed the councils of the Union, find our power gone, and our influence on the wane, at a time when both are of vital importance to our prosperity, if not to our safety. As other States accumulate the means of material greatness, and glide past us on the road to wealth and empire, we slight the warnings of dull statistics, and drive lazily along the field of ancient customs, or stop the plow to speed the politician--should we not, in too many cases, say . . . the demagogue? . . . With a wide-spread domain, with a kindly soil, with a climate whose sun radiates fertility, and whose very dews distill abundance, we find our inheritance so wasted that the eye aches to behold the prospect" (ibid., p. 169).

        In addition to the barrier to manufactures formed by

cotton cultivation under slave labor, and the silent opposition which the prevalent system engendered, were not infrequent outspoken declarations against industry. William Gregg was one of the few in the South to rise superior to Calhoun's sway, and asserting that there were some who were better able to speak of the propriety of factories than even that statesman, faced him squarely but tactfully:

        "The known zeal with which this gentleman has always engaged in every thing relating to the interest of South-Carolina, forbids the idea that he is not a friend to domestic manufactures, fairly brought about, and, knowing, as he must know, the influence which he exerts, he should be more guarded in expressing opinions adverse to so good a cause."57

        57 Domestic Industry, p. 20.

        58 Ibid., p. 14. "Lamentable, indeed, is it to see so wise and so pure a man as Langdon Cheves, putting forth the doctrine, to South-Carolina, that manufactures should be the last resort of a country. With the greatest possible respect for the opinions of this truly great man, and the humblest pretensions on my part, I will venture the assertion, that a greater error was never committed by a statesman" (ibid). The Southern Quarterly Review in 1845, the same year as Gregg's publication, quoted Cheves: "Manufactures should be the last resort of industry in every country, for one forced as with us, they serve no interests but those of the capitalists who set them in motion, and their immediate localities." And Mr. Kohn remarks, "This expression was not peculiar to any one class of leaders in South Carolina at that time," and instances other examples (Cotton Mills of S. C., p. 13). Tompkins comments: " . . . as slavery grew, . . . there was a period from 1840 to 1860, when the interest of the South sorely needed manufacturing as well as agricultural development. Only those men who appreciated this condition undertook to go counter to the growing sentiment in favor of agriculture and slave labor. Those who did continue to manufacture, were necessarily men of broad views and great abilities," and he speaks of some of the notable few--Gregg, Fries, Holt, Leak, Morehead, Hammett (Cotton Mill, Commercial Features, p. 180). Cf. also references to Burkett and Poe and to Brooks, n. 42. Cf. Gregg, Domestic Industry, pp. 19-20. For a very fine passage refuting Cheves' position and defining what the writer meant by "domestic manufactures"--not household industry, but cotton factories throughout the State and craftsmen at every cross-roads--see ibid., pp. 14-16.

        In public-mindedness, in breadth of view, in qualities of imagination, in sanity of judgment that did not sacrifice understanding of his misguided contemporaries, in power of analysis of the confronting situation, William Gregg stood head and shoulders above other Southerners of his time. And only now, seventy-five years later, can his wisdom be thoroughly appreciated. The Lancashire opposition, which, despite the cotton famine, hated slavery and led to British disaffection when the warring South two decades afterwards most needed an ally, brilliantly vindicated his warning to his antagonists that even their selfish ambitions could only be served by attention to such reasoning as he advanced. Gregg said:

        Those who are disposed to agitate the State and prepare the minds of the people for resisting the laws of Congress, and particularly those who look for so direful a calamity as the dissolution of our Union, should, above all others, be most anxious so to diversify the industrial pursuits of South-Carolina, as to render her independent of all other countries; for as sure as this greatest of calamities befalls us, we shall find the same causes that produced it, making enemies of the nations which are at present the best customers of our agricultural productions.59

        59 Domestic Industry, p. 14; cf. ibid., p. 52.

        Because of the striking reversal of front of the city at a later date, which will be of central importance in subsequent chapters of this study, Gregg's advice to Charleston's capitalists in 1856 is interesting. Condemning, as a member of the legislature, a proposed subsidy to a railroad to link Charleston and Cincinnati, put forward in furtherance of commercial policies selfishly followed by "wealthy gentlemen, some of whom have ships floating in every sea," he declared that Charleston's destiny was "fixed and indissoluble with the State of South-Carolina, and . . . mainly her great investment in Internal Improvements should be made with a view to developing the resources of the immediate country around her . . . cheap modes of transportation

from all quarters of the State could not fail to re-act on the general prosperity of the city . . . the donmant wealth of Charleston might be so directed as to be felt in the remotest parts of the State, in stimulating agriculture, draining our . . . swamps and putting into renewed culture our worn-out and waste lands; diversified industry, stimulating the mechanic arts and increasing the population and wealth of the State." Instead of this he found that "there is no city in the Union which has accumulated more wealth, to its size, than Charleston--none that has shown so little inclination to develop the resources of the State. Her millionaires die in New York. There is scarcely a day that passes that does not send forth Charleston capital to add to the growth and wealth of that great city."60

        60 Speech on Blue Ridge Railroad, p. 67. Cf. ibid., p. 29.

        The characteristic inclination toward the individual rather than the corporate form of enterprise which was noticed as showing itself in the South of the Revolutionary Period, was still strong up to the Civil War. In 1845 Gregg inveighed against it, particularly as crystallized in legislative refusal to grant charters of incorporation; he was quick to hold up New England as a business model to the South. Those who have sought to magnify the industrial activities of the old South have frequently failed to take into account the differences in organization which distinguished enterprises then from those of post-bellum years. The textile industry could not be a movement in economic society, sinking its roots deep and extending them broadly, so long as investment participation sprang from and ended with individual initiative. Until the widespread emergence of the joint-stock form, the mills could not claim and embrace the generality of the community's resources. And in a period when this device was not largely turned to, it is plain that industrial stirrings were comparatively feeble.61

        61 Gregg hoped that dangers to be apprehended from indiscriminate granting of charters to banking institutions would "not be confounded with, and brought injuriously to bear against the charters which are necessary to develope [sic] the resources of our country, and give an impetus to all industrial pursuits. . . . The practice of operating by associated capital gives a wonderful stimulus to enterprise. . . . Why is it that the Bostonians are able in a day, or a week, to raise millions at one stroke, to purchase the land on both sides of a river, for miles, to secure a great water power and the erection of a manufacturing city? . . . The divine, lawyer, doctor, schoolmaster, guardian, widow, farmer, merchant, mechanic, common labourer, in fact, the whole community is made tributary to these great enterprises. The utility and safety of such institutions is no longer problematical. . . . If we shut the door against associated capital and place reliance upon individual exertion, we may talk over the matter and grow poorer for fifty years to come, without effecting the change in our industrial pursuits, necessary to renovate the fortunes of our State. . . . About three-fourths of the manufacturing of the United States, is carried on by joint-stock companies; . . . we shall certainly have to look to such companies to introduce the business with us." He showed, by South Carolina examples, the perpetuity of the corporate form as contrasted with the frequently limited life of the personal enterprise (An Enquiry into the Propriety of Granting Charters of Incorporation for Manufacturing and Other Purposes, in South Carolina, pp. 4-11).

        The individualism of the old South, the inability to co-operate was due no less to physical than social isolation between portions of the population. Not only was there self-satisfaction coupled with dependence upon the North for manufactured commodities in the low-country, but the up-country, the frugal population of which was better disposed for manufacturing development, was so segregated as to be kept in mean state, or actually dependent itself upon the coastal districts. Between the Piedmont and the sea was the barrier of plantations; between the Piedmont, and the industrial North were no transportation facilities. Concentration of capital, especially in the corporate form of industrial enterprise, is a mark of economic integration; in the ante-bellum South many other facts besides the absence of capital concentration show the lack of team work, of conditions making for unity of thought or action.62

        62 "Isolation gave birth to individualism, as marked upon the mountain-clearing as upon the plantation; and beginnings of the co-operative spirit were dwarfed by nature and by human inclination . . . " (Ingle, p. 32 ff.). Cf. Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. v, pp. 314-315. Olmsted found mountain wagons coming sometimes two hundred miles to the head of navigation in North Carolina (p. 361 and pp. 358-359). The division of capital among small mills rather than its investment in larger factories is paralleled by the relatively larger number of church buildings in the South than in the North, with, however, relatively small seating capacity (Ingle, p. 32 ff.). The same tendency may be seen in respect to poorhouses, asylums, hospitals and jails (Dodd, Expansion and Conflict, p. 231; cf. industrial map for 1860, p. 188, showing few plants of an output of $250,000 south of Maryland).

        The non-industrial character of the old South may be seen not only in internal fact, but in external reflection equally conclusive. Of external evidences, the political perhaps most readily occurs to one. Pervasive economic conditions come certainly to the surface in political pretensions; economic transitions are registered in alterations of political front. The protective tariff of 1816 was introduced and defended, respectively, by two South Carolinians--Lowndes and Calhoun. The signature of a Virginia president--Madison--made it a law. This tariff was opposed by New England in the person of Webster. In 1828, in the debate over the "Tariff of Abominations," the situation was just the reverse--Calhoun opposed protection, Webster championed it. In swapping sides, both men were answering to the changed economic interests of their respective sections. No clearer picture is needed of the trend of the South in ante-bellum years than the spectacle of Calhoun transformed from nationalist to sectionalist.63

        63 Upon this whole matter, see Scherer, p. 179 ff. "In 1816, when Webster opposed protection, there was a capital of only about $52,000,000 invested in textile manufacture, of which much still lay in the South. In 1828, when he reversed his position, this capital had probably doubled, and had become localized in and about New England" (ibid., p. 181). Cf. ibid., p. 234.

        Cotton, nearly exclusively in the South, and to a notable degree in New England, was responsible underneath for the alterations which were displayed in the superficial play of politics. It was the disintegration of manufactures brought about by more and more extensive embracing of cotton cultivation that turned the South from protection to free trade; it was the growing absorption in industry, especially cotton manufacture, and relative relinquishing of commerce, that made New England protectionist instead of, as before, the champion of free trade.64

        64 Ibid., p. 152. Slavery added to cotton brought the extra confusion of purely political animosities. "At the beginning of the nineteenth century the tariff was not a matter which was exclusively political. . . . The subject ceased to be an economic one and became a political one in proportion as slavery grew in the South and diminished in the North, and in inverse proportion as manufactures dried up in the South and became of greater importance in the North" (Tompkins, The Tariff and Reciprocity).

        This is not the place to remark at length how economic interests are changing the South back, in partial measure, to the first position. Cotton is again central. Cotton factories are largely responsible for the little leaven that is working in a large loaf, producing in the heart of the Solid South Republican adherents and voices for protection. "Slavery has been abolished. The South has reestablished manufactures. Its interests in free trade and protection are changed from what they were in 1860. We need not only domestic trade, but foreign markets. We need, apparently, protection and free trade at the same time. . . . The South is as much interested in protection to home markets as New England is. New England is as much interested in export markets as the South is. In this situation we ought to get together . . . for 'Protection and Reciprocity.' "65

        65 Tompkins, Tariff and Protection.

        It is interesting to examine a summary of the industrial history of the South in the fifty years preceding the Civil War, given by an important writer:

        Between 1810 and 1860 three periods of progress marked the factory development of the cotton states. During our last war with England. . . . mill builders from the North migrated to the Southern highlands, and with local cooperation established small yarn factories at several places in the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky. . . . During the decade ending with 1833, when hostility to the tariff made the Southern people bitterly resent economic dependence on the North, there was a second movement towards manufactures, especially in South Carolina and Georgia, directed mainly towards the erection of larger and more complete factories. This agitation bore fruit in some corporate enterprises, most of which had but qualified success. Finally, in the late forties real factory development began simultaneously at several points, and had not two financial crises and a war checked its progress, we should probably date from this time the beginning of the modern epoch of cotton manufacturing in the South.66

        66 Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. v, p. 316 ff.; Cf. ibid., pp. 330-331. Contrast Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg, vol. i, pp. 133-137.

        Two objections against this view have pertinence. In the first place, these three periods of comparative interest in manufactures can hardly be called "movements" in any social or economic sense. That of the twenties and running into the thirties may claim more color of this than the other two.67

        67 But some of the agitation for industries in these, as in other years, had a flavor not symptomatic of healthy desire for improvement. Conventions looking to railroad development were held in North Carolina and Tennessee in the middle thirties. Of the advantages which it was agreed would flow from the building of the Charleston and Cincinnati Railroad, it was declared that "it will form a bond of union between the States [i.e., Southern States] which will give safety to our property and security to our institutions" (Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg, vol. i, p. 125). Of more positive character was the utterance of a Southerner who viewed with concern the danger that the North would crush slavery and place the South under complete submission to tariff aggressions, congressional representation for the latter section finding a stop in the limit of slave territory. "Under these circumstances, the true policy of the South is distinct and clearly marked. She must resort to the same means by which power is accumulated at the north, to secure it for herself." If the South should manufacture a large portion of its cotton crop "we reduce the quantity for export, and the competition for that remainder will add greatly to our wealth, while it will place us in a position to dictate our own terms. The manufactories will increase our population; increased population and wealth will enable us to chain the southern states proudly and indissolubly together by railroads and other internal improvements; and these works by affording a speedy communication from point to point, will prove our surest defense against either foreign aggression or domestic revolt. . . . If the evil day shall ever come when the south shall be satisfied that she cannot remain in the Union with safety to her institutions, it [i.e., industrial self-sufficiency] will place her in a condition to maintain her separate nationality" (E. Steadman, of Tennessee, quoted in J. D. B. DeBow, Industrial Resources of the South and Southwest, vol. ii, p. 127). Objection to massing poor whites in mills was combatted by a Charlestonian with the reflection that small farming with slave labor brought discontent that might mean social upheaval, whereas the factory opened a door of opportunity making for stability; when poor whites should have the chance of owning a slave "they would increase the demand for that kind of property, and would become firm and uncompromising supporters of Southern institutions" (Ingle, pp. 25-26).

Gregg was almost wholly responsible. It has been pointed out above that Gregg was a missionary who preached an unaccepted faith. He was not a social exponent. In the second place, it is gratuitous to count upon what would have been the case had not the war broken in upon declared industrial beginnings. The Civil War was not a fortuitous event. It had to come. It was the disastrous evidence of the dominance in the South of a system which gave no room to widespread industrial enterprise. Could the war be regarded simply as an occurrence, an unfortunate happening, there would perhaps be ground for assuming that industrial enterprise might have been built into, and finally changed wholesomely, the economic regime of the ante-bellum South, but facts show that it was a case where mastery between mutually exclusive plans had to be tried on the basis of comparative strength. The spirit for manufactures had not sufficient force to avert the war, but only enough life to show, in expiring, that it had begun to be born.

        The decade 1850-1860 has been reserved for specific treatment at this point because two Southern writers have sought, rather dogmatically, to invest it with a character of industrialism superior to that of ante-bellum years generally and to show that it fathered later growth. Mr. Edmonds has said: "A study of the facts . . . should convince anyone that the South in its early days gave close attention to manufacturing development, and that while later on the great profits in cultivation caused a contraction of the capital and energy of that section in farming operations, yet, after 1850, there came renewed interest in industrial matters, resulting in an astonishing advance in railroad construction and in manufactures."68

        68 Edmonds, p. 13. It is shown how the course of cotton prices affected industry; from 1800 to 1839 cotton averaged a fraction over 17 cents; in 1840 the price dropped to 9 cents, continuing to decline to the 1846 average of 5.63 cents, when, after a short crop, there was a sharp rise in 1847, only to be followed by a fall to 8 cents and less. "These excessively low prices brought about a revival of public interest in other pursuits than cotton cultivation. . . . " It is said that from 1850 to 1860 the South quadrupled its railroad mileage, in the latter year being 387 miles in advance of New England (ibid., p. 10 ff.). For an account of late colonial and Revolutionary development, see ibid., p. 3 ff. Cf. DeBow, vol, iii, p. 76 ff.

        It is stated that "Cotton manufacturing had commenced to attract increased attention, and nearly $12,000,000 were invested in Southern cotton mills. In Georgia especially this industry was thriving, and between 1850 and 1860 the capital so invested in that State nearly doubled."69

        69 Edmonds, Facts about South, p. 10 ff. Judging by the United States census of manufactures, these figures are grossly inaccurate. In 1860 the Southern States had $9,840,221 invested in cotton manufacturing, and in Georgia the investment increased from $1,736,156 in 1850 to $2,126,103 in 1860, or less than 30 per cent (United States Census of Manufactures, 1900, Cotton Manufactures, p. 56).

        The assertion that in 1860 the South had in all 24,590 industrial establishments with an investment of $175,000,000 loses force when, by a simple division, it is seen that on an average this made the investment in each only $7,144.37, which is surely not indicative of considerable importance. Many of the establishments must have been much smaller than would be represented by this average, and the few which were a great deal larger were rare exceptions. The very disparity in size of enterprises points away from any concerted movement toward manufacturing. As to the railroads, many of them were narrow-gauge, and all the facts tend to show that railroads were looked upon as facilitating commerce rather than manufactures.70

        70 Even after the war the pet scheme to build a railroad over the mountains gathered sentiment in the long-cherished desire to link Charleston with "the producing interior" typified in Cincinnati; as rails were laid, piece-meal, through the Piedmont, advantages thus afforded for the erection of factories were seldom mentioned. The easier transport of cotton and the development of the South Atlantic ports were the thoughts uppermost. See above, p. 37. In the case of North Carolina, it is said that the railroads by bringing in manufactures cheaper than local plants could supply them, actually hurt the advance of individual enterprise (Thompson, p. 31).

        In vaunting property figures of the South of 1860 as compared with those of the North, Mr. Edmonds has given himself to the most obvious and serious error of including slaves.71

        71 "Blot out of existence in one night every manufacturing enterprise in the whole country, with all the capital employed [he was writing in 1894], and the loss would not equal that sustained by the South as a result of the war. . . . New England and the Middle States, having grown rich by the war, almost trebled their property [from 1860 to 1870] while the South drops from the first place to the third. In 1860 it outranked the Northern section by $750,000,000." Mr. Edmonds does not note the inclusion of the slaves in his "property" figures (p. 18 ff.). In reference to the false idea of prosperity in the ante-bellum South, it has been said: "A delusion of great wealth was created in the listing as taxable property of slaves to the amount of at least two thousand millions" (Hart, p. 218).

to certain persons, were, socially and economically considered, no more property and wealth than were their masters. In their emancipation the South did not lose, but gained, if their labor in freedom may be thought to be more productive than when they were chattels.72

        72 "As commonly used the word 'wealth' is applied to anying having an exchange value. But when used as a term of political economy it must be limited to a much more definite meaning, because many things are commonly spoken of as wealth which in taking account of collective or general wealth cannot be considered as wealth at all. . . . Such are slaves, whose value represents merely the power of one class to appropriate the earnings of another. . . . All this relative wealth, which, in common thought and speech, in legislation and law, is undistinguished from actual wealth, could, without the destruction or consumption of anything more than a few drops of ink and a piece of paper, be utterly annihilated" (George, pp. 38-39).

        Mr. Edmonds makes such over-zealous statements as that "The energy and enterprise displayed by the South in the extension of its agricultural interests was fully as great as the energy displayed in the development of New England's manufactures or that of the pioneers who opened up the West to civilization," and greatly overreaches in his disapproval of the phrase "The New South," "a term which is so popular everywhere except in the South, . . . supposed to represent a country of different ideas and different business methods from those which prevailed in the old antebellum days. . . . Its use . . . as intended to convey the meaning that the South of late years is something entirely new and foreign to this section . . . is wholly unjust to the South of the past and present. It needs but little investigation to show that prior to the war the South was fully abreast of the times in all business interests."73

        73 Edmonds, pp. 1-2.

back to ante-bellum years, is to show that "the wonderful industrial growth which has come since 1880 has been due mainly to Southern men and Southern money," and it is well to rest his exposition with the proper statement that "Since 1880" the people of the South "have turned to manufacturing with a facility that not only shows that they are in no way lacking in capability to compete in manufacturing pursuits, but, considering the limited capital, this section has exhibited remarkable gains in developing its resources under adverse conditions. In a little more than a decade from the time the work of development may be said to have begun . . . nobody . . . doubts that the South can compete with New England in the manufacture of cotton goods, but many do doubt whether New England can compete with the South. . . . "74

        74 Ibid., p. 21. Cf. ibid., pp. 19-20.

        Edgar Garner Murphy embraced the viewpoint and made more categorical the statements of Mr. Edmonds respecting Southern industrial history. "The present industrial development of the South," he wrote, "is not a new creation. It is chiefly a revival. . . . Instead of industrial inaction we find from the beginnings of Southern history an industrial movement, characteristic and sometimes even provincial in its methods, but presenting a consistent and creditable development up to the very hour of the Civil War. The issue of this war meant no mere economic reversal. It meant economic catastrophe, drastic, desolate. . . . Thus the later story of the industrial South is but a story of reëmergence."75

        75 E. G. Murphy, The Present South, p. 97. With modifications prompted by deeper study, Clark has presented about the same inter-pretation of the decade of the fifties as that of Edmonds and Murphy: "The South resented economic dependence, yet lacked the population, the experience, the capital and the habits that foster manufactures and diversify industries. It was topheavy with cotton, and slave agriculture unbalanced its economic life. . . . Yet had the war not intervened, manufactures would have revived and increased as settlement became denser, railways more numerous, and capital more abundant in proportion to resources, until these states by their own potency would have remoulded their industrial economy" (in South in Building of Nation, vol. v, pp. 330-331). For statements probably influenced by Edmonds or Murphy, or both, see St. George L. Sioussat, in The History Teacher's Magazine, Sept., 1916, p. 224, and J. J. Spalding, in Proceedings, Fourth Annual Convention, Georgia Industrial Association, pp. 44-45.

are then repeated, except that Mr. Murphy failed to see the almost total lapse of industrial activity by 1840.

        The incentive to discover an industrial past for the section, which Mr. Edmonds found in the desire to establish the South as the magician of her post-bellum awakening, was matched in Mr. Murphy's motive by a more penetrating purpose. In commenting upon the growing importance of manufactures as contrasted with agriculture, which was the most distinctive economic movement after 1880, he declared that "it is but one reassertion of the genius of the old South." Though his words boldly invite such a construction, it was outside of his object to mean by this that a genius for industrialism had run through the earlier history of the section. His true desire was to assert that "The old South was the real nucleus of the new nationalism," the old South in the sense of "the South of responsibility, the men of family, the planter class, the official soldiery, or (if you please) the aristocracy,--the South that had had power, and to whom power had taught those truths of life, those dignities and fidelities of temper, which power always teaches men. . . . " He regretted that this old South was not able to come into force until after Reconstruction because "a doubt was put upon its word given at Appomattox. . . . Power was struck from its hands. Its sense of responsibility was wounded and confused."76

        76 Murphy, pp. 10-11.

        This is a fine statement of a primary truth in the development of the South that began about the year 1880. The old South did draw breath with the new. The permanent character of the South, the forces resident in the South of earlier as of later years, were those which largely made possible a complete change in viewpoint, which carried through the measure of, if not indeed giving birth to, a reversed program. But, as Mr. Murphy did not see, there is a radical distinction between the continuity of this quality in the

South and any continuity of its evidences in industrial pursuits. The new South did not receive from the old South a heritage of industrial tradition; what it received was an ingrained and living social morality, not marred in its essential characteristics, and very likely, strange as it may appear, even assisted, by the institution of slavery.77

        77 "This sense of responsibility, deepened rather than destroyed by the burden of slavery, was the noble and fruitful gift of the old South to the new, a gift born of the conditions of an aristocracy, but responsive and operative under every challenge in the changing conditions of the later order" (ibid., p. 21).

        Against some suggestions of an industrial character for the fifties,78

        78 A list of cotton factories in Alabama in 1852, the largest of which had only 3,080 spindles, is contained in DeBow, vol. i, p. 233. For a similar list for South Carolina in 1847, see Kohn, Cotton Mills of S. C., pp. 17-18; cf. Gregg, Domestic Industry, pp. 24-25. As to railroads, see DeBow, vol. iii, p. 76 ff. Where cotton mills were urged, the tone of the press might be casual as compared with that characterizing the later period of the eighties when advocacy was passionate; e.g.: "We are glad to learn that our men of enterprise and capital are at length waking up on the subject. This is the best business that they could turn their attention to with the view of realizing profits . . . while at the same time it gives new life and energy to the surrounding community" (North Carolina Standard, Feb. 27, 1850, quoted in Pleasants MS.).

        79 Scherer, p. 235 ff. Cf. Friedrich List, National System of Political Economy. Hammond indulged largely in estimates; as to untrustworthiness of census figures of wealth in these years, see Olmsted, pp. 512-513, and M. T. Copeland, The Cotton Manufacturing Industry of the United States, p. 18, note.

        The obsession with cotton, and the crazy confidence which the staple engendered, come out in the defiant valedictory which this spokesman flung to the North: " . . . would any sane nation make war on cotton? Without firing a gun, without drawing a sword, should they make war on us we could bring the whole world to our feet. . . . What would

happen if no cotton were furnished for three years? . . . England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South. No, you do not dare to make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is King."80

        80 Quoted in Scherer, p. 235 ff. How little thought had been given to the South's economic self-sufficiency appears in this warning to the North: "The South have (sic) sustained you in a great measure. You are our factors. . . . Suppose we were to discharge you; suppose we were to take our business out of your hands; we would consign you to anarchy and poverty" (quoted in Scherer, p. 241). Cf. the spirited dissent from such thinking by Cassius M. Clay, as quoted in Helper, pp. 206-207. Hammond's views are readily amplified by reference to proslavery writings, especially those of Christy, Bledsoe, Stringfellow, Harper, Dew.

        Propaganda toward sweeping in Mexico and the Spanish West Indies to the Southern slavery system, when it became apparent by 1856 that further expansion in the West was impossible, paralleled the academic instruction given throughout his whole career by Professor Dew in the College of William and Mary.81

        81 Dodd, in South in Building of Nation, vol. v, p. 573.

        Ship-building, often urged because of superior advantages for the industry, did not take hold in the South.82

        82 Cf. Olmsted, p. 539, note, and table on p. 541; Ingle, pp. 70-71.

        83 Cf. Ingle, pp. 70-71. "Of the twenty millions of dollars annually realized from the sales of the cotton crop of Alabama, nearly all not expended in supporting the producers is reinvested in lands and negroes," and from this proceeded "senility and decay" (Hon. C. C. Clay, Jr., speaking to a horticultural society in 1855, quoted in Olmsted, p. 577). Cf. B. F. Perry, in address before S. C. Institute, 1855, quoted in Helper, pp. 229-230.

        84 Cf. Sparta, Ga., dispatch to Charleston News, July, 1855, in Olmsted, pp. 543-544. The decade 1850-1860 was the most prosperous for the cotton industry in the country up to that time (Copeland, pp. 73-74). Following opening of railway communication after 1850, which brought in outside manufactures, "the home industry was, as a whole, distinctly less successful" (Thompson, p. 31).

of slaves in the ten cotton States was greater in 1860 than in 1850,85

        85 Hammond, pp. 60-61.

        86 Ibid., p. 59.

        87 Ibid., p. 102, note 1. See table in ibid., p. 129.

        88 Ibid., pp. 73-74.

        No distincter picture of the growing trend in the South away from balanced economic development can be wished than that presented by the series of commercial conventions held in the fifteen years preceding the Civil War. The 1845 meeting, in Memphis, did not allow the recording of a proposition that the seat of government be removed to a place west of the Alleghanies, and passed a resolution affirming that the convention "far from desiring to engender sectional prejudice . . . regard the North and the South, the East and the West, as one people, in sympathy and in interest, as in government and country"; in accordance with the purpose to build up the South, the questions brought before the convention were at first of a practical nature, concerning commerce, manufactures and education. Gradually, however, border States ceased to send delegates, and the conventions were dominated by the political aims of the cotton belt, with politicians, rather than men of affairs, as spokesmen. Such practical measures as were discussed were on lines too broad to be capable of realization. They were such proposals as made resolutions rather than results. The South, so far as she sought industrial advancement, was in a maze, a novice not knowing to what projects to lend strength, never thinking of looking inward and never willing to start with homely enterprises that are suggested by genuine recognition of economic needs. It

was sought to secure the free navigation of the Amazon, to make passage of the Isthmus at Tehuantepec, to build a railroad from the Mississippi to the Pacific, to secure the introduction of slavery into Central America, to remove obstacles to filibustering plans in Nicaragua. Through the discussions in successive years at Charleston, New Orleans, Richmond, Savannah, Knoxville, Montgomery and Vicksburg the tendency toward politics grew; rather forced pronouncements of belief in the Union carried implication against their sincerity, and were mocked by speedy development of wrangles over the tariff into open use of the word "secession." "Hail Columbia" might be played at a banquet, but response was given to a toast, "The District of Columbia, the battleground for Southern institutions." Washington, and not the Southern States, drew the eye of all.89

        89 See Ingle, p. 221 ff. " . . . in all that they said there was an undertone of disappointment and apprehension. They wished to take part, but could not, in what was going forward in the rest of the country. They spoke hopefully of national enterprise, but it was evident that the nation of which they were thinking . . . was not the same nation that the Northern man had in mind when he thought of the future of industry" (Woodrow Wilson, Division and Reunion, p. 164). Cf. Scherer, p. 204. Cassius M. Clay in a speech in 1856 relentlessly pointed out the futility of all the plans proposed: "If there are not manufactures, there is no commerce. In vain do the slaveholders go to Knoxville, to Nashville, to Memphis and to Charleston, and resolve that they will have nothing to do with these abolition eighteen millions of Northern people; that they will build their own vessels, manufacture their own goods, ship their own products to foreign countries, and break down New-York, Philadelphia and Boston! Again they resolve and resolve, and yet there is not a single more ton shipped and not a single article added to the wealth of the South. But . . . they never invite such men as I am to attend their Conventions. They know that I would tell them that slavery is the cause of their poverty, and that I will tell them that what they are aiming at is the dissolution of the Union. . . . They well know that by slave labor the very propositions which they make can never be realized; yet when we show these things, they cry out, " 'Oh, Cotton is King!' " (quoted in Helper, pp. 206-207). An observation of Sir Horace Plunkett with respect to Irish leaders is peculiarly applicable here, if Irish nationalism be understood as paralleling true Southern economic needs:" . . . I always felt that an Irish night in the House of Commons was one of the strangest and most pathetic of spectacles. There were the veterans of the Irish party hardened by a hundred fights, ranging from Venezuela to the Soudan in search of battlefields, making allies of every kind of foreign potentate, from President Cleveland to the Mahdi, from Mr. Kruder, to the Akhoom of Swat, but looking with suspicion upon every symptom of an independent national movement in Ireland; masters of the language of hate and scorn, yet mocked by inevitable and eternal failure; winners of victories that turn to dust and ashes, devoted to their country, yet, from ignorance of the real source of the malady, ever widening the gaping wound through which its life-blood flows. . . . Irishmen have been long in realizing that . . . there are battles for Ireland to be fought and won in Ireland" (p. 91 ff.).

        The bias of these last ante-bellum years, lashed to passion by a guilty sectional conscience, or made more wild by the lack of any connected thinking, precluded even the possibility of industrialism. When a gambler on the verge of ruin is desperately playing his last cards he has no time to reflect on past errors of judgment, and no inclination to think of better methods than the fortunes of chance by which to repair a pocket that likely momentarily will be emptied.90

        90 " . . . the Irish mind has been in regard to economics, politics, and even some phases of religious influence, a mind warped and diseased, deprived of good nutrition and fed on fancies or fictions, out of which no genuine growth, industrial or other was possible" (Plunkett, pp. 122-123).

        91 At the height of this period Helper wrote: " . . . the stupid and sequacious masses, the white victims of slavery . . . believe, whatever the slaveholders tell them; and thus it is that they are cajoled into the notion that they are the freest, happiest and most intelligent people in the world, and are taught to look with prejudice and disapprobation upon every new principle or progressive movement. Thus it is that the South, woefully inert and inventionless, has lagged behind the North, and is now weltering in the cesspool of ignorance and degradation" (pp. 44-45. Cf. Page, pp. 22-23).

        Industrialism and the growth of cities are closely connected, yet in the decade of the fifties the advance in population of representative Southern cities was tardy as contrasted with the North and West.92

        92 Ingle, pp. 14-15.

        It has been noticed earlier that before the war even agriculture was carried on with the roughest, least efficient tools, such as the "scooter," the "bull-tongue," the scraper, the sweep and hoe.93

        93 Cf. Hammond, pp. 77-78. Cf. George, pp. 522-523.

the farm or in the home rather than in mechanical pursuits, thus arguing against any considerable industrial tradition or stirrings before that date.94

        94 Under date of Nov. 14, 1882, the patent for a loom shuttle was issued to D. A. Willbanks, High Shoals, Ga., but this is the only invention connected with cotton manufacturing revealed by a search of patent lists for many weeks (Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Nov. 18, 1882). Typical lists of patents issued in the same year to Southerners show: cultivator, saw gin filing machine, vehicle wheel, quilting attachment for sewing machines, rotary engine, couch, combined cotton-planter and fertilizer-distributor, grate feeder, paint, devices for holding the fingers in writing, hoe, animal trap, bottle washer, automatic fly can, spoke socket, cotton chopper, coffee roaster, revolving plow, bread cutter, etc. (ibid., Sept. 26, 1882, and Nov. 4, 1882).

        Gregg warned the South that as surely as she separated from the Union, she would find herself economically unequipped to maintain her position. His words were realized with bitter force. The trial of the war showed how far industry had been neglected. It tore away in an instant a veil of fiction, and showed deplorable fact beneath. Not even the immediate needs of an army, in munitions and ordnance, could be met within the South. Clothing for soldiery and people was lacking, shipyards were small; transportation was insufficient. When cotton could no longer bring in the manufactures of others, the South was left without essentials.95

        95 "The story of manufactures in the South from 1860 to 1865 is a record of the efforts of a people, deprived in large measure of the materials that satisfy their needs, to supply themselves without previous preparation with the equipment of war and the resources of peace" (Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. v, pp. 330-331). Cf. Scherer, p. 260, note; R. D. Stewart, "Firearms of the Confederacy," in Magazine of Antique Firearms, Dec., 1911; Tompkins, Tariff, p. 5; Thompson, p. 55; ibid., p. 44. It is significant that the exigency was met only by leaning heavily upon domestic household production. See above, p. 35.

        It has been seen how lacking was the ante-bellum South in any industrial character, and how some tendencies in this direction, showing themselves in the years just before the outbreak of conflict, were choked off or perverted by political motive in the rapidly growing hostility to the North. The Civil War, which brought into glaring view the absence of Southern economic self-sufficiency, cleared the

fevered, suffocating atmosphere like an electric storm. Misconceived sectional political ambition and fierce protest had ridden to a fall; talent and energy theretofore absorbed to such ends were freed for wholesome introspection and material upbuilding. The Civil War set at rest the political inconclusiveness of the Union, which had operated so harmfully for the South. The political bee, which had been encouraged to buzz in the Southern bonnet by the planter particularism, was silenced.96

        96 Southerners "now renewed once and for all time their allegiance to the Union which had up to that time been an experiment, a government of uncertain powers" (Dodd, Expansion and Conflict, p. 328).

        97 "The planter culture, the semi-feudalism of the 'old South' was annihilated, while the industrial and financial system of the East was triumphant. . . . the east was the mistress of the United States, and the social and economic ideals of that section were to be stamped permanently upon the country" (ibid., p. 328. On the non-industrial quality of the ante-bellum South, see also ibid., pp. 214-215). After emancipation, "the Southern people felt themselves in the throes of an economic revolution leading to a future of diversified industries. The old sentiment in favor of agriculture survived; but faith in it as the sole support of a nation was disappearing. The wealth and power which the North had derived from manufactures was better appreciated" (Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. vi, p. 254).

        With the removal of political obsession vanished its cohort, slavery; slavery gone, it not only became apparent that the South had to change tactics, but that it could change tactics. Thus practical pointings were not more powerful than mental consequents--not just the slaves, but the South as a whole was emancipated.98

        98 As will be seen later, new opportunities and duties did not break on the South with full force at first. What the war made possible, however, is seen in the following striking statement of a Southern periodical some years afterward: " . . . it has been a very common thing . . . we all know, for one generation after another in southern cities . . . to beguile the monotony of their humdrum life with rosy day-dreams of a far-off greatness that has been always coming but has never come. At last, however, since the annihilation of the institution of slavery, the new awakening of the world under the intelligent energies of an age of unprecedented progress, the delusive mirage now disappears; and the desert of hope in the South begins truly to grow green with . . . a harvest that is really ripening before the impoverished people who have so long been looking for it and have been so drearily disappointed. . . . At last we know that the South need no longer be nodding, and dreaming, and dropping, over the faded hopes that have for ages attended her traditions; but, under the auspices of a new order of things, that her people have to go on only a little further with the same heroic endurance and the same brave energies now characterizing them, to realize in all its fullness and all its force the great established and imperishable fact that the old Slave States of the Union--themselves emancipated from the industrial incubus of an institution which contracted their spirit of enterprise, enfeebled their energies, and smothered all their industries except that of agriculture,--are now at last standing straight and strong, with a cheering consciousness of their native power in the bounties God has given them. . . . " (Industrial South, Richmond, quoted in Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Mfgrs. Record, June 17, 1882). Cf. Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. vi, p. 254, and Grady, p. 270. Tompkins said of one community now noted for its manufactures, "The effect of emancipation upon all classes of industrial life was immediate and revolutionary," and attributed the interest in factories chiefly to abolition of slavery (History of Mecklenburg, vol. i, p. 150. Cf. ibid., pp. 151, 194-196).

        It will be seen in a later chapter, in examining the widespread building of cotton mills, how completely the South was altered in economic outlook after the Civil War. Not the least satisfactory evidence of this changed character is in the frank avowal of it by Southerners on every hand. The war was in Southern economic history a watershed. In 1882 a publisher in the heart of the South could say: "The old sectional spirit is dying out. You can find few men now who hold the narrow views of former years."99

        99 Patrick Walsh, of Augusta Chronicle, quoted in Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, Sept. 30, 1882.

        The newness of cotton manufacture, as of industry generally, to the post-bellum South is evidenced in the type of enterprisers who entered the field when its opportunities were understood. There were few experienced men upon whom to rely; it is safe to say that after the war more of the men projecting cotton mills came from any one of the accustomed callings of agriculture, commerce and the professions than from industry.100

        100 See Goldsmith, pp. 7-8; Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. vi, pp. 266-267; Tompkins, Cotton Mill, Commercial Features, p. 180; and the present writer, in Manufacturer's Record, Baltimore, May 10, 1917.

as DeBow, hammering away in his Review for railways, cotton manufactures and direct trade with Europe, were pitifully in the minority. After the war, such adherents of the old order as Bledsoe ridiculed industrialism in vain; warnings against making the "New South" only another North made small appeal to thinking men who cherished precisely this ambition.101

        101 See Dodd, in South in Building of Nation, vol. vi, p. 546. For an excellent account of post-bellum activity as contrasted with antebellum quiescence, see Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg, vol. i, pp. 150-151, 194-196; Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. vi, pp. 262-263.

        How great is the temptation to conceive and attempt to carry through political and social reforms which are really contingent upon economic reorganization, is nowhere more clearly seen than in the period of Reconstruction in the South. These years, filled with the clamor of jealousy and vindictiveness and hurt and passion and greed needed so much of wisdom and patience and, above all, work. Fortunately, economic processes by some magic can usually, however uncertainly, go forward in spite of every political hindrance; the South, if hearing with one ear insults from without, listened with the other to voices from within. The degree of distraction and torment of Reconstruction testifies to the strength of purpose with which the South attended to her own best promptings. It may even be held, perhaps, that Reconstruction, in a certain point of view, was of positive assistance in nurturing the mind for industrial beginnings. There was no question but that the South was exhausted and was being drained of all but self-respect; she was humbled beyond compassion. Former slaves were apparently becoming masters. As a participant in nationality, in appreciation of broad social policies, the South knew that she had made a terrible failure. The fierce pride of the first war years had waned into the hopeless, dogged resistance of the days before Appomattox and flickered out in the degradation that followed. During Reconstruction the South, like a man thrown into prison, had time to reflect on past sins. Though perhaps it was not admitted in word,

it was soon to be shown in deed that the South understood the part that slavery had played. A new course must surely thenceforth be adopted. In Reconstruction the South found itself. Not without the material assistance and more generous view that came through agency of Northern men who in this period learned to know the industrial opportunities of the section and were willing to contribute toward its development, it was still primarily a change of heart which the South experienced. In the face of a freed negro population, the idea of work first seriously presented itself to the Southern white mind.

        Lack of tangible evidences of this psychological change should not hinder understanding of its presence. During Reconstruction little that was practical could be done, but how earnestly the South had been introspecting and planning is splendidly apparent in the suddenness and vigor with which industrial development commenced once impediments were removed.102

        102 Mr. Clark has well called Reconstruction "a germinal period for manufactures." For a sympathetic interpretation of the meaning of Reconstruction years, see Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. vi, pp. 254-255, 262-263, 265-266. Grady wrote in 1889, speaking principally of the period of Reconstruction: "For twenty-five years the industrial forces of the South have been at work under the surface. Making little show, experimenting, working out new ways, peering about with the lamp of experience barely lit, digging, delving, struggling, until at last the day has come, and independence is proclaimed. Now watch the change take place with almost comical swiftness" (p. 270). One cannot but second the appeal of Professor Sioussat: "The political history of reconstruction has been narrated from many points of view, . . . but the vast social and economic changes, which beginning in the reconstruction time are still in progress, usually receive in our text-books less attention. Our girls and boys study carefully the work of the Gracchi, the organization of the medieval manor . . . and the condition of the peasants in France before the revolution. Is it not possible to awaken an intelligent interest in the tasks with which emancipation and the industrial revolution have confronted the people of the South?" (p. 223).

        It will be seen later that no agency bore a larger part in the rise of cotton mills in the South than the News and Courier, of Charleston. It is therefore important to know that, according to a statement made by the paper in 1880, on the very eve of the great development, its philosophy of

manufactures had been conceived in the thick of Reconstruction. "Ten years ago," it was said, "The News and Courier formulated what is now an accepted truth, in declaring that the remedy for commercial distress in the North and the secret of sure fortune in the South was to bring the mills to the cotton." The thought was not balked by the small success of ante-bellum factories, one of which, established in Charleston long before the war, was at the date of this writing "in the irony of fate, the City Alms-House"; nor was it unassisted by the presence of men in the State "who understood that large profits could be made by well-managed cotton factories." There were at the close of the conflict such mills as Graniteville and Batesville which were gaining reputation, and another important venture was being projected. Around these a body of thought, favorable to manufactures, and new to the South, grew up, and "the expectation of profit, which in those days had something of a theoretical basis," was by 1880 able to stand upon "a solid foundation, supported by indisputable and convincing facts. . . . "103

        103 Feb. 10, 1880. A South Carolinian, reminded of the cotton mill boom of the early eighties, led by the press, said "the South had begun to develop and revive before 1880. The papers probably stressed a program which they had already seen started" (M. L. Bonham, interview, Anderson, S. C., Sept. 10, 1916). "No appreciable break occurred in the continuity of cotton manufactures in the South, in spite of the mills destroyed or closed by the war. Before 1870 several of the ruined factories had been rebuilt, and long prior to that others had resumed operations. . . . In 1868 . . . there were sixty-nine mills . . . in operation south of the Ohio and Potomac. . . . By 1870 Southern mill owners were confident they could make yarn five cents a pound cheaper than the Northern factories" (Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. vi, pp. 254-255). Cf. ibid., pp. 262-263. The News and Courier declared that "nothing did more to show the practical advantages of a cotton producing State in this matter than the calculation made and published a number of years ago by the President of the Saluda Factory, which showed by actual figures that South Carolina mills could sell ordinary yarns in New York at the price which it cost the mills in New England to make these yarns, and still realize a considerable profit" (ibid.). See a list of mills in operation in South Carolina two years after the war, published in an almanac of Joseph Walker, Charleston, quoted in Kohn, Cotton Mills of South Carolina, p. 19. With reference to the fifteen years following the war, see Thompson, p. 59 ff. For a sketch of the career of H. P. Hammett, typical of the South Carolinians who after the war understood that a profit could be made from well-managed cotton mills, and who in the sixties and seventies was mayor of Greenville, a member of the House of Representatives, a railroad president and mill builder, see Tompkins, Cotton Mill, Commercial Features, pp. 189-190. Renewal of cotton manufacturing in the South closely following disappearance of slavery was generally on old lines and with old machinery, but Hammett's Piedmont Factory was "designed, built and equipped after strictly modern plans" (ibid.).

        We may leave now the period of Reconstruction, with its formative influences, and come to the evidence bespeaking material proof of industrial beginnings after political hindrances were removed, economic strength was being regained and the South could concentrate on its task of manufactures.104

        104 "While some retrospect is necessary [in studying the history of the New South] the period . . . covered is principally that which began with the close of the reconstruction era, at the time when the South was permitted once more to exercise self-government, and when some progress had been made toward repairing the economic losses of the war" (Sioussat, pp. 223, 228). Cf. Tompkins, Tariff, p. 3.

        There is every reason for selecting the year 1880 as the beginning of cotton manufacturing development in the South. Negatively, foregoing pages have shown that it did not exist, in a proper sense, earlier. Remaining parts of this study will exhibit very positive evidences of alertness and progress after that date. Though there are material bases for grounding the genesis in the year 1880, it is not meant to insist dogmatically upon this precise point of time.

Certainly, however, much in the way of convenience would be sacrificed by choosing 1879 or 1881. Writers touching the subject, whether careful students or casual commentators, have very generally selected this date as the initiation of the cotton mill era.105

        105 "The scope of the history of Southern progress along industrial lines is embraced mostly within the last twenty-five years" (T. C. Guthrie, in Proceedings, 7th Annual Convention, Southern Cotton Spinners' Assn., 1903, p. 44). See this and following pages for an extraordinarily good interpretation of stages antecedent to the rise of the mills. The suddenness with which development began is indicated: "If some soothsayer . . . twenty-five years ago . . . had essayed to predict what the South would accomplish in industrial development . . . and particularly in cotton manufacturing; if he had foretold the hundreds of millions of capital that would be invested; the number of mills; the number of spindles; . . . the quantity of cotton consumed each year; the number of operatives; the value of the annual output--if he had prophesied concerning the meeting here today, the capital, labor, values and territory represented here, he would have been set down as a dreamer of dreams." Another speaker at the same convention referred to slavery as turning back the clock of progress, which, however, started ticking off industrial advance after 1880 (Averill, ibid., pp. 123-124). Noticing the decrease in price of cotton from 1870 to 1879 from 23 to 10 cents, the growing impatience with unreliable freed negroes, the movement of people of means to the cities and willingness to invest in other things than mortgages, Mr. Thompson assumed the same date of commencement (p. 59 ff.). Cf. E. C. Brooks, Story of Cotton, p. 215. Professor Brooks prefers 1880 as the date of the Southern economic renaissance (interview, Durham, N. C., Sept. 18, 1916), and his Story of Cotton shows this clearly, as, e.g., "It was in 1880 . . . that the Southern states turned seriously to manufacturing cotton" (p. 261); he gives a table from which he says "It is apparent . . . that the real factory life in the South dates from 1880 . . . ;" " . . . a new era started in the South about 1880 . . . " (p. 257); "The whole civilization of the South had been overturned, . . . a new era in regard to the value of skilled labor and personal worth was taking the place of the old notions . . . and we have the beginning of the factory system in the South" (pp. 255-256). Mr. Goldsmith calls the year 1880 "epoch-marking" and declares it "marks the turning point in the development of modern cotton factories in the South. . . . A new era dawned" (pp. 4-5). Tompkins related the third period in Southern population history to "the industrial expansion which grew from the business revival . . . following the war," and quoted figures from 1880 (History of Mecklenburg, vol. 1, p. 197). Murphy put stress upon a psychological reversal which argued industrialism: "About the year 1880 the long-waited change begins. By 1890 the industrial revival is in evident progress. By 1900 the South had entered upon one of the most remarkable periods of economic development to be found in the history of the modern industrial world" (pp. 101-102). "From the ashes and ruins left by the war a 'new South' has emerged. Between the cessation of hostilities and the beginning of this development, a period of fifteen years, the South had slowly recovered from the losses which it had suffered. . . . The cotton manufacturing industry has grown up in the South . . . since 1880" (Copeland, pp. 32, 34). "The revolution, . . . the evolution on the 'double quick,' began about 1880 in South Carolina. . . . " (Kohn, Cotton Mills of S. C., p. 20). Cf. ibid., pp. 18-19. "One of the most remarkable features in the industrial history of the Southern States has been the phenomenal growth of cotton manufactures there . . . ; from 1880-1890 the number of spindles increased twofold . . . whilst in the following decade the growth was still greater. . . . " (T. W. Uttley, Cotton Spinning and Manufacturing in the United States of America, p. 43). This selection of 1880 is by an English student. Some references far from studied are especially confirmatory; often a painter will half close his eyes to discern tone values: "United States Census figures show that since 1880 the consumption of cotton in mills in the cotton growing states has increased 1,502 per cent. . . . " (Advertisement of Southern Railway in Textile Manufacturer, Charlotte, N. C., Aug. 19, 1915). "In other words, since 1880 the investment in Southern cotton mills has increased from less than fifteen million dollars to more than three hundred and fifty million dollars" (John A. Law, in Proceedings, Robert Morris Club, National Association of Credit Men, 1916, pp. 18-19). Cf. Henry D. Phillips, in The South Mobilizing for Social Service, p. 566; Hart, pp. 224, 232, 242. "It will be seen that the South has been taking stock since 1880, and that economic forces and influences are now better understood than ever before . . . " (Dodd, in South in Building of Nation, vol. vi, p. 550). "Mills were established in Spartanburg County first in 1879 and 1880 in numbers. About these years was the first great activity. The County was crushed before 1879. Before 1876 there was no capital, and the domination of the carpet bag government" (Cleveland, int., Spartanburg). For a looser statement, hardly to be taken in contradiction, see Tompkins, Cotton Mill, Commercial Features, preface. The year 1880 marks not only the beginnings of cotton manufacturing, but was signalized by recovery or new enterprise in other directions. Ante-bellum cotton production of over 5,000,000 bales had been reached again (Sioussat, p. 227, and News and Observer, Raleigh, N. C., Sept. 15, 1880); Tennessee and Alabama boom towns, resting on hopes of iron and steel manufacture, came a little later (Sioussat, ibid.); railroad development took its rise (Hart, p. 227); " . . . it was not until amost 1880 that the public-school idea was accepted as the best solution of the educational problem" (U. S. Bureau of Education, Negro Education, 1917); furniture and vehicle factories appeared in the upland, hardwood sections (Brooks, p. 217); agricultural method and rural life began undergoing reorganization and betterment (ibid., pp. 221-222); public interest in cotton seed oil manufacture started with 1882 (Tompkins, Cotton and Cotton Oil, pp. 210, 214); right of suffrage was withdrawn from illiterate whites and negroes (ibid., p. 64); as to good roads, see Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg, vol. ii, p. 213; the speculation of 1879 was held to have set in motion European and American spindles (Commercial and Financial Chronicle, quoted in News and Courier, Charleston, Sept. 12, 1881); "The cotton-manufacturing industry in almost every part of the world has continued to prosper during the past twelve months" (Financial and Commercial Chronicle, quoted in Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Sept. 9, 1882); " . . . the sudden and wonderful revival of business which took place in the republic during the last half of 1879 . . . had the effect of withdrawing us from the foreign markets to supply our home demands" (American Rail and Export Journal, quoted in ibid., Aug. 26, 1882).

        Innumerable evidences of the newness of the South to cotton manufacture in 1880 crop out, making it clear that united building of mills cannot be placed before that date.

In this year only one establishment in South Carolina was located within the corporate limits of a city.106

        106 J. K. Blackman, The Cotton Mills of South Carolina, p. 13.

        107 See as to Clement Attachment, Daily Constitution, Atlanta, Jan. 23, 1880.

        108 In connection with the Glendale Factory, D. E. Converse & Co. operated a flouring mill, several gins, a saw and planing mill, and a wool carding mill in which upwards of 10,000 pounds of wool was prepared for the country people (Blackman, p. 10).

        109 See especially, however, correspondence signed "Local," in News and Observer, Raleigh, N. C., Nov. 21, 1880, and quotations from New York Herald and Washington Post in News and Courier, Charleston, March 8, 1881.

        The panic of 1873 and the following depression may be considered alone sufficient cause for the failure of these years to show more industrial progress in the South.

        From the combined causes of war, paper money, and scarcity of cotton, the price of the staple and of manufacturing machinery soared to monstrous figures, and did not return again to the level of 1860 until about 1880.110

        110 U. S. Census of Manufactures, 1880, "Cotton Manufacture,"

        In a list of the thirty cities having the largest gross manufacturing

product, the census of 1880 enumerated none in the South, unless Baltimore and St. Louis be counted, and in neither of these did cotton manufacture rank with their six principal industries.111

        111 "Remarks on the Statistics of Manufactures," p. xxvii.

        Census figures, inconclusive when examined for particular aspects of the history of the cotton manufacture, show strikingly, when taken for a considerable period, that the Southern industry had its rise in 1880. The following table, covering the years 1850 to 1900 inclusive, gives the course of the mills of the South as exhibited in the most salient features:112

        112 U. S. Census of Manufactures, 1900, "Cotton Manufactures," p. 57. These figures, strictly taken, indicate the decade, rather than the year, of commencement of striking growth. Comments in the census and other evidence, however, fill in the outline here presented.

        

Year	Estab.	Capital	Operatives	Spin.	Looms	Lbs. Cotton
1900	401	$124,596,874	97,559	4,299,988	110,015	707,842,111
1890	239	53,821,303	36,415	1,554,000	36,266	250,837,646
1880	161	17,375,897	16,741	542,048	11,898	84,528,757
1870	151	11,088,315	10,173	327,871	6,256	34,351,195
1860	165	9,840,221	10,152	298,551	8,789	45,786,510
1850	166	7,256,056	10,043	--	--	--

        That 1880 was the date of commencement, clearly seen in this tabulation, is also interestingly apparent in interpretations of the figures brought out in successive census reports. No better picture of the way in which the Southern development broke on the national consciousness can be had than by a glance at some of these comments seriatim.

        As has been said, up to 1880 the Southern industry had evidenced no extraordinary or convincing advance. It is natural, therefore, to find the census of this year remarking on the degree of Southern growth merely as an extension of the manufacture, and classing the Southern mills with some new ones in the West.113

        113 "The cotton manufacture is almost monopolized by New England, Massachusetts alone producing to the value of $74,780,835. The other New England states produce in the aggregate about as much more. . . . " And in the list of States producing in excess of $2,000,000 each are mentioned Georgia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina (U. S. Census of Manufactures, 1880, "Remarks on the Statistics of Manufactures," by Francis A. Walker, pp. xix-xx). Two obvious advantages of Southern mills seemed to be sufficient cause for greater percentage of increase in that section than in other sections. ". . . tables indicate the rapid extension of the cotton manufacture to the southern states, where the cotton is at hand and labor is much cheaper than at the north." Southern spindles increased from 1870 to 1880 by 65 + per cent, in New England 57 per cent, in the Middle States 11 + per cent, in the Western States 46 + per cent, and in the whole country 49 + per cent. "It will be seen that the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota have been added to the list of cotton manufacturing states since 1870" (ibid., "The Factory System of the United States," by Carroll D. Wright, p. 16). "After the success of the power loom the cotton manufacture took rapid strides. . . . Factories sprung up on all the streams of Yorkshire and Lancashire, . . . while in this country the activity of the promoters . . . won cities from barren pastures. They erected Lowell, Lawrence, Holyoke, Fall River . . . and now in this generation the industry is taking root upon the banks of Southern streams" (ibid., p. 8).

        As will be seen later, Edward Atkinson, of Boston, had much to do with rousing the South to economic activity. However, he admitted Southern industrial prospects only when he could not urge a superior advantage in New England or when he knew that to do otherwise would be futile. His comments in the consus of 1880 are interestingly indicative of his frame of mind. Dwelling on the new through rail connections in this country, he computed in poundcents the saving of New England over Lancashire in raw cotton; recognizing that this argument of relative proximity to cotton fields proved too much, applying with greater force to the Southern States, he was obliged to say that "If Georgia has twice the advantage over Lancashire that New England now possesses, it will only be the fault of the people of Georgia if they do not reap the benefit of it."114

        114 U. S. Census of Manufactures, 1880, "The Cotton Manufacture," p. 12. Cf. p. 13.

which were possessed by New England; that the lowest cost of production existed where wages were highest.115

        115 Ibid., p. 14.

        He was fond of trying to center the attention of the South on the "preparation" of cotton rather than on its manufacture. Thus he declared that ginning, which must be carried on among the plantations, "is the most important department in the whole series of operations to which the cotton fiber must be subjected; and as yet there has been less of science and art . . . applied to this department than to any other." He exhibited in much detail, on the basis of a private investigation made before the census year, the careless and wasteful way in which cotton was handled in the Southern gins and "screws," but was obliged to admit that by 1883, when his report was transmitted, "the old methods, by which the cotton has been depreciated after it had been picked, are rapidly going out of use." This was partly by agency of the Atlanta cotton exposition of 1881, in which he had been a prime mover, and which it is clear he hoped might direct efforts increasingly to the growing of the staple in the uplands, and the utilization of seed for its oil and food substances.116

        116 Ibid., p. 4 ff.

        The position taken in this study, that the Southern cotton manufacturing development really began in 1880, receives striking justification in the comments on the statistics of the industry by Edward Stanwood in the census of 1890. In the figures collected in this year the Southern development since 1880, as contrasted with the previous record of the section, and as compared with the proportionate advance of other seats of the manufacture, was too apparent to be accorded other than frank avowal, leading to speculation as to chances of the rest of the country in maintaining accustomed superiority. "The geographical distribution of the cotton manufacturing industry is an interesting study," Stanwood said, "and it is more especially so at the present time by the fact that during the last ten years a change has been taking place, which, if it should continue, will become

highly important." He recited that from the beginning New England had been chief in the industry, in 1840 having 70 per cent of the spinning machinery, in 1860 (spindles were not taken in 1850) 74 per cent, 77 per cent in 1870, and 81 per cent in 1880. The 1890 census, however, showed for New England a drop to 76 per cent. In the face of this decrease, he enlarged on the steadiness of concentration in certain New England districts and the success with which Massachusetts alone had maintained its percentage of spindleage increase. But, in spite of having added 2,000,000 spindles, New England was a relative loser by nearly 5 per cent, and for the first time in the census occurs the heading "Growth in the South." And it is declared:

        In considering the geographical distribution of the cotton manufacturing industry the most important fact is the extraordinary rate of its growth in the South during the past decade. For a great many years, probably ever since the cultivation of the cotton plant in the South Atlantic states had a beginning, domestic spinning and weaving of coarse cotton fabrics has been a common fact in the household economy of that part of the country. Here and there small factories were established for the production of heavy fabrics. It is only in the period since the close of the civil war that mills have been erected in the South for the purpose of entering the general market of the country with their merchandise, and almost all the progress made in this direction has been effected since 1880.

        It was remarked that the 1880 census showed for all the States south of the District of Columbia, only 542,048 spindles, and that had all these been concentrated in one State it would have raised that State only to seventh place in point of production capacity. "A remarkable development of manufacturing enterprise in the South, based on the nearness of supplies of raw material, which began ten years ago, had no more reasonable field in which to exercise itself than that of cotton spinning. New mills sprang up all over the region, but particularly in the states of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia." In 1890 these three States reported 75 more establishments than in 1880, but even this did not indicate the increase, because some antiquated mills had ceased operation forever, and the average number of spindles to the mill had advanced nearly 73 per cent.

        Quite as large proportionate increase had taken place in other Southern States; markets previously in exclusive possession of Northern mills had been occupied by Southern products, finer goods were being manufactured and the new mills were "for the most part equipped with the latest and most improved machinery." Outstanding Southern advantages were partially offset by disadvantages, "some of which time and experience will cause to disappear," and, in place of Atkinson's determined preference for New England, it was declared that "It can not be doubted that the development of this industry in the cotton-raising states is based upon sound commercial reasons, and that it is destined to continue." Increase of manufacturing in the Middle States had been at a slower rate than in any other part of the country, and the development in the West, while exhibiting a good rate of advance, was too small to call for extended notice. While it was recognized that the future growth of the industry, considered geographically, depended upon a variety of factors--cheapness of transportation of raw cotton, nearness to markets for finished goods, economy of power, supply of adaptable labor, spirit of State laws, and, perhaps, degree of humidity--the South was not held to be militated against in any of these respects.117

        117 U. S. Census of Manufactures, 1890, "Cotton Manufacture," by Edward Stanwood, pp. 171-172. As will later appear, a good deal had been made of the alleged disadvantage of the South in not having a sufficiently humid climate, but Stanwood showed that the superiority possessed in this particular by the British Isles had been overcome in American mills through use of artificial humidifiers. The whole of his estimate in this census report is interesting as indicating how the southern development was breaking on the national consciousness; special New England localities were given praise, but the rise of the South as a cotton manufacturing section held prominent place in the writer's thought. In addition to the percentage increases in spindles, it is important to notice that in looms, representing completer commencement of capture of the industry, the percentage advance in the United States was 43, in the Middle States 28, Western States 85, New England 35, and in the Southern States was 204 (ibid., p. 171).

        By the time Stanwood came to analyze the figures of cotton manufacture for the 1900 census, events had further

clarified his thought.118

        118 U. S. Census of Manufactures, 1900, Cotton Manufactures, pp. 28-29.

        119 Decrease in number of establishments in New England and the Middle States was said to be more apparent than real, by reason of consolidation of plants and changes in census classification. The Western States were shown to work under disadvantages which dismissed them from further solicitude. Cf. ibid., p. 48.

        "The growth of the industry in the South is the one great fact in its history during the past ten years." From 1880 to 1890 the number of establishments advanced 48.4 per cent, from the latter date to 1900 the increase was 67.4 per cent, and the size of mills had easily kept pace. The interpretation of the growth of the Southern industry represents one of the earliest conscious attempts at scrutiny with desire to analyze--Southern cotton manufacture had become not only a fact, but a fact to be studied, appreciated, understood.120

        120 "Speaking broadly, the cotton manufacturing industry did not exist in the South before the Civil War, and it existed on only the most restricted scale before 1880. . . . It is probably not an exaggeration to say that prior to 1880 there was not a mill south of the latitude of Washington that would be classed as an efficient modern cotton factory, even according to the standard of that time. Before the Civil War the people of the South were almost exclusively engaged in agricultural pursuits. After the war closed it was some years before the people had recovered sufficiently from the disaster to undertake manufacturing." Extended reference to the effects of the Atlanta cotton exposition, the character of the cotton mill campaign, and the lessons learned in matters of machinery will be noticed in another place. It was remarked that the South was making experiments of value to the whole industry, the first and, for some time, the only electrically operated factory being in that section. Instead of the former speculation as to the permanence of Southern mills, it was declared that "The fact that after a phenomenal growth during more than twenty years the expansion of old mills and the erection of new ones are still going on in the South is ample proof of the success of the enterprise," and the steady increase in spindles is given by years.

        Comments on returns in the 1910 census showed the percentages

of increase in the leading Southern States to be decidedly greater than those in Northern States, but South was merged with North as going to make up the nearly exclusive seat of the industry, the East. Records of individual Southern States are intermixed with those of States of New England, the former having come into proper comparison with the latter in point of absolute importance.121

        121 U. S. Census of Manufactures, "Cotton Manufactures," pp. 38-39.

        Census reports uncovered fully, after a period of time, facts which were in part contemporaneously recognized. The following chapter will exhibit this proclaiming of a new day in the South of 1880 in detail; but the whole study really is a justification of the assertion that this date ushered in industrialism. The consciousness of a new economic era, arising in the mind of a theretofore sluggish and perverse South, is the best evidence of the beginning of manufacturing for the very good reason, as will presently appear, that expression of this consciousness went far to create the development.

        Preliminary notice of a Charleston newspaper's trade review covering months in 1880 and 1881 said: "In the Annual Review will be exhibited the course and strength of the manufacturing revival in South Carolina, with especial reference, of course, to the progress of manufactures in Charleston."122

        122 News and Courier, Aug. 16, 1881.

        123 Ibid., Sept. 1, 1881.

        Another paper commented on the desire of a Northern contemporary that New England should take steps to progress into the manufacture of finer grades of cotton goods, since it recognized "the great advance we are about to make at the South."124

        124 The Observer, Raleigh, March 26, 1880.

for the better was sensed. Thus, "The cities of the South are rapidly learning to appreciate the great value of manufacturing industries, and the great development of the last year or two is only a beginning of what may be expected when that whole section throbs with industrial life and activity in the near future."125

        125 Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Mfgrs. Record, Aug. 26, 1882. " . . . too little heed is given by manufacturers and mechanics to the immediate prospects opened up by what is termed the new departure of the South; . . . there is no possibility that the South can immediately become a section of great manufacturing centres; but it is unquestionable that a combination of present efforts will in time yield important results" (American Machinist, quoted in ibid., July 15, 1882). Cf. ibid., July 15, and, in connection with buying by Southern merchants, Aug. 26, 1882.

        By 1884 the new turn in events was so evident that, in brief retrospect, the date of genesis could be discerned. Of South Carolina it was said: "The State has now recovered the ground that was lost by emancipation, by negro suffrage, by political misrule and official corruption. And the most significant circumstance is that the industrial triumph now proclaimed is mainly the result of the work of four or five years." And a significant point was touched in the observation that "agricultural operations could be carried on with reasonable success, in even the darkest days of strife and misrule, but the undertakings which were dependent on the concentration of capital for their development remained torpid, if not dead, until the return of confidence breathed into them new life and vigor."126

        126 News and Courier, Charleston, Feb. 4, 1884. Giving figures of cotton manufacture, it was said: "In a little more than three years . . . the increase in production was a third more than in the ten years ending in 1880, and the whole production in 1883 was ten times as great as the product in 1860" (ibid.). As to the process of agricultural recuperation, cf. Hammond, p. 166.

        By 1880 one of the oldest Southern cotton manufacturing towns had recovered. In 1865 the Federal army burned 60,000 bales of cotton and all the mills of Columbus. "The very heart of the city was burned out. . . . Within fifteen years the waste places have been rebuilt and industry revived from its very ashes."127

        127 Observer, Raleigh, Sept. 10, 1880.

        Newspaper notice of organization of the Charleston Manufacturing Company in 1881 was headed, "The dawn of a new era," and the same paper, which did so much to bring about cotton manufacturing, often showed how sharply defined was the movement's beginning.128

        128 News and Courier, Charleston, Aug. 1, 1881. Commenting on an address of H. P. Hammett, "Cotton Mills in the South," which was in itself a full exposition which indicated widespread popular inquiry into the subject, it was said that the speaker's own factory "was projected and built before the opening of the Cotton Mill Campaign in the South, and Major Hammett ranks, therefore, as one of the pioneers . . . " (ibid.).

        The 1880 census enabled the South to take stock of its industrial condition as a section and as part of the nation, and furnished a definite basis on which to calculate improvement. Speaking of the increase in manufacture in Augusta, a cotton manufacturer of that city summed up what had been done since the census of 1880, as follows:

        Well,-to particularize, the Sibley Mill has been completed; the King and Goodrich Mills built up entirely since that time. The Summerville, McCoy, Globe and Sterling Mills have all been increased largely, and the Enterprise Factory more than doubled. These increments since the meagre census reports were sent in mean 63,000 new spindles, 2,200 additional looms and about 2,200 fresh hands . . . the increase in cotton manufacturing property alone since the census amounts in Augusta to $300,000.129

        129 Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, Feb. 15, 1883. Nine months earlier a Georgia paper could read in the progress since the census the promise of a time when the South might "spin every pound of cotton made upon her fields" (Columbus Chronicle, quoted in Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Oct. 14, 1882). Cf. Atlanta correspondence of Augusta Chronicle and Constitutionalist, quoted in Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, Feb. 8, 1883, and Augusta Trade Review, Oct., 1884. A special issue of the Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Sept. 2, 1882, denominated "an exponent of the new South," gave statistics of the important features of cotton manufacturing in the South, by States, at that date, indicating that from $15,000,000 to $18,000,000 had been invested in the business since 1880. Cf. Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, March 8, 1883; Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, July 29, 1882.

        It will presently be shown that the Atlanta Exposition of 1881 had much to do with stimulating interest in cotton manufacturing in the South, and in accelerating and broadening

and lending confidence to the "cotton mill campaign." But it was result as well as cause. The rapidity with which the exposition was planned and opened in a small town in the heart of a section unaccustomed to such ventures, and the readiness of response to its appeal cannot be explained except in recognizing that the Southern thought for industry had gone far toward crystallizing. A few years earlier it would have been impossible because the suggestion of such a scheme would have been unmeaning.130

        130 "The Atlanta Exposition, in 1881, was the hopeful and conscious expression of the opening of a new era for Southern industry; . . . consequently, wonderful as has been the growth of this quarter century, it is but the realization of what was even then practically assured by existing attainments and conditions" (Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. vi, p. 280). See editorial giving a summary of Atlanta's prosperity in The Daily Constitution, Jan. 2, 1880. " . . . it was all the work of merely ten months from the time the project was conceived until the exposition was thrown open to the people. It was impossible in that short time, at that remote distance, and in that small city, to do the whole South complete justice. But a knowledge of the South's resources was demanded . . . " (J. W. Ryckman, secretary of the exposition, in Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, June 24, 1882). "The visitors to this [exposition] were convinced that 'an industrial revolution had actually been effected in the South . . . ' " (Hammond, pp. 328-329).

        After Atlanta had had the faith to act host to the first exposition predicated upon belief in the South's industrial future, other places, by entering eagerly into plans for similar undertakings, testified to the awakening. It was even proposed to duplicate the Atlanta Exposition in Boston; this was perhaps a sophisticated suggestion intended to lessen the enthusiasm for the manufacturing of cotton in the South that had been the rather unexpected outcome of the original exhibit.131

        131 See Philadelphia Industrial Review, quoted in Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, June 10, 1882.

        132 See ibid., June 10, Sept. 23, Oct. 7, 21, 1882.

exhibition.133

        133 Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, Feb. 22, 1883.

        The detailed description of the condition of the cotton manufacture in South Carolina, published by the News and Courier in 1880, was evidence of the same consciousness of industrial stirrings as was the Atlanta Exposition.134

        134 "Attempts have been made at different times to show the extent of the cotton manufactures in South Carolina, but until to-day no thorough and complete statement upon that subject has been given to the public" (Blackman, p. 3). Cf. Kohn, Cotton Mills of S. C., p. 20.

        There was abundant recognition outside of the South of the industrial awakening that occurred about 1880 and was made manifest in the Atlanta Exposition. Agreement among Philadelphia cotton manufacturers to shorten production of coarser fabrics was held to be as wise as it was significant, for "the time can not be far distant when all our coarse cottons will be supplied from the cotton belt; and the child is born who will see the great mass of cotton manufacturing in all its diversified branches, carried on where the fleecy staple is cultivated."135

        135 Chicago Herald, quoted in Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, July 29, 1882. A Boston journal struck a generous note that differed from some emanating from New England in an article, "The Drift of Manufacturing": "Another Pittsburgh is growing at Birmingham, Alabama; another Lowell at Augusta; another Lawrence at Columbus. . . . The East has no sole right to the term 'manufacturing'; the drift is Westward and Southward, and is already a larger one than is generally supposed. . . . The time is not far distant when the breeders of domestic strife will be relegated to another clime, or at least to where they will cease attempting to array one set of industries in this great country against another set" (Commercial Bulletin, quoted in ibid., Sept. 23, 1882).

        It naturally took a little time for the reality of the Southern awakening to break upon observers who had hardly expected industrialism from that section.136

        136 "Progress has been made with considerable acceleration as the wisdom of the new order of things became apparent, until now, when it appears that a new state of things has become established" (Miller and Millwright, quoted in Manufacturers' Record, Feb. 22, 1883). After speaking of the local character of ante-bellum mills, the Dry Goods Economist, in 1896, said: "Whatever the expansion of the cotton industries of the South in the years following close upon the war, . . . such progress pales into insignificance when compared with what has taken place almost within the last decade" (Jubilee number, p. 78). Cf. Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, July 29, 1882; Sept. 23, 1882; News and Observer, Raleigh, Oct. 10, 1880; early suggestion of English interest is seen in a quotation from Iron, Philadelphia, in Manufacturers' Record, Feb. 8, 1883; cf. ibid., Dec. 21, 1882.

        Space only remains for bare mention of some objective evidences recommending 1880 as the date to be chosen as that marking the South's industrial awakening. The return to specie payments, bringing confidence to enterprise, showed itself in the veritable boom of the fall of 1879, precipitating events in the South as all over the nation.137

        137 See Commercial and Financial Chronicle, Jan. 10, 1880; Copeland, p. 266; Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. vi, pp. 264-265.

        138 See Observer, Raleigh, Jan. 15, 1880, quotation from Railway Age; ibid., Jan. 8; Baltimore Sun, Jan. 22, 26, Feb. 2, 20, 1880.

        139 News and Courier, Charleston, May 30, 1881.

        Charleston shipbuilders were busy.140

        140 News and Courier, April 13, 1881.

        141 Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg, vol. i, pp. 181-182. Agitation for a special school tax, bringing several unsuccessful elections, during which time the school was suspended, resulted in an overwhelmingly favorable vote only in 1880 (ibid., p. 168). The streets of Charlotte began to be paved (Tompkins, Road Building and Broad Tires, p. 6).

        142 See Blackman, pp. 18-19, and many other references in this pamphlet.

        The economic South was coming rapidly to a national point of view, strikingly signalized in the invitation of business men to Edward Atkinson to address them in the Senate chamber of Georgia in October of 1880.143

        143 On this occasion, called by him (proceed. Southern Cotton Spinners' Assn., 1903) "The first opportunity ever given to a Northern anti-slavery man to speak words of truth and soberness to Southern men," Mr. Atkinson said: "Malignant conditions [of disunion] have passed away. The active and vigorous men born of the new South refuse to be controlled any longer by the Bourbons of that section, and the 'stalwarts' of the North, who dare not trust the principle of liberty to work its first results, are being themselves classed as Bourbons incapable of guiding or directing the true union that now exists in this Nation" (Address at Atlanta, p. 8). See also ibid., p. 12, and John W. Ryckman in author's preface of ibid.

        Cotton goods in 1880 were in brisk demand, their price advancing more rapidly than that of the raw material; in this benefit Southern mills shared.144

        144 See Commercial and Financial Chronicle, Jan. 3, 1880; Baltimore Sun, Jan. 8, 20, 28, 1880; Blackman, p. 15.

        Production of cotton in the South had gradually increased by 1880-1881 to three times the number of bales of 1865-1866,145

        145 Quotation from Bradstreet's, in Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Nov. 4, 1882.

        146 Brooks, p. 209.

        147 Blackman, p. 7.

        148 Quotation from Bradstreet's, in Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Nov. 4, 1882. As to improvements in agricultural implements in the South by 1880, see Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg, vol. i, p. 181; a Georgia community wanted an agricultural implement factory; steam engines were sold for farm use (Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, Nov. 30, 1880).

        Shortly after 1880 the manufacturing development of the South required special spokesmen and interpreters, and brought publications with such an aim, as the Manufacturers' Record of Baltimore, the Industrial South, of Richmond, and Southern Industries, of Nashville, into existence.149

        149 See Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Aug. 5, Nov. 18, 1882; Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, Nov. 23, 1882, Jan. 25, 1883.

        Managers of the New England Manufacturers' and Mechanics' Institute announced in March of 1883 that space in the exhibition to take place in the fall had been applied for by Southern exhibitors.150

        150 Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, March 29, 1883.

        Suggesting something as to the date of commencement of cotton manufacture is the fact that in 1886 South Carolina repealed an act of 1872 exempting from state, county and municipal taxes for ten years capital invested in cotton, woolen and paper mills.151

        151 Clark, in South in Building of Nation, p. 282.

        In the next chapter it will be seen what positive bearing the defeat of the Democratic candidate in the presidential election of 1880 had upon the Southern cotton manufacturing industry. In this place it is only necessary to note that after 1880 Southern political animus never gave itself again to such bitterness against the North, and thus one undoubted obstacle to economic advance was removed.152

        152 See statement of executive committee of Columbia and Lexington Water-Power Company, in News and Courier, Charleston, March 25, 1881.

CHAPTER II
THE RISE OF THE MILLS

        It has been seen how cotton for long years had been hurtful to the South; how it had joined with slavery and secession to bring the disaster of the Civil War; how after humiliating but sobering Reconstruction years the curtain was ready to lift on a new act in which the characters should be chastened in spirit, clarified in thought, and quick to discharge changed rôles. The South by 1880 was ready to be no longer negative, but affirmative; not just the passive resultant of its past, but the conscious builder of its future. From a consequence, the South was to become á cause.1

        1 "There are scores of turning-points" in the history of cotton in America "where, if wisdom had taken the skeins from the hands of prejudice and passion, a righteous and peaceful pattern might have been the result" (Scherer, p. 296). This was a juncture where judgment was to prevail.

        The determination with which the South entered the War was to hold over to receive new application. "The fortitude of the march, the courage of the charge, the heroism of the retreat, the touching sacrifices of the ill-paid and ill-equipped soldier-life--these were to be emphasized and prolonged, when the tattered flag no longer flew, the quick roll of the drum had ceased, and the comradeship of the camp and march was dissolved. From defeat and utter poverty were to be wrought victory and plenty."2

        2 Grady, The New South, p. 166. On the Confederate monument in the busy little city of Anderson, South Carolina, are the words: "And above all let him [the truthful historian] tell with what sub-lime endurance they met defeat, and how in poverty and want, broken in health, but not in spirit, they have recreated the greatness, and made it again the sweetest land on earth. In grateful acknowledgment of their prowess in war, and of their achievements in peace, this monument is erected."

        The South suffered a change of heart. An altered purpose animated its leaders, and gradually but certainly seized upon its rank and file. President Baldwin, of the Louisville

and Nashville Railroad, born in Maryland and for many years resident in New York, and so competent to speak for both sections, declared with force:

        The commercial men of the cotton States fully appreciate the situation. . . . They now see clearly how very little politics have done for them, and seriously turn toward the real "reconstruction" which active trade will inaugurate. . . . All the war issues are dead and buried--except to a few politicians who misrepresent their constituents and merely use the language of the past to give them, personally, . . . prominence. . . . True, we hear a great deal more about the few men who stand forth prominently as the advocates of these dead issues than we do of the thousands of young and energetic Southern men who are building cotton and woolen mills; who are opening mines and starting iron, copper and zinc furnaces, or who are relaying the roads between the Atlantic and the Ohio and the Gulf. These men don't talk, they don't write books, they don't go to the Legislature or to Congress. They speak, trumpet toned, in results. . . . Years have brought time for thought, and compulsory thinking has produced marvellous results. . . . The people of the South have suffered--it is not pertinent whether we regard their sufferings as just or unjust--but they have put aside mourning and are ready for work.3

        3 Quoted from New York Herald, in News and Courier, Charleston, July 11, 1881. "Mills for the weaving of the coarser cotton fabrics are now in successful operation in Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky and several of the Atlantic Coast States, all of which have been built by native labor, mostly with local capital and are managed by Southern men. . . . The class formerly known as 'poor whites' are . . . assimilating with their more fortunate neighbors. They are making good workers in mine and field, good operatives in factories. . . . "

        A Georgian in welcoming South Carolinians to the Atlanta Exposition said of the display that "It comes at a most propitious moment, for the South, in sympathy with the quickening energies which excite the continent, is even now trembling in the initial throes of the mighty industrial revolution that surely awaits her. A great change is evidently about to come upon us. 'In the fabric of thought and of habit' which we have woven for a century we are no longer to dwell, and a new era of progressive enterprise opens before us."4

        4 News and Courier, Charleston, Dec. 27, 1881. " . . . there are 213,157 spindles to Georgia's credit. . . . These are the weapons peace gave us, and right trusty ones they are. . . . The story the spindles tell is one of joy to all, and show (sic) how rapidly we are climbing the hill of prosperity" (Columbus Enquirer, quoted in Daily Constitution, Atlanta, March 9, 1880). Professor Hart has quoted an editorial in a Southern newspaper, presumably of the early eighties, declaring that "the great South . . . is self-contained, and what is more, she is self-possessed, and she has set her face resolutely against the things which will hurt her" (p. 219).

distinction between the English Industrial Revolution and that in the South, namely, that the former was, certainly in its immediate causes, unanticipated, accidental, while the latter was deliberately planned.5

        5 Cf. B. L. Hutchins and A. Harrison, A History of Factory Legislation, pp. 19-20.

        6 News and Courier, Charleston, Jan. 26, 1881.

        Reconstruction governments, under radicals, outsiders and blacks, had attempted a political display through wasteful, ruinous expenditure; it will be seen how different was the program of economic advancement embraced in the "Real Reconstruction" of Southerners come into their own.7

        7 Cf. Dunning, Reconstruction, pp. 205-206. How much earlier reorganization might have come in the South had not the carpet-bag regime been instituted, may be guessed from the frankness with which South Carolina, which so largely led the revival in the eighties, reentered the Union in 1865. The sincerity and dignity of surrender is sufficiently apparent in the speech of Huger, the aged postmaster of Charleston, in seconding the motion nullifying secession, in the constitutional convention following the war. Of South Carolina he said: "She is my mother; I have all my life loved what she loved, and hated what she hated; everything she had I made my own, and every act of hers was my act; as I have had but one hope, to live with her, so now I have but one desire, to die on her soil and be laid in her bosom. If I am wrong in everything else, I know I am right in loving South Carolina,--know I am right in believing that, whatever glory the future may bring our reunited country, it can neither brighten nor tarnish the glory of South Carolina. She has passed through the agony and the bloody sweat; as we now return her to the Federal Union, let every man do his duty bravely before the world, trustfully before God, remembering each man for himself that he is a South-Carolinian. She has been devastated by the invader, reviled by the hireling, mocked by the weak-hearted, but she has accepted the invitation to return,--accepted it in good faith, with the assurance of a word better than a bond; and now, no matter what she gives up, no matter what there is to endure and to forget, let us all do our duty as becomes her children, counting it our chiefest honor to stand by her in evil report as well as in good report, honor alike to live with her and to die with her" (Andrews, The South since the War, pp. 52-53). Orr, deploring quibbles and extenuations, declared: "We must put it in the constitution that slavery is dead, and that we will never attempt to revive it. . . . We seem to forget where we stand; we forget that we made the war and have been beaten; we forget that our conquerors have the right to dictate terms to us. . . . Let us be wise men. Let us strengthen" Jackson's "hands by graceful and ready acquiescence in the results of the war. So shall we strengthen ourselves, and soon bring again to our loved State the blessings of peace and civil rule" (ibid., pp. 61-63). Cf. ibid., p. 94.

arrested in their development by slavery and by war and by the double burden of a sparse population and of an ignorant alien race," Walter Page recognized that "The process that has been going on in the upland South in particular is a process of conscious and natural State-building, constructive at every important step," and working itself out through the two instruments of industry and popular education.8

        8 Rebuilding of Old Commonwealths, p. 139. Grady's plan--"the settlement of the race problem and the development of the material resources of the South"--was nothing different (see Oliver Dyer, Sketch of Grady, in The New South, pp. 76-77). "Mr. Grady's patriotism partook of the quality of his love; although romantic and general, it was also practical and local. . . . It took hold of the . . . condition and interests of the country--of its diversified industries, its agriculture, its manufactures, its commerce, its internal development, its external relations, its education and its religion" (ibid., p. 20). He said in 1889: "The industrial growth of the South in the past ten years has been without precedent or parallel. It has been a great revolution, effected in peace" (New South, p. 191). On Professor Hart's discussion of the comparative wealth of the South and other sections, it may be commented that given the fact of huge potentialities in the South and of an awakened eagerness to develop these, status counts for little; given the loaf, and the leaven working in the loaf, and the most exacting of economists must be satisfied" (see Southern South).

of the civil strife, the blackened granulations of the Augusta Powder Mills flashed and thundered, and when the war was over the mills went down before the ravages of time. . . . To-day, the same spire, with extinguished craters, overlooks the same spot. The same river rolls at its feet; the same hills confront it on the other side. But in place of the scattered walls of war, a massive structure, granite and compact, is reared. In the place of musty explosives of darker days, the purest productions of peace are fed into the present mill, and from its looms will go forth the texture to clothe the people of the land, to weave the white wings of commerce and to float the bunting of the Newer South. The old picture has rolled away--the new one has received a solid setting."9

        9 Chronicle and Constitutionalist, Augusta, Feb. 23. Though four years earlier North Carolina "would not be caught" in the "Yankee money trap" of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, in 1880 it was being asked: "Shall our Commissioner of Agriculture or our State Geologist be . . . subjected to the mortifying . . . task of standing in those grand halls [of the proposed world's fair of 1883] . . . and present the ridiculous farce of representing this . . . State by showing a dump-cart load of rocks?" (News and Observer, Raleigh, Nov. 12, 1880). Cf. ibid., Dec. 2, 1880. The ten "supreme advantages" claimed by Augusta in 1884 were every one economic, the first being its superiority as "a manufacturing center" (Trade Review of Chronicle and Constitutionalist, Oct., 1884).

        One cannot view the passion with which revival was undertaken without realizing how pointed were the lessons taught the South in the war and its aftermath.10

        10 Citing statistics of property losses to South Carolina between 1860 and 1870 and the relative gain to a state such as Rhode Island, Murphy wrote: "Beneath these cold and unresponsive figures there lie what tragedies of suffering, what deep-hidden recurrent pulses of despair, of self-repression, of patience, of silent and solemn will, of self-contest, of ultimate emancipation!" (Present South, p. 101).

eyes open (or hearts open would perhaps be the better expression) could not fail to see manifest improvement--progress even, if you like the word better."11

        11 News and Courier, Charleston, March 24, 1881. Timrod wrote of Charleston:

                         "How know they, these busy gossips, what to thee
                         The ocean and its wanderers may have brought?
                         How know they, in their busy vacancy,
                         With what far aim thy spirit may be fraught?
                         Or that thou dost not bend thee silently
                         Before some great unutterable thought?"

         (Henry Timrod, Poems, Memorial Ed., 1899, p. 172). Professor Sioussat has stressed the significance of the economic readjustment between 1865 and 1880, "a readjustment more fundamentally important than the political events which in large degree overshadowed the less dramatic factors" (History Teacher's Magazine, Sept., 1916, p. 224). Cf. Ingle, p. 5. Declaring right after the war that negro slavery had been hardly more debasing than white slavery, Andrews foresaw that the remaking of the South must reach down to basic tasks: "That is the best plan which proposes to do most for the common people" (pp. 387-388). Cf. Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. vi, p. 254.

        As the movement proceeded from introspection, the very genius of "Real Reconstruction" was self-help. It took courage to begin, but confidence rallied about every sign of genuine performance. Thus it was said that "Every true South Carolinian must rejoice at the . . . energy exhibited by the citizens of Columbia in their management of the Cotton-Mill Campaign. For years they have appeared to depend on somebody else to help them. The Legislature made liberal concessions. No effort was spared to interest Northern capitalists in the splendid water power. . . . But nothing was done. Tired of waiting a number of business men in Columbia took up the matter themselves. They soon found that the citizens generally would sustain them. . . . the city is full of life again. A handsome sum of money has been subscribed already to the capital stock of the Cotton Mill Company. . . . It will be a happy day for the whole State when the hum of a myriad spindles is heard on the banks of the historic Canal."12

        12 "The News and Courier busies itself with every enterprise, big and little, that will turn a dollar's worth of raw material into more than a dollar's worth of manufactures. . . . we confess to a weakness for Columbia, which suffered so sorely at the end of the war. . . . But cotton mills will soon make amends for the vicissitudes and hopelessness of the past . . . " (News and Courier, Charleston, March 19, 1881). Another paper discouraged reliance upon the government for prosperity, and pointed to relief that had come to the West only through self-help: "That government is the best which is not required . . . to pass new laws, leaving to the people the utmost freedom, with full liberty to devote their energies to the improvement of their own condition. . . . We know of no people more favorably situated than North Carolinians are in this respect" (Observer, Raleigh, Jan. 9, 1880). As Ireland in its cooperative agricultural efforts later, the South was experiencing a "combination of economic and human reform" (see Plunkett, pp. 205-206). "There came a different viewpoint," said one informant. "The old South was done away with. The problem was to utilize the thing nearest at hand to support a large portion of our people." And so the North Carolina Board of Agriculture made an investigating trip to New England, and an industrial exhibit was held" (Henry E. Fries, int., Winston-Salem, N. C., Aug. 31, 1916).

        This self-reliance never meant exclusion of assistance from the North or elsewhere; it meant a broadening, not a contracting of view. "Some of that credit which was accorded to the man who caused an additional blade of grass to grow should be given to everyone," whether home or outside enterpriser, "who affords facilities to manufacture an additional boll of cotton. . . . "13

        13 News and Courier, Charleston, June 28, 1881.

        14 News and Observer, Raleigh, Dec. 1, 1880. "South Carolina in 1884," a 60-page pamphlet published by the News and Courier after a comprehensive survey of economic conditions prevailing in each county, shows the strength of this spirit. In descriptive detail it is a valuable photograph of agriculture and industry in the State at that date.

        Even those communities most earnest in social regeneration, and most anxious to forget the past in looking to a saner future, very occasionally slipped back into old ruts, and found in material advancement the means of satisfying spitefulness. Thus an attempt to settle foreigners upon a large tract in eastern Tennessee was commended partly because it would increase congressional representation of the

South and enable it the better to protect itself against "adverse legislation."15

        15 Observer, Raleigh, Aug. 25, 1880. Virginia, never so ardently back of economic recuperation as States to the south, was perhaps hindered by internal dissension over repudiation of part of her debt; the papers at this juncture were filled with political wrangles (cf. Daily Dispatch, Richmond, Feb. 9, March 24, 1880). The proposal to exempt manufacturing plants from taxation, already bringing results further South, could raise protest from the farming interest (cf. ibid., Jan. 14, 27, 1881). Public solicitude over industrial development was far less marked than in the Carolinas and Georgia, partly because of border position of Virginia, partly, perhaps, because there was not the one chief manufacture, cotton, on which to center attention. There was less reliance on home effort, more looking to outside assistance (cf. ibid., March 29, 1880). Mississippi had time for childish vituperation over dead issues. A Wisconsin editor had asked a Mississippi contemporary, "Did you ever read of Appomattox?" He received the reply: "O, Yes! We've read of Appomattox, where a few hungry and ragged thousands surrendered to a man with a million of men under his command. . . . the whole wide world remembers that it required five of your federals to whip one of our confederates. . . . Will you fight for Grant if he should slap a golden crown on his cranium? . . . The last man of you that shoulders a shot-gun in behalf of your gory god will be hunted down like dogs . . . " (quoted in Daily Constitution, Atlanta, Feb. 1, 1880). Cf. a headline in Daily Constitution, Atlanta, April 11, 1880, and colloquies in ibid., March 14, 1880; News and Observer, Raleigh, Dec. 18, 1880; News and Courier, Charleston, June, 1881.

        Once awake, how immediately the South went to work is evidenced in notices proclaiming the new order of things. "The time was when the South was exclusively agricultural in its pursuits, but the past few years have seen factories springing up all over this section. . . . The South is destined at no distant day to not only raise cotton . . . but to manufacture it . . . thus keeping at home all the profits."16

        16 Americus, Ga., Recorder, quoted in Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Oct. 14, 1882.

        17 Cf. Miller and Millwright, quoted in Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, Feb. 22, 1883.

that "As a great fact the system originated in no preconceived plan; on the contrary, it was formed and shaped by the inevitable force of circumstance. . . . The first force which tended to create this system was that of invention. . . . "18

        18 Carroll D. Wright, "The Factory System of the U. S.," in U. S. Census of Manufactures, 1880, p. 1.

        19 Augusta correspondence of Savannah Morning News, July 4, 1882. Cf. News and Observer, Raleigh, Nov. 16, 1880, praising the industrial progress of Augusta.

        20 Cf. News and Courier, Charleston, Dec. 27, 1881. Mr. Edmonds' solicitude on this point has been noticed; cf. Edmonds, p. 1.

        21 W. C. Heath, in Southern Cotton Spinners' Assn., proceed., 1903, p. 49. Post-bellum activity in mill building recalled the fact that years before planters had conceived the advantage in manufacturing, but were deterred by slavery; originality, to be effective, needed to work under a new dispensation. Cf. Gannon, Landowners of South and Industrial Classes of North, p. 6 ff.; Andrews, pp. 224-226.

        Before 1880 the South had worn a veil before her eyes, had been running a temperature that distorted economic perspective, corrupted public judgment. When the veil was torn off and the fever subsided, normal thinking brought frank avowal of the past distemper. The section had woven "rosy day-dreams of a far-off greatness," and been tortured

by a "delusive mirage,"22

        22 Industrial South, quoted in Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, June 17, 1882.

        23 Gannon, Landowners of South and Industrial Classes of North, pp. 6-7.

        To appreciate the strength of the demand for social regeneration, it must be recognized that while cotton manufacturing formed its central purpose, the movement was comprehensive, embracing, in thought if not in deed, many departments of life. Progress along all lines was not simultaneous or equal. It is not hard to see why public education, for example, did not so soon translate desire into realization as did industry. Bread and meat must first be looked to, and the South then could turn to plans which, if more truly fundamental, were still less instantly pressing.24

        24 "I do not . . . suggest that any other agency of . . . economic progress can be more than a very partial substitute for education; but only that, in the peculiar circumstances of Ireland, we must have recourse to supplementary influences which will produce a more immediate effect upon the general life of the present generation while its young people are being educationally developed" (Plunkett, pp. 51-52).

        25 News and Observer, Raleigh, Nov. 20, 1880.

        26 Sioussat, p. 270. "Enthusiasm like that of a great religious movement developed and the result was that in the decade 1900-1909 the total school revenues in these States had been more than doubled."

        In the English Industrial Revolution other trades borrowed stimulus from textiles;27

        27 Cf. Scherer, pp. 51-52.

especially significant. In the zeal for manufacturing, the temptation would be to neglect agriculture, the old bête noire, and so not keep ever in mind the higher wisdom of an economic balance.28

        28 A friendly adviser pointed out the danger of excessive manufacturing in England, and urged that the South seek development of agriculture beside industry (United States Economist, quoted in Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Sept. 30, 1882.

        29 News and Courier, Charleston, Jan. 2, 1882.

        30 News and Observer, Raleigh, Nov. 30, 1880. "Our system of agriculture is too much on the order of present enjoyment and does not have sufficient regard for future use. . . . We would gladly see all of the profits of this year's crop spent on the land itself. . . . " (ibid., Sept. 19, 1880).

        "We at the South," it was said, " . . . if we intend to turn over a new leaf and seek a new development for our section," must inaugurate shipping relations with Brazil,31

        31 News and Observer, Raleigh, Nov. 17, 28, 1880.

        32 Ibid., Dec. 5, 1880.

        33 Observer, Raleigh, April 1, 1880.

        34 News and Observer, Raleigh, Nov. 13, 1880.

        35 Observer, Raleigh, July 11, 1880.

        36 Observer, Raleigh, Feb. 6, 1880. Cf. ibid., Jan. 15, Feb. 20, 1880.

        37 News and Courier, Charleston, May 30, 1881; cf. ibid., April 29, 1881.

        38 Observer, May 1, 1880.

        Interest was taken in extension of telegraph and telephone line.39

        39 See News and Courier, Charleston, Jan. 1, May 4, 1881.

        40 Ibid., April 22, May 5, 28, June 13, 1881.

        41 Ibid., March 10, 1881.

        42 Observer, Raleigh, Sept. 4, 1880. Cf. Daily Constitution, Atlanta, March 30, 1880.

        43 Andrews, p. 158.

        More than a contributing cause in the growing desire for economic renovation of the South, and amounting certainly to a decisive accelerant, was the defeat of Hancock by Garfield in the presidential election of 1880. The South, emerging from the humiliation of Reconstruction, had centered hopes on a victory for Tilden over Hayes four years earlier, and when the Democratic candidate was counted out, by a likely fraud as the section was willing enough to believe it, despair gave way to resentment and the Solid South, nursing its pride and revengefulness during Hayes' administration, dedicated itself to Hancock's triumph. In the four years between elections, the South, bearing many real grievances, sought to lighten them by lashing itself to a false ambition. Hancock's success would give answer to the North and cure Southern sorrows. It was looked forward to as "the first full, and fair, and free presidential election in which the South has participated since the war. There will be no intimidation of voters by means of the army. . . . There will be no southern returning boards upon whose venality the republican leaders can rely in case of a close contest."44

        44 Daily Constitution, Atlanta, Feb. 15, 1880.

        The shock of Hancock's defeat threw the South, so to speak, back upon its haunches. The days immediately following are surcharged with interest for the student of Southern economic history.

        The News and Observer, of Raleigh, which had been violently sectional and which for a few days after the election consoled its readers with hope of victory four years hence, within a week changed front and gave expression to a new spirit that, suddenly and with compelling force, was sweeping the people.45

        45 In quotations from influential newspapers it will be observed that the changed view, breaking on the South so quickly, at first carried something of sectional prejudice; industrial upbuilding would be partly spitefulness against the North. But this was the whimpering of a child while drying its tears.

        "Out of our political defeat we must work . . . a glorious material and industrial triumph. We must have less politics and more work, fewer stump speakers and more stump pullers, less tinsel and show and boast, and more hard, earnest work. . . . Work for the material and educational advancement of North Carolina, and in this and

not in politics, will be found her refuge and her strength."46

        46 Nov. 9, 1880. "We must make money--it is a power in this practical business age. Teach the boys and girls to work and teach them to be proud of it. . . . Demand all legislative encouragement for manufacturing that may be consistent with free political economy."

        Following the installation of Garfield, another editor finely said:

        But if we lost the victory, in one sense, we have won it in another. We have been taught what the South can do for itself if it wills to do it. If we have lost the victory on the field of fight we can win it back in the workshop, in the factory, in an improved agriculture and horticulture, in our mines and in our schoolhouses. There is where our fight lies now, and the only enemies before us are the prejudices of the past, the instincts of isolation, the brutal indifference and harmful social infidelity which stands up in our day with the old slave arguments at its heart and on its lips, "I object" and "You can't do it."47

        47 Columbia Register, quoted in News and Courier, Charleston, March 18, 1881. Columbia at this time was entering upon the fervor to develop its canal and build a cotton mill. The editor of the Register had been a slaveholder. This pronouncement is purged of an earlier and unworthy jealousy which had sometimes appeared in such expressions as the following from another paper: "The South should depend upon its own virtue, its own brain, its own energy, attend to its own business, make money, build up its waste places, and thus force from the North that recognition of our worth and dignity of character to which that people will always be blind unless they can see it through the medium of material, industrial and intellectual strength. We may proclaim political theories, but it is the more potent . . . argument of the mighty dollar that secures an audience there, and the sooner we realize it the better for us" (News and Observer, Raleigh, Nov. 27, 1880).

        No people less homogeneous, less one family, knit together and resolute through sufferings, could have taken instant fire, as did the South, at such appeals. Facilities for satisfying the need were not narrowly investigated. The South was shut up to such and such means--they must fit into imperative requirement.48

        48 Also, as has been seen, a philosophy which had right quietly, sometimes half-consciously, been taking shape in the Southern mind, was just now becoming fully articulate. For example, some months before the election, it had been said: "While the politicians are making a great deal of noise over the states rights question, the people of the South are quietly making substantial industrial progress. . . . The cotton mills in operation have proved very profitable. New mills are projected. . . . The signs of the great industrial change now going on in the South are plainly visible everywhere. . . . The people of the South are beginning to learn that the true road to power is not through the white house, supported by a swarm of federal officials. They are learning that solid wealth is power, and that wealth is attainable only by working up their cotton and wool into fabrics and their ores into metals" (Memphis Avalanche, quoted in Daily Constitution, Atlanta, March 30, 1880). "Distinction must be made between the political talk in the papers and what the people really wanted. There was a strong but silent undercurrent for economic welfare, while the politician was still singing the old song" (E. C. Brooks, int., Durham, N. C., Sept. 18, 1916). Approval of the thought that Hancock's defeat threw the South into a reversed frame of mind was received in interviews with some men who lived through the events, but from none of the newer generation.

        But the South did more than receive a new economic aim. Garfield elected, it began to show further the faith that had been welcomed, and moved to renounce political separatism: "The Southern people must be National themselves, in their aspirations and conduct, if they would have the Government truly national in spirit," and Garfield president not of a section or party. "To have a government of 'the whole country,' to be entitled to it, we must think of the whole country as our own, and demand no more than we are ready to give. It must come to this."49

        49 News and Courier, Charleston, March 9, 1881. "In the near future the successful leaders, South and North, will be those whose first thought is for the Republic; men who are National in feeling and purpose; men who understand that the political and social strength and safety of each State depend not on isolation and separation, but on combination and union." Cf. ibid., May 7, 1881. A New Orleans editor said: "The bitterness, prejudice and hostility to the changes wrought by the war which were so marked a few years ago are disappearing. There is now a very noticeable . . . disposition to accept the situation as it is, and on this basis to build a new South which shall surpass in wealth, glory and greatness the old South. . . . before another National campaign opens this element will control the political and material affairs of the South" (Times-Democrat, quoted in ibid., Feb. 4, 1881). Cf. A. K. McClure, The South: Industrial, Financial, Political, p. 53; Dunning, p. 198. Not all leaders were so sensible; Senator Vance, of North Carolina, looking forward to Garfield's term, was belying his professions by asserting "The thing that has been is the thing that shall be" (News and Courier, Charleston, Feb. 23, 1881).

        Garfield's assassination showed how ready the South was to join hands with the North. "It could not have been foreseen . . . that the outburst of sympathy and condemnation would have been universal in its manifestation, affectionate in tone and National in spirit. South Carolina does more

than reprobate assassination. The . . . whole people, resent the deed because the victim is the President of the United States. . . . The forces of reunion had gone on with a rapidity which few appreciated. All the elements of cordial friendship and of national good-will were there. It needed only the threat of a common misfortune to give shape and voice to the recreate [sic] but sturdy love of the Republic."50

        50 News and Courier, Charleston, July 13, 1881. " . . . the President's desperate illness . . . has done more than years of ordinary events in bringing the North and South together. . . . Vainly will the politicians flourish the 'bloody flag.' The people will not rally on the ensanguined colors again" (ibid., July 18, 1881). Cf. ibid., July 14, giving interview with Jefferson Davis, and Sept. 20, 1881; William A. Harden, A History of Savannah and South Georgia, p. 485. The cordiality with which the First Connecticut Regiment was received in Charleston the month following Garfield's death was believed an outgrowth of the city's sorrow at the national tragedy. The first column of the News and Courier bore the flags of Connecticut and South Carolina crossed, with the legends, "Yankee Doodle Come to Town," and "A Welcome Invasion." An editorial spoke of the war as a "grand lesson to the South," and declared: "We have learned that we cannot stand alone, that our fight must be made within the Union . . . " (Oct. 24, 1881).

        It is clear that the pressing task of the South, from the day of Appomattox, was truly an economic and social and not a political one.51

        51 Cf. Sioussat, p. 223.

        52 "The greatest statesman of the South in recent times was Seaman A. Knapp, who believed that the demonstration farm was of more value to society than the noisiest political convention . . . ; that a boy's corn club would do more to enrich materially the life of the people than the fattest office won on the hustings. . . . The unselfish servants of the people, working in humble ways to improve the farm, the road, the factory, the home, the school, and the church are the true statesmen of the South" (Samuel C. Mitchell, "The Challenge of the South for a Better Nation," in The South Mobilizing for Social Service, p. 46). Cf. ibid., p. 45. "Back of the patriotism of arms, back of the patriotism of our political and civic life, there lies, like a new and commanding social motive, the patriotism of efficiency. . . . It is not merely the patriotism of industrial power. It is the patriotism of social fitness and of economic value. It is the passion of usefulness" (Murphy, Present South, p. 148). Cf. ibid., p. 316.

        "So long as we have sectional enmity in politics in the

South its material prosperity will be checked and an absolute injury will be sustained . . . by exciting distrust of capital and prejudices of immigration. The Southern people, outside of the professional politicians, care very little about Federal politics. They are endeavoring to develop the resources of the South and regain the broken-down fortunes left by the desolation of civil war."53

        53 Sumpter, S. C., Southron, quoted in News and Courier, Charleston, May 14, 1881. "So taking the past and the present as indices for the future, it is plain to see that a dissolution of the Solid South will cut at the very roots of all these wrangles between the North and the South in which sectionalism is involved." Cf. Observer, Raleigh, Jan. 29, 1880, in comment on an editorial of Financial Chronicle.

        54 "Brutus" in News and Courier, Charleston, May 25, 1881. For a list of Federal appropriations for North Carolina in the rivers and harbors bill the year previous, see Observer, Raleigh, May 6, 1880. It was said, apropos of the approaching meeting of the Southern Press Association, that the Associated Press in its selection of news did not always contribute sufficiently to the business progress of the South. "The commercial prosperity of the South is of far greater consequence to the Southern press than any mere political object. . . . Any association, therefore, that will aid in . . . dissemination of truthful information about the social, business and industrial life of the Southern States, should be encouraged by those who control the Southern press" (News and Courier, Charleston, March 29, 1881). "It is time to stop impeaching the South's development, for . . . business is driving sentimental politics to the woods" (Springfield Republican, quoted in News and Observer, Raleigh, Dec. 31, 1880). Years earlier Gregg took McDuffie severely to task for his half-hearted entrance into cotton manufacturing: "Had you . . . mixed a little more patriotism with your efforts, you would have taken the pains to ascertain why your Vaucluse establishment did not realize . . . sanguine expectations. . . . You would have put your own shoulders to the wheel. . . . " Instead of political opposition to protection (Gregg did not favor a tariff), McDuffie should have advocated turning it to economic advantage (Domestic Industry, p. 8). "It would indeed be well for us, if we were not so refined in politics--if the talent, which has been, for years past, and is now engaged in embittering our indolent people against their industrious neighbors of the North, had been . . . engaged in . . . the encouragement of the mechanical arts" (ibid., pp. 7-8). Cf. Ingle, Southern Sidelights, p. 40; Andrews, South since the War, p. 96). The "old dislike of the peddling, money-making Yankee is being replaced by admiration for his thrift, and desire to adopt the means by which he has left his impress upon the nation's life" (Springfield Republican, quoted in News and Courier, Charleston, April 7, 1881). One who now feels this view has been overemphasized said, speaking of the lack of strong men in politics in South Carolina, "they have gone into this great economic movement, and let most other things go to the dogs" (Mrs. M. P. Gridley, int., Greenville, Sept. 9, 1916).

1880 that men like Gregg, pleading that "politicians, instead of teaching us to hate our Northern brethren, endeavor to get up a good feeling for domestic industry,"55

        55 See Domestic Industry, pp. 14-16; 11, 24; Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, p. 363.

        56 Dodd, in South in Building of Nation, vol. v, p. 568 ff.; Kohn, Cotton Mills of S. C., p. 13.

        57 Dyer, in New South, p. 90.

        Nearly every stage of this study testifies to the large extent to which such economic publicists as these, by conscious teaching and by example, were responsible for industrial growth. It is a nice matter to strike a balance between the force of their inner promptings and the external influences operating upon them. It has been seen that their identical philosophy, held by earlier Southerners, could not bear fruit before 1880, and certainly from this date forward moral stimulus gathered strength from the constantly more apparent physical advantages for manufacturing. As to whether desire for industry uncovered facilities, or facilities for industry suggested their employment, a careful thinker said: "My answer is for the ideas, the internal stimulus, but subject to the qualification that in a longer time we would have had the mills by force of external influence. So far as the period from 1880 to 1900 was concerned, it

was as nearly the immediate result of internal agitation as any industrial growth could be." It is probably correct to conclude that "the social and economic influences cooperated with the human purpose."58

        58 W. W. Ball, int., Columbia, Jan. 3, 1917. "The building of the Pelzer Mill was the germination of the idea implanted by The News and Courier." A competent student wrote: "The growth of cotton manufacturing . . . is significant of a change in Southern ideals . . . a change from a social system in which work was held to be degrading, to one in which great interest is taken in industrial enterprise" (Copeland, pp. 32-33). Sir Horace Plunkett said unhesitatingly of a development not far different: "The story of the new movement . . . begins in the year 1889, when a few Irishmen . . . set themselves the task of bringing home to the rural population . . . the fact that their prosperity was in their own hands . . . to arouse and apply the latent capacities of the . . . people . . . " (cf. pp. 178-179). An objective judgment is: "Other industrial conditions beside the nearness to the cotton crop produced this growth, chief of which has been the general industrial awakening experienced by the South" (New International Encyclopaedia, article on "Cotton," p. 159). Mr. Brooks leans toward environment when he says: "In . . . natural resources the South has found the basis of . . . new economic policy, a new social order . . . " (p. 214).

        Enough has been said to make it apparent that at the outset the employment of children in the mills, if not absolutely necessary, was practically so, and never excited the least question. Search has failed to reveal one instance of protest against their working, but, on the other hand, cotton manufacturing was hailed as a boon especially because it gave means of livelihood to women and children. Poverty-stricken, the South was mustering every resource to stagger to its feet. All labor power was empirically seized upon; response was eager. At that critical juncture, later results of the employment of children could not be looked to. The great morality then was to go to work. The use of children was not avarice then, but philanthropy; not exploitation, but generosity and cooperation and social-mindedness.59

        59 Between 1880 and 1890 the number of children was doubled, and between 1890 and 1900 trebled (cf. U. S. Census of Manufactures, 1890, "Cotton Manufacture," by Stanwood, p. 173; ibid., 1900, p. 33). "Manufacturers took whom they could get for operatives in the new mills. The employment of children was not a matter of choice but of necessity. . . . " Cf. Edmonds, p. 20. It must be remembered, too, that whole families were transferred from farms to mill villages, which alone, in the then condition of the South, would have required that the children work. Of course, the use of children has long since become unnecessary, and has been as cruelly unjust as at first it was natural. Cf. the writer's "Some Factors in the Future of Cotton Manufacture in the South," in Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, May 10, 1917, and "The End of Child Labor," in Survey, Aug. 23, 1919. Some of Murphy's eloquent pleas for abolition of child labor, while courageous and fitting when he wrote, did not, perhaps, recognize sufficiently the facts of the inception of the system. Cf. Present South, pp. 114, 142-143, 147; George T. Winston, "Child Labor in North Carolina," in Pamphlet 262 of National Child Labor Committee, p. 1 ff. For a statement true for the eighties but not for 1916, see Hearings before Committee on Labor, House of Representatives, January, 1916, p. 12.

        Understanding that the South, from inner impulse, environmental suggestion and the union of these two, was determined for manufacturing, the immediate reasons for the building of mills may now be considered. It must be remembered that there is a distinction between industrial advantages believed to be present, and facilities as they were afterwards proved out. In the next pages the effort is to discover the thought back of the erection of factories, rather than the evaluation of supposed advantages as revealed in actual operation.

        It is clear, first, that there could be no single proximate cause. A mill president said: "You cannot find any uniformity in the reasons for establishment of mills. There were a thousand reasons. Sometimes it was salaries that were wanted; sometimes commission houses that were after the charges; sometimes it was to build up the community; sometimes the profits of one mill that brought another into being; sometimes the machinery men; sometimes it was just because they were . . . fools."60

        60 Landon A. Thomas, int., Augusta, Ga., Dec. 29, 1916. Others gave similar medleys: "I think the chief advantages observed were the possession of ample raw material and cheap motive power. . . . Also, cheaper common labor, and . . . the fact that the climate . . . is . . . a good one . . . " (S. S. Broadus, Decatur, Ala., letter, Jan. 27, 1915). "Mills were located about Spartanburg because they had cotton to grow to their doors, water power, tax exemption, encouragement in railroads giving two-thirds rate on machinery and material hauled, and willingness of supply men to take stock" (J. B. Cleveland, int., Spartanburg).

        When Mr. Edmonds declared that "What the South has done . . . has been without any special stimulus," he meant there were few demonstrated aids to manufacturing in the

beginning; he neglected to take account of the subjective factor of popular resolve which flourished just because of the surrounding poverty.61

        61 Facts about South, pp. 20, 22. Contrast R. M. R. Dehn, The German Cotton Industry, pp. 13, 16.

        62 George W. Williams, int., Charleston, S. C., Dec. 27, 1916. Cf. a statement respecting development of English economic thought, in Edwin Cannan, Theories of Production and Distribution, ed. of 1894, pp. 147-148.

        It is not hard to discern several specific influences making for the industrial development, and these may be examined separately, bearing in mind that all of them, in varying degree, doubtless bore a part.

        Some, especially in North Carolina, have found a cause in manufacturing made necessary during the Civil War. The State, urged by Governor Ellis and Governor Clark, became a workhouse for the production of war supplies and goods no longer obtainable from outside. It is said that a vision of what lay in manufactures was firmly imbedded in the North Carolina mind, and that after Reconstruction the people went back to industry.63

        63 D. H. Hill, int., Raleigh, N. C., Sept. 16, 1916. Governor Clark, in his message to the Legislature, August 16, 1861, stated the situation: "First, that in our commercial relations we have been dependent on the North for almost every article that we use connected with machinery, farming, merchandise, food and clothing . . . including almost every article we need for our defence. The second and more important fact is now established, that we have the means and material for supplying all these wants within our own borders. Necessity is developing these resources and driving us to the use of them. The continuance of this war and blockade for two or three years may inflict much personal suffering, but it will surely accomplish our national and commercial independence." Many cotton mills were chartered in North Carolina during the war. "War changes the habits of a people. After the Revolutionary War and the second war with England America relied less on England and became self-supporting. The Civil War changed the habits of the Southern people and made them rely on their own skill and energy for every necessity of life. Where there was no skill, attempts were made to develop it" (Brooks, pp. 199-200). That "a new form of expression of patriotism took the place of military service" after the Revolution,--encouragement of home industry--is clear; it may be held that such economic patriotism was delayed in the South by Reconstruction following the Civil War, and that industrial progress was thus "the result of both moral and economical forces" (cf. U. S. Census of Manufactures, 1880, "Factory System of U. S.," by Carroll D. Wright, p. 6).

        Conveniently mentioned, too, in connection with North Carolina is the thought that certain groups of immigrants had planted their manufacturing tradition. This has been referred to in the previous chapter, and it will be remembered that slavery and agriculture forbade these foreigners making a lasting public impression. By maintaining an occupation in particular families, however, late members of which came to bear in the industrial awakening, they did a service.64

        64 Cf. Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. v, pp. 313-314. In a few instances, it is true, local communities were given an industrial character that resisted an enervating economic environment. Germans at Wachovia, in North Carolina, within a year after settlement had in operation a flour mill, carpenter, shoe and blacksmith shops, pottery, tannery and cooperage establishments (M. R. Pleasants, unpublished MS., "Manufacturing in N. C.," p. 5). Cf. Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg, vol. i, pp. 24-25; Olmsted, p. 511. Winston-Salem, N. C., owes much to its Moravian settlers.

        Entertaining a synthetic rather than analytic viewpoint, it has been sometimes said, with empirical reasoning, that industry in the South grew out of a natural recovery following the war. While not accounting very well for a change of mind that was certainly present, this argument has point. A survey of South Carolina in 1884 asserted: "The State has now recovered the ground . . . lost by emancipation, by negro suffrage, by political misrule and official corruption. . . . Since the redemption and regeneration of the State, in 1877, the growth of manufactures has been astonishing in its rapidity and volume. Agricultural operations could be carried on with reasonable success, in even the darkest days of strife and misrule, but the undertakings which were dependent on the concentration of capital for their development remained torpid, if not dead, until the

return of confidence breathed into them new life and vigor."65

        65 News and Courier, South Carolina in 1884. "We shall see how the people of this section, reduced to poverty by . . . war, . . . bestirred themselves cheerfully, amid the ashes and waste of their homes; how they met new and adverse conditions with unquailing courage; how they gave themselves cordially to unaccustomed work; with what patience they bore misfortune, and endured wrongs put upon them through the surviving passions of the war. . . . How . . . at last controlling with their own hands their local affairs, they began, in ragged and torn battalions, that march of restoration and development that has challenged universal admiration. We shall see how . . . things despised in the old days of prosperity, in adversity won unexpected value. How frugality came with misfortune, fortitude with sorrow, and with necessity invention" (Grady, pp. 142-143).

        A similar account was given twenty years afterward:

        The war destroyed the capital and property of the South . . . and left in its wake a grinding poverty. . . . The problem of procuring wherewithal to feed and clothe themselves, the fight for a mere subsistence, employed all the energies . . . of the people. This poverty and the struggle to get rid of the carpet-bag government, left no time for anything else. But there came a time when the people could pull themselves together and take an inventory of what they had accomplished . . . they had a little time to look about them, and to take some thought of the morrow. It required no particular wisdom to see that here where the raw material was produced, where natural resources abounded, and where there was . . . the steadiest and most intelligent class of labor, that in this favored land was the essential home of cotton manufacturing. So it became merely a question of providing capital with which to buy some machinery, the transfer of labor from the farm to the mill, and the South's career as a manufacturing people was fairly begun."66

        66 Southern Cotton Spinners' Assn., proceed. 7th Annual Convention, address of T. C. Guthrie, p. 44 ff.

        The war and Reconstruction took one generation of activity; by 1880 the South had convalesced. "We took our minds off the war, and began thinking about home affairs." Before 1880 there was a great social pressure that prevented attention to constructve measures.67

        67 E. C. Brooks, int., Durham, N. C., Sept. 18, 1916. The night of the Hayes-Tilden election the informant's father and uncle sat up all night with their shotguns, expecting trouble with the negroes. A representative of the old South said: "From the close of the war, all through Reconstruction time, we had it pretty hot. Politics took up the time of all of us. The effect of Reconstruction, even after we got rid of it, lasted us six or seven years. When that blew away, everything took on new life. We began to build up all sorts of enterprises" (James Morehead, int., Greensboro, N. C., Aug. 30, 1916). "After they got straightened out, with their State governments in their own hands, people began to feel there was a future for them" (Summerfield Baldwin, Sr., int., Baltimore, Md., June, 1917). Cf. Tompkins, Cotton and Cotton Oil, p. 64; Copeland, pp. 32-33.

        Mr. Clark has pointed out that with restoration of confidence in political conditions in the reconstructed States, outside capitalists no longer feared disorders that threatened safety of investments; and when work became a necessity, opportunities for diversifying work were seized upon.68

        68 In South in Building of Nation, vol. vi, pp. 265-266. This statement is one of the best-considered by this writer.

        69 Cf. Clark, in ibid., pp. 262-263, 258 ff. "The growth of population, the building of railways, the accumulation of capital, the slow perfection of commercial finance, the spread of popular education, each assisted the imperative trend toward industrial diversification and expansion. In spite of the panic and depression . . . between 1870 and 1880 every important Southern manufacture was completely rehabilitated . . . " (ibid.).

        One is quite ready to agree to the suggestion, also, that "there was in the South a quiet element of business and professional men who did not approve the course of the leaders of the section, and who, smothered under, so far as public attention was concerned, kept up activity and stood forth when a liberal industrial and commercial program became the order of the day," and that the revulsion of feeling was not really so quick as study of public expressions might indicate.70

        70 Walter S. McNeill, int., Richmond, Va., Aug. 29, 1916; M. L. Bonham, Anderson, Sept. 10, 1916. Another said there is nothing esoteric in the cotton mill campaign, that the South was looking about for something to lay its hand to and naturally fell upon the omnipresent staple; the cables that moored the South to its past had worn thin, and it needed only some lucky accidents about 1880 to part the last strands and set the ship free on her course (J. L. Hartsell, int., Concord, N. C., Sept. 2, 1916). Cf. Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. vi, pp. 254-255.

        The high price of cotton right after the war and a belief that this condition would continue because cotton could be

only scantily raised with free labor, focused attention again upon the staple; the local merchant was given credit at the North, and he in turn gave credit to the farmer, who pledged his land to cotton. This temporary restoration of King Cotton saddled the farmer with debt and delayed agricultural diversification and industrial beginnings.71

        71 Cf. Grady, p. 175 ff. For other references, see Tompkins, Cultivation, Picking, Baling and Manufacturing of Cotton, pp. 5-6; History of Mecklenburg, vol. i, pp. 150-151; Thompson, p. 59 ff.

        In coming to the directly personal factor, the part of promoters and projectors in the building of the mills, it is well to bear in mind the caution that "it is . . . not unnatural that most of us should fall into the error of attributing to the influence of prominent individuals or organizations the events and conditions which the superficial observer regards as the creation of the hour, but which are in reality the outcome of a slow and continuous process of evolution."72

        72 Plunkett, p. 27. The mistake has often been made: "You might write volumes, but you would never be able to get beyond the fact that the cotton mill development in Gastonia, Gaston County, North Carolina, and the whole South, is the result of the fact that a few men had a vision" (Joseph H. Separk, int., Gastonia, N. C., Sept. 14, 1916). Cf. Southern Cotton Spinners' Assn., proceed. 7th Annual Convention, address of Edward Atkinson, p. 89; Cannan, p. 23.

        In certain cases where it would seem plain that mills were due exclusively to one man, it is necessary only to ask where and why he received his impulse, to show that he was really an exponent of a prevailing tendency, just as the community upon which he relied for assistance, in its response to his appeal, answered a little later to the same social stirring.73

        73 One of the sincerest men talked with said: "The Gaffney people never thought of having a mill before I came back from the Clifton village, where I was putting up buildings, and got them stirred up. You get an idea in another place where you happen to be, and you say to yourself: 'Why won't that work in our little town?' Well, you've got to do a lot of talking after you get home with the idea, but they'll catch on in the end. The people of Union asked some Gaffney men to come there and tell them about the business. The professor at the high school and I went down to Union, and I recollect I made them a right smart good talk down there, and they caught on to it and built the mills they've got now. And that was a dead town" (L. Baker, int., Gaffney, S. C., Sept. 13, 1916). An interview with a mill official whom Mr. Baker persuaded to come to Gaffney showed that he had acted so completely under Mr. Baker's enthusiasm that he accepted the factory as a matter of course. In no instance did one personality stand out as an almost exclusive influence more than in the development of mills at Columbia through Mr. Whaley (Washington Clark, William Banks, W. W. Ball, interviews, Columbia, S. C., Jan. 1, 2, 3, respectively, 1917). "If I had at my disposal the history of Major Thos. L. Emry, who was the founder and father of Roanoke Rapids, I would simply tear a few pages from it and spread them across this space and you would have the whole story of the pioneering of this wonderful industrial . . . center" (Charlotte News, Textile Ed., 1917).

        It has been seen how Murphy pointed out that the New South was the child of the Old South, fathered in large degree by the same leaders who in less happy days had bred only economic deformities. "The old South was the real nucleus of the new nationalism. The old South . . . was the true basis of an enduring peace between the sections. . . . " And everyone must share his regret that "a doubt was put upon its word given at Appomattox. . . . Power was struck from its hands. Its sense of responsibility was wounded and confused."74

        74 Present South, pp. 10-11. Such men as E. M. Holt, Francis Fries, J. M. Morehead and William Gregg, who years before had seen the wisdom of industrial development along with agriculture and, besides the usual activities of farmer and legislator, were engaged in building railroads and mills, could not have their way with the South. Men of opposite faith, later converted to new courses, did no more than adopt a program which earlier had been spurned. On these unfollowed leaders, see South in Building of Nation, vols. xi and xii; Cyclopedia of Eminent and Representative Men of the Carolinas; Jerome Dowd, Sketches of Prominent Living North Carolinians (1888); Biographical History of North Carolina; Tompkins, Cotton Mill, Commercial Features, pp. 181, 185, 187-188; Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. v, p. 323; Copeland, pp. 32-33; Goldsmith, p. 4; Southern Cotton Spinners' Assn., proceed. 7th Annual Convention, p. 168.

        Nothing stands out more prominently than that the Southern mills were conceived and brought into existence by Southerners. The impulse was furnished almost exclusively from within the South, against much discouragement from selfish interests at the North, and capital was supplied by the South to the limit of its ability.75

        75 Cf. Grady, pp. 182-184, 197-198; Edmonds, p. 32; Charlotte News, Textile Ed., 1917.

        Coming now to the part of ex-Confederates in the industrial regeneration of their people, it is apparent with what speed they embraced their new duty and how the promise of their participation was welcomed by the wisest heads in

the North. It has been observed that just as citizens of Salem, Massachusetts, established a club where descendants of the witches and of those who hanged them toast one another, so "the same people that turn out, by the city-full, to build Lee's monument and to bury Davis, are taxing themselves for the schooling of negro children. . . . " Each of these Southerners, "devoutly remembering the old; understanding as no one else can why he remembers it; but all the time looking for something not only better and larger than he has known, but grander than any one ever dared to hope for this side of heaven," showed a divine versatility that is the very stuff of civilization.76

        76 A. D. Mayo, "Is There a New South?", in Social Economist, Oct., 1893, pp. 201-202; cf. ibid., p. 207.

        James L. Orr, soon to be governor of his State, was a type man, and he appeared with others of the same persuasion in South Carolina as early as the constitutional convention of 1865. There was nothing sullen about him; what he did, he did whole-heartedly. "He was considered one of the coolest-headed men in the State five years ago this summer; but, for all that, he was one of the leading members in the Secession Convention, and in the Rebel Senate during the whole existence of the Confederate government. Now he is one of the leading reconstructionists. . . . He . . . carries himself with a very democratic air."77

        77 Andrews, p. 50. The promptness with which distinguished participants in the Confederate cause came forward after the war was an indication of the consistency of Southern leadership. Lee was as much the general at the head of a college as at the head of an army.

        Often reprobated at the North, this was as normal as it was fortunate; Southerners would choose those in whom they had rested old confidences because people and spokesmen had made a mental readjustment which, however unbelievable to enemies, was easy and natural.78

        78 Cf. Dunning, pp. 44-45. Twelve members of the South Carolina constitutional convention of 1865 had been members of the secession convention (Andrews, pp. 38-39). Cf. Thompson, pp. 57-58.

rather than help these inevitable leaders. "For my part," said Sidney Andrews, "I wish every office in the State [South Carolina] could be filled with ex-Confederate soldiers. It is the universal testimony of every officer of our own troops . . . that the late Rebel soldiers are of better disposition toward the government, toward Northerners, toward progression, than any other class of citizens."79

        79 South since the War, p. 95; cf. ibid., pp. 393, 371-372; Dunning, pp. 185-186; Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg, vol. i, pp. 151-152. Andrews had more faith in a "conquered Rebel" than in "most of these North Carolina Unionists" (ibid., p. 167).

        The year 1880 was reached before these men could really assert themselves. Their training in politics stood them in good stead when they came to organize public sentiment in a new campaign, that of industrial awakening.80

        80 Cf. Punkett, pp. 72-73.

        81 The Industrial South, of Richmond, in 1882 was asking "when will . . . prosperity come" and declared this especially "the impatient utterance of the surviving veterans of the war . . .--the men who were crushed to the earth by the loss of all their worldly possessions, who have ever since been struggling for a footing in life again, and who are looking longingly for some assurance . . . that their children and their children's children will have large opportunities for improvement of their fortunes through the exercise of energy in utilizing the bounties of nature around them" (quoted in Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, June 17, 1882).

        When the student of Southern industry meets one of the few surviving members of this company, he at once feels himself in touch with the spirit that was the South's salvation. Far-seeing, public-minded, generous-natured leaders because lovers and servers, these have proved themselves true patriots.82

        82 It is worth while setting down impressions of one or two. A ruddy, white-haired old gentleman, cordial, cultivated, and a little shyly if gladly reminiscent, received me in the office of his ship chandlering store in Bay Street, Charleston. He showed by look and phrase and occasionally by direct remark that he had been nicely familiar with all the details of the important mill project in which he had taken a chief part, and that they had been obscured, never obliterated, by the years. Almost with a child's embarrassment he explained he did not know why he had kept a packet of intimate memoranda concerning a devoted but unsuccessful venture, and handed them over to me with charges for their safe return. Another, nearly ninety-eight years old when interviewed, sat in the office of the mill which he built and of which he had long been president. He wore a greenish-black, threadbare overcoat, and clutched a bulging umbrella of the same sort. Clear-brained, almost excessively direct, of dominating personality, one felt he had always been equal to the tasks confronting him. As he looked about at the bookkeepers, he spoke with much emphasis, to soften the too pitifully evident chagrin at being dispossessed. His successor, exulting in what has been called "juvenile capitalism," had little of the affection of the old man for the enterprise. Here was the South of slavery, agriculture and aristocracy, that made the South of free labor, industry and democracy. A writer on the mills has said: "These little personal things will creep into my story and break the continuity of dry developments, but the human element pulsates so frequently through the proposition that I must be excused if I fly off at a tangent at almost any word and mix up the material and the psychological" (Charlotte News, Textile Ed., 1917, concerning Roanoke Mills). Cf. ibid., concerning Edenton Cotton Mill; Southern Cotton Spinners' Assn., proceed. 7th Annual Convention, p. 44 ff.

        It was natural, at the opening of the period, that many cotton factors should head mill enterprises. They had some money, business connections and a knowledge of the staple that was important. Frequently they had been buyers for, and stockholders and directors in, some of the first enterprises. Charleston cotton merchants played a leading rôle. Captain F. T. Pelzer is a case in point; he made money in cotton right after the war, was a director in Hammett's Piedmont Factory, became interested in several other ventures and ended by founding the mill bearing his name.83

        83 Frank Pelzer and William Banks, interviews, Charleston, Dec. 28, 1916, and Columbia, Jan. 2, 1917. Col. W. G. Smith was a cotton buyer in Orangeburg County, S. C., before organizing a mill there. Leroy Springs, in his mercantile business at Lancaster, took cotton in exchange for goods. A little later it will be noticed how he became a cotton manufacturer (Banks, ibid.). The same is true of John H. Montgomery (cf. Columbia Record, Textile Ed., Oct., 1916).

        84 Thus "William C. Sibley, the president of this company, has had a long experience in cotton, and is one of the largest cotton buyers of the Southern States. . . . He is at present handling, and has for many years . . . efficiently handled, the corporate affairs of the Langley mills . . . " (Boston Journal of Commerce, July 29, 1882).

after plans to invite him to Anderson had fallen through, started a factory on his own account.

        By no means all of the mill builders had direct or even indirect connection with cotton. How thoroughly local most enterprises were and how general in communities was the desire for mills, is seen in the callings from which men came to cotton manufacturing. Lawyers, bankers, farmers, merchants, teachers, preachers, doctors, public officials--any man who stood out among his neighbors, or whose economic position allowed him a little freedom of action, was likely to be requisitioned into service or to venture for himself.85

        85 Cf. Goldsmith, pp. 7-8. "All that was necessary was that the promoter of the mill should have succeeded in the business in which he had been formerly engaged."

        86 Cf. Plunkett, p. 133 ff.

        Especially did merchants become mill builders. When large plantations broke down into small farms and tenant holdings, factors at the ports could no longer market the whole cotton crop or supply needed credit, because they did not have knowledge of local conditions. Merchants, many of them mere country storekeepers, found themselves more than ever drawn into the buying and selling of the staple, and lending money on growing crops. Supplying every material want of the farmer and taking his incoming cotton in surety, the merchant was the pivot of the economic system. These merchants, more than anyone else in their communities, had credit relations at the North, the importance of which in their manufacturing enterprises will be observed in the chapter on capital.87

        87 Cf. Hammond, p. 144 ff. The description of usury in sales on "time" applies over much of the South today. I heard of a North Carolina farmer who, in 1920, with cotton prices unprecedentedly high, was asked half of his crop in payment for fertilizer.

in the prosperity of their localities that was none the less effective because not always academic or sentimental.88

        88 Mr. Clark is hardly justified in asserting that "The conditions were no longer those that attract a few hardy adventurers into a new field of business, but such as draw conservative capital, in large units and in the hands of trained administrators, to assured spheres of enterprise" (cf. in South in Building of Nation, vol. vi, pp. 266-267). Administrators were rarely trained and large investments of capital were rarely for dividends only.

        The man who later had capital to head cotton mills at Clinton, South Carolina, set up the only store in the place immediately following the War. The town was then in a poor way, and not being helped by several barrooms.89

        89 Columbia Record, Textile Ed., 1916. Cf. ibid. respecting John R. Barron's Manchester Cotton Mills.

        90 Columbia Record, Textile Ed., 1916.

        The moving man in the Charleston Manufacturing Company was half merchant as head of the ice company.91

        91 Cf. advertisement of Alva Gage & Co., Deutsche Zeitung, Charleston, 1881.

        Saying that Massachusetts mills created only in quantity values that Rhode Island manufacturers produced through quality of goods, William Gregg years before saw that the Massachusetts method would first be introduced in the South, and said: "Cotton manufacturing will not, probably, be speedily introduced into this State [South Carolina], unless our business men of capital take hold of it. Merchants and retired men of capital may erect factories, . . .

our wealthy planters may engage in this business . . . but it will be long before the Southern States shall have a set of manufacturers similar to those in Rhode Island; they must grow up among us. . . . "92

        92 Domestic Industry, p. 27.

        93 Some mistakes there were bound to be, when an industry was being built overnight. "Gen. Irving Walker, a stationery man, was the first president of the Charleston Manufacturing Company. He was a nice man, but he knew nothing about the business. That was at the bottom of nine-tenths of the failures of cotton mills in this State--the presidents were popular, you know, everybody liked them, but they were incompetent, with no technical knowledge." The founder of one mill, mayor of his city, was denominated "a hot air politician." The type of man who could succeed in the eighties usually fails now. Mills at Bessemer City, North Carolina, are illustrative. There is no longer the leeway. Cf. Thompson, p. 272. "Looking back on them," one informant said, "I can see that the first mill men were a set of blundering children, some a little more apt than others." Cf. Ga. Indus. Assn., proceed. 4th Annual Convention, address of J. J. Spalding, pp. 46-47, and the writer's "Some Factors in Future of Cotton Manufacture in South," in Manufactures' Record, Baltimore, May 10, 1917. Newer manufacturers, though still bearing marks of neglected training, are supplementing "a deep desire to succeed, faith in the soundness of the task and in one's own self, and business and social imagination" with intimate knowledge of detail. Cf. Charlotte News, Textile Ed., 1917, for many instances, especially that of C. B. Armstrong.

        Mr. Estes' entry into manufacturing was typical. "I was first in the dry goods business, then the grocery business. I was mayor here for six years. I was successful. They got me to get up the mill. Old Judge King took first $50,000 and then $100,000 of stock, with the idea that I was to be president."94

        94 Charles Estes, int., Augusta, Ga., Dec. 29, 1916. "When this enterprise was inaugurated there were those who doubted whether the mill would ever be built, but with Mr. Charles Estes, to whom, by universal consent, the work of organizing the company was intrusted, there is no such word as fail . . . " (newspaper clipping in Raworth Scrapbook). "Mr. A. Scheurman, a leading merchant of Griffin, Ga., is now closing out his business with the intention of engaging in cotton manufacturing . . . (Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, Dec. 14, 1882). Cf. Grady, p. 181; Southern Cotton Spinners' Assn., proceed. 7th Annual Convention, pp. 111-112.

        If space permitted, a review of the histories of H. P. Hammett, G. A. Gray, R. C. G. Love, Daniel Rhyne, and others would show interestingly the channels by which chief leaders came to build mills. Hammett and Gray were both linked with the ante-bellum industry. The former grew up on a farm, taught school, married the daughter of William Bates and was taken into his cotton manufacturing company; he entered the Civil War and was given duty in the Confederate tax office. After the war he represented his native county in the State legislature, was mayor of Greenville, made president of a rundown railroad and, knowing men of influence and being acquainted with an excellent water power, built his mill in the seventies.95

        95 Cf. Tompkins, Cotton Mill, Commercial Features, pp. 189-190.

        96 Cf. Gastonia Gazette, Feb. 9, 1912, and C. W. Patman in Knit Goods, N. Y., March, 1912. Men drawn into the business as a result, directly or indirectly, of Gray's influence, had been teachers, public officials, bankers and farmers. Cf. Patman, ibid. One of the most successful manufacturers in Gastonia was raised on a farm and ran away from home when a young man and went through the country peddling clocks and quilts. He said that as a boy he believed the treasurer of a cotton mill the biggest man in the country, and that he thought this over while tramping about later with his wares. He finally set up an instalment furniture business in Gastonia, was made sheriff and was elected to the vice-presidency of a cotton mill. He is now president of many factories (C. B. Armstrong, int., Gastonia, N. G., Sept. 14, 1916).

        D. A. Tompkins, less than thirty at the opening of the cotton mill era, was late enough to profit by the pioneering work of others. There was enough industry in the South to make the mill engineer's profession profitable. Tompkins was one of the first men in whose career it was evident that the South was becoming a real seat of the cotton manufacture,

with facilities for machine design and repair and all that general guidance which new companies needed. Tompkins, unlike his predecessors, had technical training. Partly in furtherance of his engineering business, partly from the broadest social motives, he almost raised by hand many cotton mills--inspiring the idea, supervising construction, assisting first steps in production.97

        97 As an exhibit in Southern economic history, his two little offices in Charlotte ought really to be moved intact to a place where they would be kept for the public. Glimpses revealing Tompkins' personality may be found in his own writings: Nursing and Nurses, p. 3; History of Mecklenburg, vol, i, p. vii; Cotton and Cotton Oil, preface; Road Building and Repairs, p. 26; Building and Loan Associations, preface; a notion of the character of his service may be gained from: Water Power on the Catawba River, p. 20 ff.; A Plan to Raise Capital for Manufacturing, p. 18 ff.; the backs of some of his many pamphlets give the plan of organization of his company.

        "When manufactures have become well established a new mill is sometimes organized by a number of men who perceive that some one man is a promising manufacturer."98

        98 Tompkins, Coton Mill, Commercial Features, p. 30.

        99 J. L. Hartsell, int., Concord. This was true of other mills headed by the same man. A merchant fathered a mill at China Grove quite irrespective of its later foster parent (W. R. Odell, int., Concord, N. C., Sept. 2, 1916). At Salisbury the matter of an executive was an afterthought.

        There has been an erroneous notion that many promoters of mills in the South in the eighties were Northern men and firms. In the beginning cotton manufacturers of New England did much to discourage establishment of the industry at the South, and have never sought to realize Southern advantages in a large way. In later days there was never such an incoming of Northerners as that of the Hills, Bates,

Shelden, Clark and Weaver.100

        100 Cf. J. B. O. Landrum, History of Spartanburg County, p. 58. Cf. Dehn, German Cotton Industry, pp. 4-5.

        101 Andrews, p. 378.

        102 Ibid., p. 3.

        A Southern writer in 1882 said: "Capital and skill are the only things needed to make the South preëminently a manufacturing country and shrewd, energetic men from the East and from Europe are rapidly supplying the deficiency."103

        103 Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, June 3, 1882. "The Barnett Shoals have at last been purchased by Davenport, Johnson & Co., of New York, for $22,000, and it is thought that work will begin here in a short time. Athens is yet destined to be the Lowell of the South" (Athens Banner, quoted in ibid., June 24, 1882). "A party of New York capitalists . . . visited the Peach Stone Shoals in Henry County, Ga., a few days ago, and were so much pleased with the property . . . that they purchased it with the intention of at once erecting a cotton mill, to rank as one of the largest and best equipped in the South" (Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, March 1, 1883). Cf. Fredericksburg correspondence in Daily Dispatch, Richmond, Feb. 23, 1880; Charlotte News, Textile Ed., 1917, concerning Wayne Mill. The considerable Northern participation in Southern mill development, as in the Chadwick-Hoskins group and the Pacific Mills, came much later. Cf. Charlotte News, ibid.

        104 Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Aug. 5, 1882.

1880.105

        105 Ibid., July 15, 1882.

        106 Huntsville Democrat, quoted in News and Courier, Charleston, July 30, 1881. Similar bidding for location of a business designed to be set up in the South has been seen later in the case of a Philadelphia carpet manufacturer being brought to Gaffney, S. C.

        The pages of this study bear ample testimony to the power of a different group of promoters from those here mentioned, namely, the editors of Southern newspapers. Being peculiarly a public movement, the cotton mill development sprang in large part from the activity of the press. The "Federalist" did not fight harder for union than Southern papers, big and little, strove for industrial awakening in the eighties. By 1880 most editors knew that they were to follow DeBow and not Bledsoe, working for understanding between the sections and not separatism, for diversity and not narrowness of economic pursuit.107

        107 Cf. Dodd, in South in Building of Nation, vol. vi, p. 546.

        108 Mr. Hemphill declares this sentence "resulted in the conversion of South Carolina in less than the life of a generation into the second cotton manufacturing state of the nation. . . . " It is "by its statesmanship and largely through the work of its press" that the South has achieved progress since the war (James C. Hemphill, "The Influence of the Press in Southern Economic Development," in South in Building of Nation, vol. v, pp. 548-549. See this whole paper for interesting material). In 1880, in presenting a survey of the mills of South Carolina, Dawson wrote: "Ten years ago The News and Courier formulated what is now an accepted truth, in declaring that the remedy for commercial distress in the North and the secret of sure fortune in the South was to bring the mills to the cotton. . . . The belief was that the manufacture of cotton in a cotton producing State must necessarily pay well, by reason of the saving in the cost of the raw material, by the saving in commissions, and charges for transportation, by the saving in waste, in the rental of land . . . and in the wages to be paid to operatives . . . " (Leading article, published in Blackman). For an instance of how this idea was acted upon in Texas, see Manufacturer's Record, Baltimore, Nov. 23, 1882. Dawson stressed the slogan "Bring the cotton mills to the cotton fields" and associated ideas, "and kept hammering them, until some fellows caught the point and began to build mills" (W. W. Ball, int., Columbia, Jan. 1, 1917). Interviews with Messrs. James Simons and F. Q. O'Neill of Charleston and Tracy I. Hickman, of Augusta, bore out the same point. Cf. Kohn, Cotton Mills of S. C., p. 20.

        The very genius of the News and Courier was its editor, F. W. Dawson. The power he exerted could never be duplicated under any other circumstances than those of the South in the eighties. His inspiriting force can scarcely be overestimated. Born in England in 1840, he was drawn to the Southern cause and enlisted as a sailor on the Confederate vessel Nashville at Southampton the opening year of the Civil War. He entered the army and was promoted to the rank of captain. After the war he worked on Richmond newspapers before becoming one of the proprietors of the Charleston News; his editorship came to full strength when this paper was consolidated with the Courier.109

        109 Cf. South in Building of Nation, vol. xi, p. 271.

        110 Yates Snowden, int., Columbia, S. C., Jan. 1, 1917. I am indebted to Professor Snowden, of Columbia, and to Messrs. W. H. Parker, W. P. Carrington, F. W. Wagener and William M. Bird, of Charleston, for descriptions of Dawson. His picture shows rather curly dark hair, fine, searching eyes, fullish lips, long, somewhat irregular nose and a strong jaw--the face of a thoroughbred.

death, being murdered in 1889 by a physician whose office Dawson entered, it is said, in order to resent an affront to an Irish servant girl in his home.111

        111 If Professor Hart has reason for a late statement that the News and Courier "has for its stock-in-trade, ultra and Bourbon sentiments" and "represents an age that is past," such a comment would not apply to the paper's earlier history (p. 70). As a single illustration of its position in the South's critical years, articles written by a member of its staff and reprinted under the title "The Cotton Mills of South Carolina," in this study referred to as "Blackman," with a striking editorial from Dawson, should be examined. How dynamic was the paper's adocacy of industry comes out in the complaint of a manufacturer opposed to the use of the Clement Attachment (a machine which represented the extreme of the doctrine of "Bring Mills to Cotton" in that it accomplished both ginning and spinning), that "the newspapers are assuming a great deal of responsibility in giving it so much notoriety" (Blackman, p. 12).

        Dawson was not an orator, and had none of the flourish of Grady. Also because his attack was more direct and concentrated than that of his Georgia contemporary, he is not so well known now. Of Dawson as of Grady it may be said: "His influence in exciting hope and inspiring confidence in the ability of the South to cope successfully with her difficulties was immeasurable. . . . 'He did not tamely promote enterprise and encourage industry; he vehemently fomented enterprise and provoked industry until they stalked through the land. . . . '"112

        112 Dyer, in The New South, pp. 78-79; cf. ibid., p. 128. Grady gave as the text of the Atlanta Constitution: "If the South can keep at home the $400,000,000 it gets annually for its cotton crop, it will soon be rich beyond comprehension. As long as she sends it out for the supplies that make the crop, she will remain poor" (pp. 219-220). In this thinking, however, the News and Courier preceded the Constitution by ten years.

        The old Baltimore Journal of Commerce in February, 1882, began to devote some pages to industrial development in the South, changing its name to the Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record. In November of the same year the Manufacturers' Record became a separate paper, because "it has been demonstrated that there was an actual need for a paper which would adequately represent the

manufacturing interests and would keep abreast of the rapid improvement in the material affairs of the South."113

        113 Cf. Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Nov. 18, 23, 1882.

        The Manufacturers' Record caught a spirit which had its birth in the heart of the South; as its own words show, it was to "represent" and "keep abreast of" industrial development in the South rather than originate this in the first instance. In its best years it was a useful popularizer of Southern opportunities.114

        114 Cf. Hemphill, in South in Building of Nation, vol. vi, p. 539.

        A fundamental cause of the building of cotton mills in the South, really self-evident, was an awakening to the advantage of adding the profits of manufacture to those of production of raw material.115

        115 This primary consideration had been explained to an earlier unheeding generation. Gregg said that coarse goods mills in Massachusetts presented "a fact that cannot but strike a cotton planter with great force, viz: that 174 hands in 12 months, convert 4,329 bales of cotton . . . into cloth . . . thus adding over $40 to the value of each bale" (Domestic Industry, p. 27 ff.). "Have we not the raw material on the spot, thus saving the freight of a double transportation?" (cf. ibid., pp. 21, 24-25). It was shown a little later that Tennessee cotton planters made only 11½ per cent profit, while manufacturers of the same crop made 24 per cent, and it was asked: "Are there any so blind as not to see the advantages of the system?" (DeBow, vol. i, p. 126). A writer in 1866 quoted an advocate of the "cotton-field system" of manufacture of seventeen years before, who declared that "the spindles and looms must be brought to the cotton fields. This is the true location of this powerful assistant to the grower," and that to bring mills to cotton "is but one move, whilst sending the cotton to the mills is a heavy annual, perpetual tax," and proceeded to estimate how this could be cheaply accomplished (Barbee, The Cotton Question, p. 138 ff.). In 1878 total costs of manufacture in Lowell, Mass., and Augusta, Ga., were shown, leading to the conclusion that in freight, commissions, insurance and exchange the Augusta manufacturer saved $6.62 per bale over his New England competitor on goods shipped to New York, and $10.23 on those sent direct to the West. For Montgomery to double the value of its cotton in this way "is our right, and our duty . . . " (Berney, Handbook of Alabama, p. 271).

        The point on which we lay the most stress is that, to the extent in which cotton . . . produced in South Carolina is manufactured in the State, the whole of the profit upon that cotton, from the first stage to the last, remains in some form within the State for the benefit of its people. Where the cotton is produced here and manufactured

factured elsewhere South Carolina is in the position of furnishing the elements which make other communities rich; . . . we know that the wealth of New England is due to the profit made upon the manufacture of the raw material which the South supplies, and which the South . . . buys back from New England at a high price in its manufactured state.116

        116 Leading article, in Blackman. Besides many collateral benefits, the eighteen mills of the State converted cotton worth $1,631,820 into manufactured goods worth $3,932,150. An editorial headed "The Gold in Cotton," said: "At present Charleston does nothing to increase the value of the cotton which comes here for sale. It leaves us as it finds us. The city lives on the pickings and scrapings. . . . Cotton mills change all this. A bale of raw cotton, worth forty dollars, is spun into yarns or cloth worth eighty dollars. There is the usual profit in buying and selling the cotton, and, in addition to this, Charleston gets forty dollars a bale, which goes into our purses and comes out of the pockets of the persons who consume the goods" (News and Courier, Charleston, Feb. 2, 1881).

        A Southerner speaking at the Atlanta Exposition asked "by what rule of political economy should the Southern people send their cotton at an expense always deducted from its price, to distant sections and foreign countries to the spun and woven . . . ," and told his listeners that "Here the cotton grows up to the doorsteps of your mills, and supply and demand clasp hands. . . . "117

        117 Ibid., Oct. 10, 1881. " . . . every Southern man is sure to prove to you that it is a dead waste to ship raw cotton to a mill 1,500 miles away when it could be made into yarns and fabrics much cheaper in factories distant from the cotton field only a short half-day's journey for a mule" (Atlanta correspondence of New York Times, quoted in ibid., Nov. 5, 1881). Cf. Richmond Dispatch, quoted in ibid., March 25, 1881. "We have the raw material--New England takes it and augments its value by her labor . . . we, too, must endeavor to mix skill and labor with our raw material before letting it pass from our hands . . . " (Observer, Raleigh, March 2, 1880). Cf. ibid., June 6, 1880; News and Courier, Charleston, April 25, 1881. "Freights were high then; it was a great argument that we saved by manufacturing the cotton here and shipping the goods to the North for just what it cost to send the cotton there" (Charles Estes, int., Augusta). Hammett told a meeting of the South Carolina Agricultural and Mechanical Society: "The South is fitted for the cotton manufacture, which adds profits and value of labor to value of raw material," showed that the South had an advantage of 10 to 20 per cent over New England in the business, and counted the benefit to Southern communities through establishment of mills (News and Courier, Charleston, Aug. 1, 1881). "There is no reason why the South should lose the entire profit upon manufacturing cotton and be content to gain only the beggarly profit of producing it, while England and the North grow rich upon handling it . . . " (Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Sept. 2, 1882). Cf. ibid. for quotation of an expressive illustration of this thought; a labored explanation is given in ibid., June 3, 1882.

        No one did more to impress this idea upon the South than Tompkins; he presented it in primer-like plainness and from every angle. It is difficult to realize how far this was from a truism to the South even by the time he wrote and spoke.118

        118 An ordinary county producing 10,000 bales would get, at 6 cents a pound, $300,000 for its cotton; if sold as cloth at 18 cents, this cotton would bring $900,000. "Assume that this cloth was shipped to China instead of shipping the raw cotton to England and it becomes evident that the English cotton buyer sends here $300,000 while the Chinaman would send $900,000," and he showed how this $600,000 increment would be distributed; that, also, factories would bring other benefits by increasing the value of raw cotton and of farms, creating a market for perishable produce and affording diversity of employment to members of the community (Cotton Mill, Commercial Features, p. 16 ff.). Cf. Observer, Raleigh, May 19, 1880, in comment upon Winston and Durham. Cf. Tompkins, ibid., pp. 23-24, 177-178; History of Mecklenburg, vol. i, p. 24. Tompkins' ingenious little book, "Cotton Values in Textile Fabrics," is an object lesson on this point.

        The question whether the South should manufacture cotton or be content with cultivation of the raw material was made vivid by the opposition to Southern mills on the part of Edward Atkinson, of Boston. It may almost be said that he conducted a propaganda to show that the South should devote itself to raising, ginning and preparing the staple to be spun and woven elsewhere. A talented organizer of business, a not unkindly egotist, officious without being patronizing, gifted in social imagination, and one of the first New Englanders to concern himself actively in a public way with Southern economic affairs after Reconstruction, Atkinson sought, sometimes with semi-private purpose, to mirror the South to itself. The image he furnished, by its very distortion, assisted Southerners to a clearer view of their task. At that peculiar juncture in the South he was listened to attentively, and negatively and positively exerted a striking influence.119

        119 See Who's Who in America, 1906-1907, p. 54. The range of his writings, from the science of nutrition to the cost of war, indicates his ready versatility. He was frequently disingenuous, understanding more than he expressed, but his blunt force compelled notice.

        He enters this story when, at the invitation of leading men of city and State, he delivered an address in the senate chamber of the capitol in Atlanta in October, 1880, especially to explain his proposal for the holding of a cotton exposition.120

        120 Cf. Address at Atlanta, preface, p. 3.

        121 Ibid., p. 27, and preface, p. 4.

        In judging his statements it must be remembered that as head of factory mutual fire insurance companies, he was constructively representing New England cotton manufacturers. He said at Atlanta: "The true diversity of employment which makes self-sustaining communities consists of occupations that do not appeal to the imagination like the great cotton factory; but the artisans . . . who work in iron or wood, the stove-maker and the like, the furniture-maker and the tinman, the house-wright, the wagon-builder, the blacksmith, and the whitesmith are the most valuable citizens. The hundred arts that require but little capital and support many men are the ones that, next to the farmer, form the bone and sinew of society. When these are established, the textile factory may well follow, but ought not to precede in any large degree."122

        122 Ibid., p. 28. If factories there must be, then shoe factories required only one-third as much capital per operative as cotton mills.

branch of the cotton manufacture--that of ginning, packing, and pressing cotton for the use of the factory--must continue to be done in the South, and every million dollars spent in the right manner in this department will . . . do more to build up the cotton States than any million expended in cotton factories. It is in order that these opportunities for immediate profit may be made apparent that the cotton exhibition should be held."123

        123 Ibid., preface, p. 5 ff. Interdependence was the foundation of union between the sections. "The railroad has almost eliminated distance; and each section that serves the other best, serves itself also" (ibid., p. 8).

        124 Ibid., appendix, p. 34 ff.

        He said that Southern spindles could not keep pace with Southern demand, and so Northern manufacturers did not fear Southern competition; he did not see that this demand constituted an encouragement to establishment of Southern mills. He tried to scare the South by enlarging on the supremacy of the New England manufacture and contemplated extensions that were imminent.125

        125 Ibid., preface, p. 7 ff. He naïvely said it would be greatly to the advantage of New England manufactures "to have a solid body of men in the South interested like themselves in promoting better ginning, baling, and handling cotton as it comes from the field" (ibid.). He made suggestive allusions to possible unsuitableness of Southern climate for cotton spinning (ibid., p. 4 ff.). One would like to attribute to Atkinson nothing less than a national viewpoint in advocating Atlanta as the place for the exposition because it was in the cotton country where the preparation of the staple could best be urged; manufacturing machinery needed no encouragement (ibid., pp. 9-10). He tried to interest the South in the use of ensilage (ibid., p. 28), was working on employment of then wasted byproducts of the cotton plant (Bradstreet's, quoted in Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, June 3, 1882), carried attention to the soya bean (Southern Cotton Spinners' Assn., proceed. 7th Annual Convention, p. 102), said there would not be sufficient labor for cotton mills, and that people would prefer outdoor employment anyway (Address at Atlanta, preface, p. 5 ff.), and that even coarse yarn mills involved risks the South could not take (ibid., pp. 27-28). He asserted that the approaching exposition "should be rather with a view to the development of tools and implements for the cultivation and for conversion of the plant into its primary forms of fibre, seed, oil, oil-cake, paper stock, and wool, than with a view to the manufacture of cotton fabrics" (ibid., p. 22). Cf. Southern Cotton Spinner's Assn., proceed. 7th Annual Convention, p. 85 ff. The seal of the exposition bore a cotton boll but no spindle.

        When Edward Atkinson and a committee from the New England Cotton Manufacturers' Association visited the Atlanta Exposition the next year, an official statement of their impressions showed that they appreciated most those exhibits having to do with "ginning and preparing" the cotton, and declared the identity of interest between cotton grower and manufacturer were here demonstrated.126

        126 News and Courier, Charleston, Nov. 1, 1881. The advantage of sending cotton north in the raw state was implied in frequent assertions of Atkinson (cf. Address at Second Annual Fair of New England Manufacturers' and Mechanics' Institute, Boston, 1882, pp. 2, 27-28).

        127 News and Courier, Charleston, Nov. 8, 1881. Cf. Tompkins, Storing and Manufacturing of Cotton, p. 14.

        128 News and Courier, Charleston, Dec. 5, 1881. Cf. the writer's "Factors in Future of Cotton Manufacture in South," in Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, May 10, 1917.

        129 News and Courier, Charleston, Dec. 5, 1881.

        But the purpose of the South had solidified too much to be dissolved by such discouragement or neglect, and, as will presently be seen, an exhibit which was planned by Mr. Atkinson to be primarily agricultural, gave tremendous impetus to the manufacturing of cotton. Commenting on his

exposition speech, an editor said: "Mr. Atkinson is misleading only when invincible prejudice keeps him from seeing clearly, and even Northern newspapers admit that he is wrong in his belief that cotton manufacturing, on a large scale, will not pay in the South."130

        130 News and Courier, Charleston, Dec. 5, 1881.

        131 Ibid., Aug. 1, 1881. It is said that in connection with the founding of Hammett's Piedmont Factory, Atkinson wrote a notice showing how cotton manufacturing in the South could never pay. This came under the eye of Hammett, who pinned to the clipping his annual balance sheet, showing a profit of 20 per cent, and sent them to Atkinson (W. J. Thackston, int., Greenville). Atkinson never did really give up his campaign. In the section on cotton manufactures of the United States census of manufactures of 1880, written by him, and transmitted not until 1883, he devoted 6 of the 16 pages to the preparation of the staple, inveighed against bad ginning and urged upon the South opportunities for improvement. Twenty years later he was still on the subject of ginning in talking to the Southern Cotton Spinners' convention, but the revival of one of his Atlanta ideas (Address, pp. 18-25), namely, the folding of sheep upon wornout cotton uplands, met now with the retort: "Let Massachusetts successfully grow our 'fleecy staple' in her New England meadows before she advises us to raise Northern sheep in a Southern cotton patch" (proceed. 7th Annual Convention, remarks of B. W. Hunt). Some Southern manufacturers remember well Atkinson's position. "Edward Atkinson?" rejoined one of these, "He was the man that didn't believe in Southern cotton mills. He was one of the most prominent authorities on cotton in his day. He made himself very obnoxious to our folks by the way he opposed cotton manufacturing in the South. He just took the wrong turn on it" (W. R. Odell, int., Concord). And another, who had heard the Bostonian in Atlanta: "Edward Atkinson tried to have an influence in deterring Southerners from founding cotton mills, but we had our own ideas. When he talked to a reporter here against Southern mills, I replied to him in the paper" (Charles Estes, int., Augusta). The very exposition building, which Atkinson suggested might be taken away in sections to be used for ginneries or oil mills, was used on the spot as a cotton factory. On the gratuitous advice offered to the South "by those interested in preventing manufacturing development," of which Atkinson's must serve here as typical, cf. Thompson, pp. 62-63.

        The International Cotton Exposition, held in Atlanta in the closing months of 1881, occupies a significant place in the history of Southern cotton mills. It accomplished two things: first, it drew together the South's apostles of a new industrial order into confirmatory exchange of views and plans, and afforded concrete, tangible encouragement to already forming aspirations; second, it opened the eyes of the North to the field of investment that lay in the South, breaking down intersectional economic and political barriers of prejudice. From commencement of practical organization of the exposition in December, 1880, it was apparent, in prospectus and executive personnel, that it was to be a more comprehensive undertaking than Edward Atkinson had suggested. Having origin in his mind, it expanded and developed in the hands of others. New England cotton manufacturing machinery makers and mill engineers were included with Southern industrialists and publicists in choice of officials. Not only raising and preparing of raw cotton, but production of cotton goods, was to receive emphasis. The secretary said: "Machinery of all the classes demanded in cultivation . . . and . . . in ginning, baling, packing, and compressing raw cotton, belongs to the first division of machinery exhibits. The machinery requisite for manufacture of cotton, with the best form of mills, the most economical applications of power, and all the details of subsequent manufacture, constitute a great department in which there is a world of interest." The exposition would demonstrate generally that the South had a great future before it, and that, with assistance, it would become "prosperous in its own right through a liberal development of its own resources."132

        132 John W. Ryckman, in author's preface of Atkinson's Address at Atlanta, p. 4. Another connected with the exposition gave as part of its purpose: "To exhibit to the Southern people and to visitors from America and Europe the different processes in the manufacture of cotton from the boll to the complete fabric, and by the friction of competition ascertain the best methods and find the best machinery. . . . We people of the South should embrace every opportunity which . . . will bring among us intelligent and interested observers of our industrial condition, resources and aptitudes. We have in the midst of us the raw material . . . of a magnificent prosperity. We lack knowledge, population and capital. These may be slowly accumulated in the course of years, or they may be rapidly by well directed efforts to obtain them from beyond our own borders. We advocate the latter plan" (News and Courier, Charleston, March 14, 1881).

        That South and North were both ripe for the undertaking is shown by the rapidity with which it was accomplished. The exposition was opened in less than a year after first mention of it, in less than six months after real steps began to be made toward it, and in just 108 days after actual work of erection was begun.133

        133 News and Courier, Charleston, Dec. 5, 1881. An Atlanta cotton manufacturer headed the executive committee, a Vermont engineer was made chief of machinery, and agents made tours of investigation through the North and Europe. Subscriptions came simultaneously from North and South; General Sherman started Northern subscriptions with $2000 (ibid., March 8, May 3, 1881). On the opening day, Daniel W. Voorhees, of Indiana, spoke against free trade (ibid., Oct. 6, 1881).

        The Atlanta Exposition was not the inception of the industrial idea in the South, but rather its manifestation. It augmented rather than initiated a purpose. Had the South not known its own mind already, Atkinson's attitude might easily have narrowed the exhibits and diminished their usefulness.134

        134 A correspondent in a new mill community wrote: "It is to be hoped the Atlanta Exposition will not take all the enthusiasm out of our capitalists and enterprising men, but that it will only tend to a greater and more speedy development of our resources" (ibid., Oct. 21, 1881). "A good work has been done, the benefits of which will be felt in every part of the country. The New South takes a fresh start at the Atlanta Exposition" (ibid., Oct. 7, 1881). The secretary declared the exposition was pushed through hurriedly because "a knowledge of the South's resources was demanded . . . " (Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, June 24, 1882). Cf. ibid., Oct. 7, 1882. "The Atlanta Exposition . . . was the hopeful and conscious expression of the opening of a new era for Southern industry . . . " (see Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. vi, pp. 280-281). Visitors to the exposition "were convinced that 'an industrial revolution had actually been effected in the South . . . ' " (see Hammond, pp. 328-329). Cf. Copeland, pp. 32-33; Goldsmith, pp. 4-5.

        The timeliness of the exposition being apparent all along, its influence in stimulating cotton manufacturing and all

industrial development was quickly evidenced.135

        135 A manufacturer remembers that operatives from his mill who visited the exposition brought back small-pox, four hundred cases resulting. But Atlanta spread other and more salutary infection as well. Another's dominant recollection is that "they had a great deal of eastern machinery there, with men sent along to operate it" (Charles Estes, int., Augusta).

        136 Cf. letter of A. J. Russell in Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, July 15, 1882.

        137 "W. B. C.," in Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Oct. 7, 1882. David R. Francis ("The Influence of Agricultural and Industrial Fairs and Expositions on the Economic Development of the South since 1865," in South in Building of Nation, vol. vi, p. 568 ff.), does not mention the Atlanta Exposition of 1881, and apparently is unacquainted with its meaning. He attributes to the New Orleans Exposition of 1884-1885 a significance that belongs to the earlier effort. "Not all the books and papers and speeches that man can produce would do the South as much good in half a century as the single event of the Atlanta Exposition did last year. . . . The cotton spindles of the south will increase year by year until the river cities will resound with the music . . . and the old battle-fields are the scenes of a great industrial revival" (Boston Economist, quoted in Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Sept. 30, 1882). The whole lesson of the exposition was expressed when "the governor of Georgia appeared on the grounds dressed in a comfortable suit of cottonade manufactured on the premises from cotton picked from the bolls the same day in sight of the spectators." Cf. Goldsmith, pp. 4-5, on this episode and the influence of the exposition generally; U. S. Census of Manufactures, 1890, "Cotton Manufactures," by Edward Stanwood, pp. 28-29.

        Many of the exhibits were sold during the exposition, and orders taken to the amount of $2,000,000.138

        138 Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Sept. 23, 1882. In Atlanta itself in the year following the exposition two cotton mills began operations, one in the exposition building itself; plow works were greatly enlarged; a cotton seed cleaner company increased output; bridge builders extended their business; a cotton compress was erected; a company to manufacture a cotton planter commenced building; a cotton seed oil mill was erected and other enterprises went forward (ibid., Sept. 30, 1882). "In six months after the exhibition closed, $2,000,000 had been invested in manufacturing enterprises in that city of only 40,000 inhabitants, all of which was directly traceable to the exhibition" (ibid., Oct. 21, 1882). Cf. ibid., June 24, 1882.

the Atlanta Exposition closed, some of its exhibits were moved to Charleston and formed the nucleus of an industrial display there.139

        139 Cf. News and Courier, Charleston, Jan. 1, and for month of February, 1882.

        140 W. R. Odell, int., Concord.

        141 "The rapid development of the South in all her material interests has been the wonder of the age, and yet the past is but the harbinger of the future. Baltimore now has the opportunity of placing herself at the head of this grand Southern movement, and thus so closely allying herself with the South as to be ever afterwards the recognized centre of the commercial and manufacturing affairs of that section. Will she do it? The answer must come from our business community and upon it will depend the future of Baltimore" (Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Sept. 23, 1882). Cf. ibid., June 10, 17, July 1, 22, Oct. 1, 14, Nov. 11, 1882; Feb. 1, 1883.

other points at the South.142

        142 Domestic Industry, p. 30. He lamented that Charleston's large surplus of dormant wealth was not directed to internal improvements in South Carolina instead of seeking Wall Street (Speech on Blue Ridge Railroad, pp. 6-7, 29), and urged that limited liability be granted to industrial corporations which might thus lay small investors under tribute for the building up of the State (Propriety of Granting Charters of Incorporation, pp. 4-11).

        143 An earlier manifestation has been alluded to. "About 1833, following the agitation against the tariff, several companies for manufacturing cotton were organized from patriotic and political rather than from purely commercial motives" (see Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. v, pp. 321-322).

        144 Hammond, pp. 203-204. "Probably no better field for the exercise of such motives could be found than among the large planters of the South. Long accustomed to leadership in all the political, business and social affairs of the community, imbued with a spirit of helpfulness which their control over the . . . earthly desitny of others taught them to exercise during slavery days, taught finally by their own discouragements during the years of reconstruction how bitter is the curse of poverty, these men would not lack . . . the willingness to help their poorer neighbors along the road to . . . industrial independence." Murphy wrote that the Old South in the New South "chiefly . . . has maintained . . . the old sense of responsibility toward the unprivileged," and that it is this "quick sense of social obligation," this "local conscience," which has given "distinction and beauty to the allegiance between the aristocracy and the common people" (p. 16 ff.). "Coöperation . . . is the very spirit of democracy--concern for the common good, not only feeling that I am my brother's keeper, but more--I am my brother's brother. We have at last awakened to the fact that the whole is greater than the part. Too often heretofore we have thought of a social class, a segment of interests. . . . But a better day is dawning when we are alike embracing in our affections the whole people, the lowly no less than the lofty . . . " (S. C. Mitchell, in South Mobilizing for Social Service, pp. 50-51). Sir Horace Plunkett has recognized that the pioneers of England's industrial preeminence "have been often actuated as much by patriotic motives as by the desire for gain" (pp. 153-154).

that "they are not only demonstrative; they really care for one another in most affectionate ways. Helpfulness is not an act of conscience: it is an impulse."145

        145 Page, pp. 111-112. Cf. John Skelton Williams, The Billion Arrives, pp. 16-17; Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, April 19, 1917, suggestion for non-interest-bearing bonds to meet war expenditure.

        Understanding the straits of the South at the opening of the cotton mill era, the readiness of Southern men to realize and assume responsibility in public matters, and the spirit of social service which characterized the awakening to a program of "Real Reconstruction," one accepts as natural the fact that cotton manufactories were frequently motivated by the desire to help a community to its feet. Often this wish was joined, and very properly so, with usual commercial promptings, but sometimes it controlled alone.

        The organization of the Charleston Manufacturing Company with a purpose to give work to poor people of the city will be spoken of presently; this company gives admirable illustration of conception of a cotton mill with a plan of general civic betterment. It typified the concern of Charleston for the welfare of the whole State, a concern which, when finally manifest, answered to Gregg's utmost solicitude.146

        146 Such cities, in "the heroism with which they meet the daily and the extraordinary crises that time brings . . . leaven the nation of which they are a part" Hemphill, quoted in Kohn, Charleston: Condensation of Jubilee Industrial Edition of News and Courier, p. 15). Charleston invested in South Carolina cotton mills that surplus of bank capital which Gregg had seen going to other quarters, and was largely responsible for incitement to an industrial movement that witnessed the purchase of used machinery from mills at Newburyport, Mass., perhaps the very spindles that Gregg had pointed to as building up the New England city.

        147 News and Courier, Charleston, Jan. 27, 1881; cf. ibid., Jan. 28, 1881. One of the chief movers in this mill, when it had failed and manufacturing was to be revived in the old plant by a new company, received from a fellow citizen a note thanking him "in the name of the public generally, for being instrumental . . . in directing Mr. Montgomery's attention to the Mill. It means much for Charleston, and is only another of your constant and inspiring efforts for the public material advancement of our city. A hundred men like yourself would 'save the city.'"

        In 1868, Messrs. Sprague, Rhode Island manufacturers, undertook to develop the water power at Columbia, but failed; the property passed to the State Canal commission, and some Columbians contributed to the employment of an engineer to push the work. In February, 1880, the development was taken over by a firm of Providence engineers with a liberal State franchise, but this scheme also failed. When capitalists of Columbia bought the rights they set forth that "The work . . . is one of great magnitude and involves expenditure beyond the ability of this community. Nor is the interest merely local, but reaches out to every part of the State. We call, therefore, upon all . . . to take part in this . . . central development. . . . "148

        148 News and Courier, Charleston, March 25, 1881. Cf. ibid., March 18, 1881; Blackman, p. 9. "The capital, because it was the capital,was laid in ashes by Sherman's troops. In the person of Columbia, all South Carolina was ravaged. . . . The city which suffered so sorely may reasonably expect the just assistance of the State . . . " (News and Courier, Jan. 25, 1882).

        The inception of the first mill at Gaffney has been mentioned. This was distinctly a community enterprise, inspired and pushed through principally by one man with the object of the good of the little town. A Tennessee mountaineer, he had come to Gaffney working on the railroad, and stayed. There was little enough in the place to attract anyone, but he held high hopes for its development. His spirituel face with fine eyes, a dreaminess in his easy movements, a vigor that resides nowhere and everywhere in him, indicate how in spite of the most restricted resources, he possesses capacity that built cotton mills out of hand. As a contractor he was working in a mill village near his town. "At Clifton I'd see the hands paid off, the amount of money they spent. I was convinced that stockholders wouldn't go into

such a large thing unless it paid them to. The first weekend I could get away, I went back to Gaffney and had a talk with some of the leading citizens, and tried to and finally did persuade them that to establish a mill here would build up the town and pay good dividends." He was not discouraged that Gaffney had no water power like Clifton, and resolved to make steam answer. The head of a little bank was elected president of the mill company, $50,000 was subscribed to stock and a charter applied for. The local banker visited a New York bank to ask for cooperation, but returned deeply discouraged. Others lost interest, but the original promoter would not. He sought to interest the president of the mill at Clifton in the Gaffney enterprise, and received confirmation of his beliefs that he could succeed, but no active support. He next attacked the superintendent of the mill at Clifton, sat with him many nights to persuade him to come to Gaffney with money and experience and head the venture, and finally succeeded.149

        149 L. Baker, int., Gaffney.

        Notices of ceremonies held when a mill commenced operation convey sometimes touchingly the pride of a community in the plant and the public character of the enterprise. Townspeople were like children with a very precious new toy; newspapers described the arrangement of the machinery in the factory with the keenest interest.150

        150 Cf. Chronicle and Constitutionalist, Augusta, Feb. 23, 1882; Chronicle, Augusta, Nov. 11, 1883.

        The potency of associative effort, so marked in Southern cotton mill building in this period, overcame timidity that might have been prompted by a frank and individual canvass of attending economic facilities. "The mill at Albemarle, North Carolina, had its origin in the desire of the Efirds to have a mill at the town. Whether there existed real advantages or not, the people would make it appear that there were advantages for that particular location. Many mills were located at places where there was the spirit for them, rather than where they would be, economically,

most successful."151

        151 J. L. Hartsell, int., Concord. "But with any kind of management in the first years of their rise they made money, because there was no competition to require close figuring." Cf. Plunkett, p. 186.

        152 Summerfield Baldwin, Sr., int., Baltimore. A mill investor of long experience believes that "usually community good played a larger part than monetary gain in the founding of a cotton mill" (Theodore Klutz, int., Salisbury). "One mill would encourage another, but the greatest factor in the growth of cotton mills in the South was community pride" (C. S. Morris, int., Salisbury, N. C., Sept. 1, 1916). The story of the building of a mill in South Carolina, told by a participant, is typical. "The town had a population of about 2500. It was stagnant, on no trunk line of railroad. Perhaps only one man in the place was worth as much as $100,000. There had been talk of building a mill; a retired business man, with no manufacturing experience, had tried and failed. Mr. X., living in Spartanburg, had been in charge of a small iron concern. He was an experienced cotton buyer and, though not wealthy, had great ability. He came to our town and announced to gentlemen there that if the local people would take $75,000 in stock he would get up the rest of the money for a 15,000-spindle mill. This offered a ray of hope. This was throwing out a rope to us. Many men saw a chance of getting a job out of it. But in the town and county generally a tremendous effort was made. The largest subscription was $2000. By raking with a fine-tooth comb they got the pledges for $75,000. The average man at first didn't give a thought to dividends. He was thinking of building up the town. I was running a country newspaper, and took $300 in stock because I thought it would give me increased circulation and job work. Every merchant thought he would get some trade by it. There were some who hadn't even an indirect motive, who just wanted to see the town grow." And again, another said: "Captain S. E. White was about as near the type of the old plantation head as South Carolina has had since the war. He had 4000 acres under cultivation, under his direct supervision. Fort Mill was just a hamlet in 1887. He wanted to see it become a town, so he started a cotton mill in it" (William Banks, int., Columbia, S. C., Jan. 2, 1917). "Colonel R. L. McCaughril, a banker in Newberry, was the leading spirit in the town. He wanted to see the place grow, so he started a mill" (ibid.). The same was true of the Orr Mill at Anderson. Cf. Charlotte News, Textile Ed., 1917, respecting McAden Mills. "Town pride played an important rôle. The cotton mill was looked upon as a dynamo to effect changes in all departments of life in a community" (Sterling Graydon, int., Charlotte, N. C., Sept. 4, 1916). A commission merchant said: "As a rule the starters of mills got all classes of people to take stock. Usually eight or ten of the leading men of the town could be got to serve on the board--doctors, merchants, lawyers, planters. There would be one leading man who would take the thing up and push it through. He would come to see us. Everybody would want the mill" (Summerfield Baldwin, Sr., int., Baltimore). "What did the lawyer, doctor or fertilizer man know about running a mill? Yet it got to the point where, if he were prominent in the town and did not become a cotton mill president, he lost his social position. Of course, he couldn't do that" (W. J. Thackston, int., Greenville). George A. Gray, as a mill expert, organized and built some factories and managed them only until they were running smoothly, having been drawn in by an inexperienced community (G. A. Gray, Jr., and J. Lander Gray, int., Gastonia, N. C., Sept. 14, 1916).

        "A good deal of patriotism developed," said a not impressionable mill man, "and every town would vie with others in building mills. Some people took stock and sold it at a discount when it was apparent that the mill would be operated. They were willing to give so much to secure the mill for the town."153

        153 E. A. Smyth, int., Greenville, S. C., Sept. 12, 1916.

        154 In 1880 Camperdown was the only factory in South Carolina within the corporate limits of a city (Blackman, p. 13). But this, like the Enterprise Factory at Augusta, was on a water power (Augusta Trade Review, Oct., 1884).

        155 Cf. News and Courier, Charleston, Jan. 28, 1881. For the pros and cons of county versus town location, cf. Tompkins, Cotton Mill, Commercial Features, pp. 34-35. The building of cotton mills to help towns was entirely sincere; contrast Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. vi, pp. 273-274.

        In the case of some investors with whom assistance to the town was an indirect motive, the creation of a payroll,

putting more money in circulation, was the causal stimulus. An editorial recommended the Charleston Manufacturing Company "as a means of enlarging the common income. . . . The employment given to hundreds of persons . . . will increase the value of house-property at once. They who earn nothing can't spend much. It was calculated last year that every $228 invested in cotton manufactures in South Carolina supported one person. . . . It is evident that the building of half-a-dozen cotton factories would revolutionize Charleston. Two or three million dollars additional poured annually into the pockets of the shopkeepers . . . would make them think that the commercial millennium had come."156

        156 News and Courier, Charleston, Jan. 28, 1881. Leroy Springs wanted a payroll at Lancaster, so built a mill (William Banks, int., Columbia). "The thing that built most mills was the fact that the business men of the town wanted the increased payroll. There is an annual payroll of $2,000,000 in Greenville today, and it was this result to which the town looked in the establishment of mills" (W. J. Thackston, int., Greenville). A textile editor went so far as to say that "the principal cause of the cotton mills of the South was that the people had to be given something to do; it was desired to create a payroll" (David Clark, int., Charlotte).

        To give employment to the necessitous masses of poor whites, for the sake of the people themselves, was an object animating the minds of many mill builders. One does not have to go outside the ranks of cotton manufacturers to find denials of this, but a study of the facts shows how frequent and normal was the philanthropic incentive.157

        157 The genuineness of altruism as a motive in the Cotton Mill Campaign is supported by observation of Southern character in other particulars and especially as operative in this period. "It is only when a people, united by a common suffering and bearing a common burden, are overheard in their converse with one another, it is only when the South speaks freely to the South, that one may catch that real spirit of noblesse oblige which has so largely dominated the development of Southern life" (Murphy, p. 7). Answering the statement that North Carolinians were very conservative, an acquainted speaker recalled how one enthusiastic New England woman induced the State to spend for an asylum for the insane at one time a larger sum than the whole annual resources of the Commonwealth. "Our whole history is full of such incidents. Almost every noteworthy thing that we have done has been done in obedience to an impulse. Conservative? We are the most impulsive people imaginable" (Page, pp. 9-10). The South had recently gone through so much misery that the body politic was closely knit; calculations of commerce were for the time relaxed, and leaders were thinking for the whole people. Cf. Lewis G. Janes, "The Economic Value of Altruism," in Social Economist, July, 1893, p. 16. As to the effect of the Civil War in rousing the South to extraordinary measures, cf. Andrews, pp. 340-341.

will be noticed in another chapter how important with Gregg had been the plan to afford work to natives desperately needing support.158

        158 To the stockholders of his Graniteville Mill he said: "We may really regard ourselves as the pioneers in developing the character of the poor people of South Carolina," and he called the factory village an asylum for widows and orphans and families brought to ruin (see Kohn, Cotton Mills of S. C., p. 21).

        But it is not only the benefit to be derived in a direct manner to the individual manufacturer, that holds out a strong inducement to the South to go largely into the business--nor yet, alone, the prospect of enriching a community as a body. Motives of philanthropy and humanity enter into the calculation, and these should not be disregarded. This is a subject on which, though it demands attention, we would speak with delicacy. It is not to be disguised . . . that a degree and extent of poverty and destitution exist in the southern states, among a certain class of people, almost unknown in the manufacturing districts of the North. . . . The writer has no disposition to reproach the wealthy for the existence of such a state of things. He is well aware that it is the result of circumstances which have to them been unavoidable. But he cannot resist the conviction that, when a fitting opportunity presents itself to the wealthy men of the South to obviate these evils . . . and that even in a way to benefit themselves, they can hardly be held guiltless in case of refusal or neglect to apply the remedy.159

        159 "I . . . appeal to the planter of the South, as well as to every other capitalist. Let your attachment to your interest and the interests of the community, united with love for your species, combine to stimulate you to enter, with resolution, this field of enterprise . . . " (quoted in DeBow, vol. i, p. 241).

        Hammett, in his Piedmont mill of the seventies, very regardful of his responsibility toward his unfortunate fellows, anticipated by a few years the action of many factory projectors.160

        160 Samuel Stradley, int., Greenville, S. C., Sept. 12, 1916. It has been pertinently said of the years following 1880: "There was no thought . . . in those times, with regard to who should work or how many hours they should work. The problem was not one of seeking or creating wealth; it was essentially one of employment, of human welfare in the sense of providing instrumentalities by the use of which men, women and children could earn a livelihood. The exigent demand for the bare necessaries of life, which could be gotten in the cotton mills of that period only by the combined toil of the whole family, overshadowed all other considerations. Literally it was a question of 'bread and meat,' and the mills provided work for thousands who could not otherwise subsist" (R. Charlton Wright, in Columbia Record, Textile Ed., 1917). Cf. the writer's "End of Child Labor," in Survey, Aug. 23, 1919. "There was much in the humanitarian movement. People saw that the cotton mill man was a benefactor. Unlike the profit of the bank, his money went to feed the poor people. This contagion spread and had a great deal to do with the building of mills" (G. W. Ragan, int., Gastonia, N. C., Sept. 14, 1916).

advertisement soliciting subscriptions to stock, yet the Charleston Manufacturing Company frankly said: "The necessity of establishing manufactures in our city, not only as a profitable means of utilizing capital, but more especially for furnishing employment to many in our midst, has been long felt. To put this matter into practical operation, a few gentlemen applied to the last Legislature and obtained a most favorable charter. . . . "161

        161 News and Courier, Charleston, Jan. 27, 1881. One inquiring among surviving incorporators of this enterprise is told today that "our idea in starting the company was that there were many people here who wanted work, needed it" (W. P. Carrington, int., Charleston, Dec. 27, 1916).

        162 Observer, Raleigh, Aug. 24, 1880. "Aside from purely mercenary considerations," said an appeal to Charlestonians to take stock in mills at Columbia, ". . . is the incalculable benefit to be derived from the employment of thousands of unwilling idlers . . . in the State, the women and girls for whom it is so hard to find healthful and profitable work" (News and Courier, Charleston, April 13, 1881). It must be remembered that whites, particularly women, could not compete with negroes in certain occupations, and in "servile" ones would not.

        No undertaking was born more emphatically in the impulse to furnish work than the Salisbury Cotton Mills. All the circumstances of the founding of this factory were

singularly in keeping with the philanthropic prompting. The town of Salisbury, North Carolina, in 1887 had done nothing to recover from the war. It was full of saloons, wretched, unkempt. It happened that an evangelistic campaign was conducted; Mr. Pearson, remembered as a lean, intense Tennesseean, preached powerfully. A tabernacle was erected for the meeting, which lasted a month and, being undenominational, drew from the whole town and countryside. The evangelist declared that the great morality in Salisbury was to go to work, and that corruption, idleness and misery could not be dispelled until the poor people were given an opportunity to become productive. The establishment of a cotton mill would be the most Christian act his hearers could perform. "He gave Salisbury a moral dredging which made the people feel their responsibilities as they had not before, and made them do something for these folks. There had been little talk of manufacturing before Pearson came; there had been some tobacco factories in the town, but they had failed. The Salisbury Cotton Mills grew out of a moral movement to help the lower classes, largely inspired by this campaign. Without the moral issue, the financial interest would have come out in the long run, but the moral considerations brought the matter to a focus."163

        163 O. D. Davis, int., Salisbury, N. C., Sept. 1, 1916. Cf. Page, p. 12 ff.; U. S. Census of Manufactures, 1880, "Factory System," by Carroll D. Wright, pp. 4-5. The spirit of that evangelistic campaign still rests upon those all along connected with the enterprise. Mr. Davis remarked the fact that three ministers of Salisbury were prominently connected with the inception of the mill. One of them, Mr. Murdock, was its secretary and treasurer and later president. The first minute-book shows how closely connected were preacher and manufacturer, even in point of time. An account copied into it from the North Carolina Herald (the local paper) of Nov. 9, 1887, headed "The Cotton Factory," says: "Mr. Pearson, in a lecture yesterday afternoon, dwelt upon the fact that the great many poor . . . people we have here ought to be and must be helped not by gifts and alms but by a chance to make an honest living. That a cotton factory would be the remedy. Pursuant to these urgent appeals a large number of citizens gathered this morning in the Warehouse and organized by calling upon Rev. F. J. Murdock to act as chairman. . . . Mr. Murdock, in strong, eloquent, and earnest words pointed out that it had almost become a necessity to build a cotton mill here to help the poor whites, quoting the Hon. J. S. Henderson's words--that next to religion Salisbury needed a cotton factory. Rev. J. Rumple, D.D., seconded Mr. Murdock's appeal. He said that he knew so well the appealing condition of the poor whites of our town and that a cotton factory would be a sufficient remedy. Mr. I. H. Faust urged three reasons for the building of a mill. 1. Increased general prosperity of the town. 2. Benevolence and charity in giving the poor a chance to earn a living. 3. Cotton mills pay a handsome interest to investors." Others spoke of the profits of all Southern mills, of the health of Salisbury as an asset, and "Maj. S. W. Cole, the veteran advocate of cotton mills, spoke earnestly and fervently in favor of the undertaking." A committee appointed to solicit subscriptions met the same afternoon. Subsequent items show that by Dec. 15 organization was complete, some $60,000 having been locally subscribed, and a successful manufacturer in Concord, nearby, who was consulted in the enterprise, being elected president.

        One director was a minister; the others were pillars in Salisbury churches. "The mill was religion-pervaded from the outset." It was decided at the start not to have a company store, thrift has been consistently encouraged in the operatives, the mill has never run at night (Theodore Klutz, int., Salisbury). Especially through Mr. Murdock's influence, several boys growing up in the mill have become ministers (Charlotte News, Textile Ed., 1917).

        Mr. Murdock seems to have been the chief local inspirator of the mill at Salisbury; before the factory was built he had established a building and loan association. A very similar case is that of Dr. Jacobs at Clinton, South Carolina. He found that the sodden little town needed to have industry preached to it. He inspired a merchant to build a cotton mill, took the lead in urging improvements for the community, and succeeded in founding an orphanage, funds of which were invested in manufactories of Clinton.

        On the whole, North Carolina was probably later in responding to the philanthropic impulse than South Carolina. The local Democratic press censured a North Carolina congressman, an Independent, in 1886 for a speech urging mills as means of employment of poor people, because this was opposed to the interest of the farmer.164

        164 John Nichols, int., Raleigh.

        165 A. A. Thompson, int., Raleigh.

        As late as 1902 a representative manufacturer declared that although negro labor was feasible, abundant, and would be cheapest, the managements "have recognized the

fact that the mill life is the only avenue open today to our poor whites, and we have with earnestness and practically without exception kept that avenue open to the white man alone" to provide an escape from competition with the blacks.166

        166 See testimony of Lewis W. Parker, Hearing before Committee of Judiciary, House of Representatives, April 29, 1902, p. 11 ff. This statement would bear some modification today. Perhaps at the outset some saw in the cotton mills not just the means of immediate employment, but the first step toward a better grade of work. Until the present these have been disappointed (W. W. Ball, int., Columbia, Jan. 1, 1917). These well-wishers of the operatives have not been willing to accept continued evidences of philanthropy in welfare work for the more wholesome self-help to be gained when Southern mill hands, like successive generations in New England, assisted by a greater diversity of industry in the section, reach out to more skilled employments.

        It has been seen that the spirit for manufacture in the South was born pretty much irrespective of the direction which activity was to take. Bearing this in mind, if one were asked what inspirited cotton mills, he would probably answer first, "Presence of the raw material." There is everything to commend this reply. In the beginning Southerners did not reason out all the implications of their thus setting up cotton factories in cotton fields. If success attended the pressing present, this was enough. Moreover, New Englanders, as noticed in the case of Edward Atkinson, more able to calculate upon the future, sought often to discourage a movement which they realized portended danger for their section as the principal American seat of the industry, and in this way the outlook of the South was clouded. Ten years after the opening of the period, however, a writer could put the matter plainly, justifying the South's best hopes and rebuking New England's dissimulation by saying: "The ultimate transfer of the cotton industry from New England to the South may be regarded as an inevitable consequence of industrial development, which should be neither feared nor prevented. . . . There is no more reason why cotton cloth should be manufactured in Lancashire than why cucumbers should be raised in Iceland."167

        167 Social Economist, May, 1891, p. 152 ff. On the purpose of English manufacturers to build mills at the South, cf. C. C. Baldwin, quoted in News and Courier, Charleston, July 11, 1881. The South was not entirely without similar penetration much earlier. Of E. M. Holt, manufacturing in North Carolina long before the war, it is said that "To him it seemed a geographical and economical inconsistency and perversity that this staple should be carried thousands of miles from the place of its growth to be made into cloth, much of which was to be brought back . . . to clothe the very people who had produced it; . . . he foresaw that not Manchester, not New England, but the South was to control the cotton industry of the world" (Martin H. Holt, in Biographical Hist. of N. C., vol. vii, pp. 182-183). A New Englander said of the South, also before the war: "As respects all raw materials, especially that of a bulky character, economy dictates that, all other things being equal, they should be wrought on the spot on which they are produced. . . . There may be some exceptions to this rule, but . . . there is none in favor of the transportation of cotton to a distant market" (Charles T. James, in DeBow, vol. ii, p. 236 ff.). Cf. Olmsted, pp. 165, 542-543. Atkinson in 1880, though speaking especially for New England, really put the case for the South when he said that "the supremacy in the art of converting cotton into cloth must ultimately fall to that country or section which possesses . . . proximity to the source of raw material" (U. S. Census of Manufactures, Cotton Manufacture, p. 8). For clear statements in the South in 1880, cf. Blackman, p. 14, and prefactory leading article.

        From the outset, though, convinced of the strength of its position, the South put by hypocritical gratuities: "Sir, it matters not what anyone may say to the contrary, common sense tells us that other things--machinery, skilled labor, motive power, and facilities of shipment--being equal, a cotton factory in the midst of cotton fields must prove more profitable than the same concern a thousand miles from the base of supply could possibly be."168

        168 See Gannon, p. 6 ff. Later, Grady declared. "The industries of other sections--distant from the source of supply--may be based on artificial conditions that may in time be broken. But the industrial system of the South is built on a rock--and it cannot be shaken!" (pp. 206-207). Cf. ibid., p. 80 ff.

        169 Quoted in Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, Feb. 1, 1883. "The water powers are located in the midst of the cotton fields, from which a large part of the cotton consumed may be purchased direct from the producer and delivered at the mills. . . . A very material advantage is that it comes direct from the gins, is clean, has not been compressed for shipment . . . and as a consequence works here infinitely . . . easier . . . " (ibid., quoted in News and Courier, Charleston, Aug. 1, 1881). "Among the public enterprises which have been started in Memphis during the past twelve months none have attracted more . . . interest than the 'Pioneer Cotton Mill.' . . . With the great staple at our doors it does seem strange that it should be sent to the Eastern States or to Europe to be manufactured into goods that will be sent back here for sale at a handsome profit" (Memphis Avalanche, quoted in Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, Dec. 28, 1882). Cf. ibid., Dec. 14, 1882, March 8, 1883.

        Nor did some Northern papers at this time fail to recognize the superiority of Southern manufactories in possession of the raw material. "They have the advantage of cotton location, and, when they have secured new and improved machinery, will do an unrivalled business."170

        170 Manufacturer and Industrial Gazette, Springfield, Mass., quoted in News and Courier, Charleston, Feb. 3, 1881. "They can save freights, buy cheaper and hire cheaper labor. They save buyer's commission, and warehouse delivery and cartage, sampling, classing, pressing, shipping, marine risks, and freight and carriage to interior towns, which amounts in all to some seven dollars per bale. . . . This makes a tax of eighteen per cent which Fall River pays in competition with Columbus. . . . As yet the South manufactures principally coarser goods . . . but the time is not far distant when it will come to make prints, cambrics, laces, and all the finer qualities of staple goods." Cf. Philadelphia Record, quoted in News and Observer, Raleigh, Dec. 16, 1880. By 1882 it was being said that Northern mills must make fabrics of higher grade or go out of existence. "Much invested capital will have to be sunk, much good machinery cast aside, and much acquired skill regarded as useless; but there can be no wisdom in hesitating to make the sacrifice when the refusal to make it means ruin at any rate" (Textile Record, Philadelphia, quoted in Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Oct. 28, 1882). Cf. Boston Commercial Bulletin, quoted in ibid., Sept. 23, 1882; April 5, 1883.

        171 Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, March 29, 1883. Cf. a reference to a protest to the Massachusetts legislature against a 58-hour bill in 1890, in Social Economist, May, 1891, p. 159.

        Many factories were built right in the cotton fields, just

as saw mills are placed in the woods. The Woodlawn and Lawrence mills, at Lowell, North Carolina, even conducted their own cotton plantation.172

        172 Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, June 3, 1882. Several mills owned cotton lands.

        173 W. R. Odell, int., Concord. Tompkins built a plant at Edgefield, S. C., for which cotton was secured unpacked from the field (J. H. M. Beatty, int., Jan. 3, 1917, Columbia). Many mills are to be seen today standing in cotton fields (cf. Columbia Record, Textile Ed., 1916. Cf. ibid., as to Lancaster Mills). The Proximity mill, Greensboro, was named with reference to nearness to raw material (cf. James A. Greer, in Textile Manufacturer, Charlotte, Aug. 19, 1915). The treasurer of the company thinks proximity to cotton was the prime cause of the Southern industry (Bernard Cone, int., Greensboro, N. C., Aug. 30, 1916). Cf. Charlotte News, Textile Ed., 1917, advertisement recommending Monroe, North Carolina, as a location for mills because of excellent and abundant cotton of Union County; cf. advertisement of P. H. Hanes Knitting Co., in Every Week, Nov. 12, 1917, p. 15.

        174 Mississippi Beacon, quoted in News and Courier, Charleston, June 18, 1881.

        Founders of the industry and others expressed the preeminence in the mind of mill builders of proximity to cotton. "There seemed nothing else in the South for manufacturing to turn to but cotton."175

        175 James W. Cannon, int., Concord, N. C., Jan. 6, 1917.

        176 Tracy I. Hickman, int., Augusta, Ga., Dec. 27, 1916.

        177 Theodore Klutz, int., Salisbury. "The whole development was the result of the desire of the people to use their raw product" (William Banks, int., Columbia). "They had in mind all over the South the fact that the cotton was on the ground" (James Simons, int., Charleston, S. C., Dec. 27, 1916). "There came a different viewpoint. The old South was done away with. The problem was to utilize the thing nearest at hand to support a large portion of our people" (Henry E. Fries, int., Winston-Salem). "Other things were side issues. Proximity to raw cotton was the great advantage, as it appeared to us" (A. B. Murray, int., Charleston, S. C., Dec. 28, 1916). Some helps to development through this proximity were not foreseen by the first mill builders. Actual spinning tests of the staple may be made, instead of relying upon conventional grading (cf. Tompkins, Cotton Mill Processes and Calculations, pp. 4-5). Atkinson did not realize that in this way only mills in the fields could improve preparation of cotton for manufacture. Southern mills, moreover, may rely upon a reserve in the hands of farmers, and not stock up in the picking season as heavily as Northern factories. A few smaller mills even buy cotton as they receive orders for goods (cf. Copeland, pp. 182-183). Nor did the founders guess that supposed benefits of contiguity to cotton would vanish and actually turn out as hindrances. Where mills have concentrated, local cotton does not satisfy the demand. The local price is sometimes driven above that of spot in New York. Cotton brought from the Delta or other distant points bears a relatively or absolutely higher freight charge than staple shipped to New England or Liverpool. Also, the product must be sent north to market and, in most cases, to be finished. Any saving in purchase of raw material locally, amounting hardly ever to more than half a cent a pound, is about counterbalanced by freight on goods. When Southern mills were few and small, presence of cotton was a real asset, and product was often sold locally. Unless all forecasts are futile, the present is a "period of transition" for the Southern mills which will give way to more widespread distribution of plants (overcoming the singular disadvantage of some factories, such as those at Gastonia which can use no local cotton for their manufacture of fine yarns), to finishing of product at the South and the development of a Southern goods market, when old superiorities of location will reappear and prove greater than ever. (These points were substantiated by interviews with John W. Fries, Winston-Salem; George W. Williams, Charleston; Charles Estes and Tracy I. Hickman, Augusta; J. B. Cleveland, Spartanburg; Benjamin Gossett, Anderson; Joseph H. Separk, Gastonia. For fuller discussions see Copeland, pp. 36-37; Uttley, p. 39 ff.; Thompson, p. 271; the writer's Factors in Future of Cotton Manufacture in South, in Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, May 10, 1917; an excellently detailed illustration of drawbacks in regard to freight charges is contained in the petition of certain up-country South Carolina mills to the State Railroad Commission, Feb. 24, 1903).

        The causes of manufacturing development reviewed and others to be touched upon, sometimes exerted a secondary influence through example of factories already in operation, or even of old mills which had gone out of existence. The stimulus lent by the older establishments, those founded before 1870, was largely through individuals or families, was personal, not inspiring new erections at the hands of men not in some way connected with the original ventures; on the other hand, a mill built after 1880 often had a social bearing, attracting to the industry enterprisers and communities with no manufacturing tradition. Of course, there

were exceptions in both cases. Graniteville, more than other ante-bellum manufactories, possessed public significance; it is difficult to tell how far promoters of mills at Augusta and elsewhere knew Gregg or were trained in his factory, and how far they were inspired simply by the example of Graniteville.178

        178 Cf. Clark, History of Manufactures, p. 553 ff. The influence of Graniteville has been discussed more fully in the first chapter.

        The factory is said to have had a fifty-year record of dividends.179

        179 Tracy I. Hickman, int., Augusta.

        180 H. R. Buist, int., Charleston, S. C., Dec. 28, 1916. Local advocates of mills sometimes harked back to successes at Graniteville and Augusta (cf. Society Hill correspondence, News and Courier, Charleston, Feb. 23, 1881). Graniteville had personal ties with many later establishments. The grandfather of LeRoy Springs, pioneer manufacturer of Lancaster, was one of the organizers of Gregg's company (Columbia Record, Textile Ed., 1916). The projector of the Rock Hill Factory was the son of a Graniteville founder (William Banks, int., Columbia).

        Other old factories furnished more exclusively personal incentive. George Makepeace founded little mills on Deep River in North Carolina. Others, such as the Fries family at Salem, learned from him. Ante-bellum manufacturing of the Fries' was the forerunner of their post-bellum activities. The Pattersons at Roanoke Rapids were connected with the Fries family. The grandfather of a mill president of Raleigh had been a stockholder in two small mills at Cedar Falls, and knew Makepeace. The pioneer cotton manufacturer of Durham had clerked in the store at Cedar Falls.181

        181 A. A. Thompson, int., Raleigh.

        William Bates, who came from Slater's mill at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, was important because he influenced his son-in-law, Hammett, as has been noticed earlier. William Entwistle, an Englishman with textile training in Lancashire, worked in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He came South with the intention of farming, but entered Graniteville

as a section hand in 1869, then was at Langley and removed to the Great Falls mill at Rockingham, North Carolina, to become overseer of weaving. Great Falls was itself built on the site of the much older Richmond Manufacturing Company's factory. Mr. Entwistle has been responsible for much mill building at Rockingham and has given technical advice to other projectors, such as Mr. Cooper at Henderson. The Leak family, owning mills at Rockingham, two generations ago had the Richmond Manufacturing Company.182

        182 William Entwistle and T. C. Leak, int., Rockingham, N. C., Aug. 14, 1920. The Holt mills in Alamance represent distinctly a family development. Gray's apprenticeship served in the old "Pinhook Factory" has been remarked. The industry at Columbus owes much to the fact that before and during the war the place was "a miniature Lowell" (Observer, Raleigh, Sept. 10, 1880). The Lawrence (1878) and enlarged Woodlawn (1880) mills, at Lowell, N. C., grew out of the original plant of the company built in 1851 (Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, June 3, 1882). Clifton was descended from the older Bivingsville and Glendale factories (Blackman, pp. 10-11; William Banks, int., Columbia).

        Coming to mills which were patterns to communities rather than individual enterprisers, it is clear that Hammett's Piedmont Factory, projected in 1873 but delayed in commencing operation until 1876, was "a crucial experiment"; that in a real sense "the success of the mills of the South depended upon Piedmont, the initial business."183

        183 W. J. Thackston, int., Greenville.

        184 "The mills built in this locality about 1880-1885 were simply results of the great success made by the Piedmont Manufacturing Company. The projectors of these mills used no arguments different from those of H. P. Hammett" (James D. Hammett, int., Anderson, S. C., Sept. 11, 1916). Pelzer was an outgrowth of Piedmont, its founder driving over to look at the water power after an annual meeting at Piedmont (W. J. Thackston, int., Greenville). Following Hammett, Charlestonians had built mills in the Piedmont district. Explaining the causes back of the Charleston Manufacturing Company, one of its incorporators said: "We thought that if a mill could pay in the up-country, it would pay to build a mill in a large center like Charleston" (William M. Bird, int., Charleston, S. C., Dec. 28, 1916). And speaking of this enterprise, a local paper urged: "Let us realize that what is good for Charleston in this respect, is better for us" (Kershaw Gazette, quoted in News and Courier, Charleston, Jan. 31, 1881). Cf. ibid., Feb. 26, 1881, regarding mills at Augusta.

        When mills were erected in numbers, experience in these was shared with intending projectors. "In the Trenton mill we made a big success. It got into the papers, and I had letters from all over the country, even from Texas, inquiring about it."185

        185 G. W. Ragan, int., Gastonia.

        186 Theodore F. Klutz, int., Salisbury. "The Salisbury mill showed what could be done in the field" (O. D. Davis, int., Salisbury). Cf. Daily Constitution, Atlanta, Jan. 2, 1880, editorial "Atlanta's New Year."

        Most extensions of plants were of course outgrowths of successful experience.187

        187 Cf. Charlotte News, Textile Ed., 1917, respecting Erwin Cotton Mill Company.

        Depressed condition of agriculture during and preceding the early eighties was in a large way a cause of cotton manufacture. Unremunerative farming led to industry in two main ways: by putting those able to initiate enterprise on the search for new investments, and by throwing out of a livelihood those unable to make new opportunities for themselves. In North Carolina, a poor agricultural State anyway, the process was especially clear. Water powers were more profitable than land.188

        188 John Nichols, int., Raleigh.

        189 J. B. Cleveland, int., Spartanburg, Cf. Hammond, p. 80.

supply of surplus labor that had been of long standing.

        Low ebb of agriculture was inevitably expressed in low price of cotton, which directly and indirectly encouraged manufacture of the staple. Generally speaking, the number of mills erected has varied inversely with the price of the raw material.190

        190 "Low cotton meant an increase in the number of failed white farmers. This meant an enlarged labor supply. Low cotton also increased the feeling in the community that the town should be kept going by something else than bankrupt cotton farmers" (W. W. Ball, int., Columbia, Jan. 3, 1917). Cf. Columbia Record, Textile Ed., 1916, regarding Oakland Mills.

        Just before the war a bale of cotton was worth $40 to $50, and the cost of constructing an average spinning and weaving mill was $16 to $20 per spindle. With war, paper money and scarcity of cotton, the value of the bale went to $900, and soon afterwards mills were costing $30 to $40 per spindle. By 1880 cotton and mill construction had returned to the 1860 levels.191

        191 U. S. Census of Manufactures, 1880, "Cotton Manufacture," by Edward Atkinson, p. 8. The average annual price for middling upland cotton at New York, gold value, was 30.76 cents in 1865-1866, and fell, with irregular recoveries, to 11.24 in 1880-1881. Though bales were increasingly heavier, production of bales trebled in these years (cf. table from Bradstreet's, quoted in Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Nov. 4, 1882). As to alleged serious turning to manufactures in the South consequent upon low prices of cotton from 1839-1844, see Brooks, pp. 148-149; on the increase of spindles in the country in the twenties, similarly caused, see Hammond, p. 246.

        With crops constantly larger, it was seen that the South had reached the maximum quantity of cotton that could be produced profitably until world demand increased,192

        192 Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Nov. 4, 1882.

        193 News and Courier, Charleston, Sept. 12, 1881. Cf. Observer, Raleigh, June 12, 24; Aug. 3, 14, 1880.

be bettered was by manufacturing the raw product at home."194

        194 See Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg, vol. i, pp. 181-182. Another writer "remembers seeing five bales of cotton bring the owner only $104. Then the cry went up, 'Take the mills to the cotton fields,' and the people from the farms flocked to tend the machinery" (L. P. Hollis, in Columbia Record, Textile Ed., 1916). Cf. Brooks, p. 203 ff. An old ledger of the Sibley mill at Augusta contains memoranda of cotton bought at 4 cents a pound. For the benefits conferred on the cotton farmer, see an illustrative but not quite accurate statement in Tompkins, "Marketing Cotton," in Textile World Record, Boston, Sept., 1908. Cf. Sioussat, p. 228.

        Not only were cotton manufactures made a likely field of investment by low price of material through increased production, but mills rose with the wave of recuperation of business after the panic of 1873 and its following years of depression. Return to specie payments lent assurance, and the demand for cotton goods was brisk. The year 1880 opened very hopefully.195

        195 For the country it was said that "following the resumption of specie payments, which inspired confidence on all sides, and after the last of the United States called bonds matured . . . and when the out-turn of the harvest was pretty well ascertained, the whole scene changed: gold began to pour into the country, business increased with wonderful rapidity, prices of bonds, stocks and merchandise advanced by jumps, and the whole field of commercial and financial transactions was marked by a great rebound from former depression, which will be remembered . . . as the great 'boom' of the Fall of 1879. In 1877 the country appeared as an insolvent debtor . . . ; in October, 1879, it appeared as the same party with every matured obligation paid up in full, and with abundant capital in hand, rousing himself to engage in a new career of industrial prosperity" (Commercial and Financial Chronicle, Jan. 10, 1880). Cf. Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Sept. 9, 1882. For the South it was stated: "The year that is just finished will be to the present generation a red-letter one; for it brought to an end the long and weary period of enforced economy and restricted business that followed the panic of 1873, and put every branch of industry at work. Agriculture was encouraged in the west and south . . . the factories received more orders than they could fill, the railroads were blocked with freight, the mines were pushed to a greater extent than ever, and all other interests were quickened towards the end of the old year in a way that was full of promise" (Daily Constitution, Atlanta, Jan. 7, 1880). Cf. Observer, Raleigh, Jan. 2, 8, 15, April 24; Daily Dispatch, Richmond, Jan. 1, 1880; for a similar statement for 1882, cf. Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, Dec. 7, 1882.

since 1873 between two fires, but we seem to have emerged from that trouble now, and we are at present making handsome profits. If this condition of affairs continues for five years . . . we will make a heap of money. Everything has conspired during the last twelve months to help this country."196

        196 See Blackman, pp. 4-5; cf. ibid., p. 10. Some foresaw New England seizing fine goods manufacture from England to protect itself against Southern coarse product, but ultimately surrendering the whole industry more and more to the factories in the fields (ibid., p. 14, and leading article). Hammett was resolutely hopeful when leaner times began to be feared (cf. Daily Constitution, Atlanta, quoted in Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, Feb. 1, 1883). As to gain of American exports to China at the expense of English mills, cf. Observer, Raleigh, Feb. 14, June 19, July 25, 1880.

        It is scarcely necessary to say that expectation of profits stimulated the erection of mills. While always considered, the prospect of money gain in dividends was not always most important in the minds of factory builders. Sometimes projectors were able to estimate from proven experience of mills running in the South, but more often profits were argued from believed advantages of the section for textile manufacture. Most advocates shared their hopes openly with community or State; few followed a course of communicating a secret to hand-picked investors. Profits realized in these years will be discussed in a later chapter. Dividends of mills were regularly brought to public attention and calculations were printed to show how any properly managed mill could make money.197

        197 Cf. News and Courier, Charleston, Sept. 13, 1881; Observer, Raleigh, Aug. 26, 1880; Daily Constitution, Atlanta, March 18, 1880.

        198 Cf. Baltimore Sun, Jan. 8, 20, 28; Observer, Raleigh, March 6, April 24, 1880; Blackman, p. 15. By the end of 1884 less favorable conditions were at hand, but the Southern industry had received its impetus by this time.

in South Carolina, putting money in mills at a distance, showed more investment primarily for profit than did local districts.

        In some instances, ten years and more after the cotton manufacturing development commenced, mills were established partly to take advantage of cheap labor. This motive of exploitation was very different from the earlier desire to give the people supporting employment. It has been pointed out that there is a distinction between arguments used in promoting factories and the factors which have contributed to the success of the industry. When commentators on the mills say that their rise has been chiefly due to inexpensive labor, it is usually meant that this has turned out to be their chief asset.199

        199 Cf. Copeland, pp. 143-144; Murphy, p. 103; and the writer's "End of Child Labor," in Survey, Aug. 23, 1919. Of course, proposals by Northerners to erect factories in the South considered from the outset the advantage in, not any advantage to, labor. Cf. Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, Feb. 1, 1883; Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, July 15, 1882.

        200 Cf. ibid., Sept. 9, 1882, as to Columbus; Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, Jan. 4, 1883, as to Augusta. When it is said that "Without the canal Columbia would have had no mills" (Washington Clark, int., Columbia, Jan. 1, 1917), correction must be inserted that without the desire for mills there would have been no canal; it was constructed in the main after 1880. Communities wishing outside assistance frequently advertised their water powers (cf. News and Courier, Charleston, Aug. 17, 1880, assets of Oconee County). Comparatively late in the development, as in the case of labor, exploitation of water powers came to a leading place. Cf. Charlotte News, Textile Ed., 1917, regarding Roanoke Rapids; Columbia Record, ibid., 1916, regarding Ware Shoals. Speaking broadly, railroads have been responsible for the extension of the industry and the location of plants rather than for the inception of mills (cf. Columbia Record, Textile Ed., 1916, regarding Glenn-Lowry mill).

        Like some other causes, purpose of promoters to provide themselves with salaries did not appear in the beginning. Later, the practice is said to have been common, applying particularly to extensions with accompanying salary increases, or to projection of plants in new communities by an established manufacturer who wished money to come principally from local investors. The man who subscribed heavily to make positions for himself and members of his family had little in common with the founders of the Southern industry.201

        201 A. N. Wood, Gaffney, Sept. 13; Clement F. Haynsworth, Greenville, Sept. 9, 1916; August Kohn, Columbia, S. C., Jan. 5, 1917, interviews.

        A few mills were started because of desire to use idle land and buildings. Commencement of manufacturing in the building of the Atlanta Exposition is a case in point.202

        202 See News and Courier, Charleston, Jan. 14, 1882. The Arista mill at Winston-Salem put idle land in use (John W. Fries, int., Winston-Salem). Cf. Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Nov. 11, 1882, as to a project at Gainesville, Ga. When the development was well begun, plants of various sorts were converted for cotton manufacture.

        203 The case of the Region of the Savannah Colonization Assn. is noticed elsewhere. Bessemer City, North Carolina, was an instance (S. N. Boyce and J. Lee Robinson, int., Gastonia, N. C., Sept. 14, 1916).

        Exemption of factories or of new machinery from State or local taxation made more appeal to the investor as such than to promoters and shareholders participating in community enterprises; it was believed to encourage assistance from the North and counted with Southern founders who owned most of the stock in their ventures.204

        204 Cf. quotation from Bradstreet's in Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Nov. 4, 1882; Observer, Raleigh, Feb. 13, 1880; Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. vi, p. 282; Blackman, pp. 6-7; Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, Dec. 7, 1882; Baltimore Sun, March 4, 1880; News and Observer, Raleigh, Nov. 2, 1880; Kohn, Cotton Mills of S. C., pp. 99, 101.

        From time to time reference has been made to reported

intent of English enterprisers to exploit Southern cotton manufacturing facilities. An Englishman who, from being an operative in Lancashire, Massachusetts, and South Carolina, has become important in the Southern industry, said that while there has always been much talk of this, nothing ever resulted.205

        205 William Entwistle, int., Rockingham.

        206 George Putnam, a member of a commission firm in Boston, established Camperdown at Greenville in 1873; through its example this mill had some influence, and, with Batesville, taken over by Putnam in 1879, had only Northern capital (Mrs. M. P. Gridley, int., Greenville, S. C., Sept. 9, 1916). Converse came from New England to join the Confederate forces and was assigned to operation of the Glendale Factory; after the war, he continued to manage the mill, and conceived the idea of the influential Clifton enterprise (J. A. Chapman, int., Spartanburg, S. C., Sept. 5, 1916). Makepeace and Entwistle are other cases in point (A. A. Thompson, int., Raleigh). It is proper, also, to consider the services of A. D. Lockwood, mill engineer of Providence, who was employed by enterprises at the opening of the period. Cf. Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. vi, pp. 264-265.

        It is said that in Lancashire machinery manufacturers, commission houses and supply men have established mills with speculative purpose.207

        207 Copeland, pp. 317-318.

        208 J. L. Hartsell, int., Concord.

an impulse.209

        209 It is charged, however, that an industrial journal represented machinery manufacturers in more than simply an advertising capacity.

        210 He would be invited to speak to citizens of a town contemplating erection of a mill, explaining the broad benefits the factory would bring them and imparting as much technical information as they needed for organization (Sterling Graydon, int., Charlotte). Cf. Tompkins, Cotton Mill, Commercial Features, p. 25 ff.; Plan to Raise Capital, pp. 13-14.

        Following the war much new machinery was installed in New England. Southern mills with more than a local market, many of them overworked during the war and run down during Reconstruction, had to reequip or build new plants. This circumstance assisted the spirit for cotton manufactures.211

        211 Henry E. Fries, int., Winston-Salem.

        These, and others, were reasons why the industry came into being. In the subsequent chapters on Labor and on Capital it will be shown how the South carried out its purpose. The present pages deal with the actual rise of factories and aim to exhibit attending public interest as it expressed itself in the "Cotton Mill Campaign." The movement, it has been seen, had a definite beginning about 1880. The whole South not joining in right at first, it is difficult to say when the "drive" ended. Certainly by 1895, if not earlier, it had been demonstrated that the industry carried its own excuse for being, and nothing more than economic motives were necessary to its encouragement.212

        212 Better argument than the first appearance of the term is the clear implication of the News and Courier that, economically, the Cotton Mill Campaign began with 1880. It was said that Hammett ranked as one of the pioneers in the Southern industry because his Piedmont Factory was built before the opening of the Cotton Mill Campaign, and, in seconding his authoritative judgment, the paper took satisfaction in the practical undertaking of a program which it had long urged, and exulted that "seen in the cold light of accomplished facts, the enthusiasm of which some of our friends have complained, as carrying us too far, has not taken us a hair's breadth beyond the confines of solid business truth" (Aug. 1, 1881). Cf. ibid., April 25, 1881. Something as to the closing date may be drawn from the fact that in 1886 South Carolina repealed an act exempting cotton mills from taxation (cf. Clark, in South in Building of Nation, vol. vi, p. 282).

        Hammett, in 1883, to allay discouragement that had arisen in some quarters, made an explanation that exhibits the Cotton Mill Campaign: "A state of things has developed which many of us expected to see, and which was inevitable. Too many yarn mills have been built in the last two or three years all over the South from Virginia to Mexico, and as a consequence the market for coarse yarn is overstocked. . . . They were built for the most part by inexperienced men, taken from other pursuits, without any experience or knowledge of the business, badly built, the cheapest machinery put into them, with no scientific system for doing the work intended, many of them without sufficient capital to pay for them when they were completed."213

        213 "They made poor yarn, which they pledged for the money to operate them, which was of course sold to realize, for such prices as were offered, and when the yarn was thus slaughtered it made a price for them and others to sell by, and it is not strange that they made little money." Most of them made more, however, than Northern mills (quoted from Atlanta Constitution, in Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, Feb. 1, 1883).

        214 " . . . more mills have been projected than have been built; more have been erected which their projectors would not have erected had they studied the matter carefully before entering upon the experiment. But the failures have been few, and upon the whole the return upon investment in Southern cotton mills has exceeded that upon factories in the North" (see U. S. Census of Manufactures, 1900, "Cotton Manufacture," by Edward Stanwood, pp. 28-29). An instructive table shows that Southern spindles increased from 610,000 in 1880 to 1,756,000 in 1890, reached more than 2,000,000 by 1892 and more than 4,000,000 by 1900. From 1880 to 1883, 450,000 new spindles were put into operation. Taking 10,000 for the average-sized mill, this means that three years saw 45 factories opened (ibid.). Cf. Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, June 10, 1882, introduction to column headed "Manufacturing." On Aug. 26, eight items out of thirty-six dealing with manufactures were about cotton mills; this was typical. Cf. ibid., Sept. 2, 9, 1882; Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, Jan. 11, Feb. 8, 1883; News and Courier, Charleston, July 30, 1881; Augusta Trade Review, Oct., 1884; Thompson, p. 73. "The South burst into the development; mills grew up like mushrooms" (Summerfield Baldwin, Jr., int., Baltimore, Md., Jan. 8, 1917).

        An impressive interpretation of the English industrial revolution has shown that while it began through invention, invention alone would have taken generations to establish the different regime. The philosophy of Adam Smith and the moral impulses imparted by the Wesleys and Hannah More joined with the work of Watt to speed the process. "It required all the forms--physical, mental, commercial, and philanthropical--working in separate yet convergent lines, to lay the foundation of an entirely new system of manufactures. . . . "215

        215 See U. S. Census of Manufactures, 1880, Factory System of U. S., pp. 4-5.

        216 Cf. Ingle, pp. 72-73.

        217 Cf. Murphy, pp. 17-18. The volitional quality of the campaign appears in contemporary references to it as an "experiment." Cf. Plunkett, p. 170. Industrial advantage. arguing from the past, seemed to be on the side of water power; the wish was sometimes father to the thought in reasonings for steam power to be used at towns not on streams but which wanted mills. Cf. News and Courier, Charleston, March 26, April 25, 29, 1881. In many ways the Cotton Mill Campaign was a romantic movement, resulting in spindles instead of sonnets. There had been intense public interest in the Pacific railway, stretching across a desert to guarantee the Union's integrity (cf. Dunning, pp. 144-145). The South felt a homogeneity in making cotton mills rise from an industrial wilderness.

of the movement and were jealous that it should have no backsets. "The State cannot afford a single failure in her cotton mill campaign . . . ,"218

        218 "Enquirer," in News and Courier, Charleston, April 29, 1881.

        219 Hammett, in ibid., Aug. 1, 1881.

        Few episodes are more illustrative of the wholeheartedness and wisdom with which the South entered upon the Cotton Mill Campaign than that of the Clement Attachment. This was a device that combined ginning and spinning in one process; it was small, cheap, and made a limited amount of yarn. Recommended for the use of planters, its employment would represent the first step from agriculture into industry. When Southerners were beginning to think of cotton manufacturing there was eager, widespread inquiry as to this equipment, and it was put into operation in some places. But it was not tarried over long--it was recognized as a makeshift, a partial solution which did not satisfy the purpose for a real industrial development.220

        220 An enthusiastic forecast missed fire in asserting "we shall have in a half century some scribbing journalist of the future writing the gossips of the invention of the Clement Attachment--which will by that time have worked greater revolutions in the South than the cotton gin has done in the past half century!" (Daily Constitution, Atlanta, Feb. 6, 1880). Cf. ibid., Jan. 2, Feb. 20, 1880. Blackman solicited many opinions about it, and received generally unfavorable replies; cf. especially pp. 17-18, showing to what pains enterprisers from all parts of the South went to examine the machine; cf. News and Courier, Charleston, Feb. 26, May 26, 1881; Observer, Raleigh, Jan. 31, 1880. Nor was the South, when the Cotton Mill Campaign began to gather momentum, greatly regardful of outside comment; answerable to the faith that was in them, papers printed onlookers' discouraging and heartening references with like composure. Cf. letter of Robert P. Parker to New York Sun, quoted in Daily Constitution, Atlanta, Feb. 13, 1880, and quotation of Detroit Free Press in Observer, Raleigh, Aug. 31, 1880.

        The spirit of the movement for factories may best be

caught in newspaper items. These appeared constantly and in numbers, in county and city papers, and there was a lively exchange of such information between publications. Any news bearing upon industry, particularly cotton manufacture, was put to service. The following is a characteristic heading: "The Straws that Show! Indications of the Way the Wind is Blowing. The Latest Movements in the Cotton-Mill Campaign." And there follow notices of the receipt of machinery by Clifton mill and praise from Boston of the efficiency and profitableness of factories at Columbus.221

        221 News and Courier, Charleston, March 22, 1881.

        222 News and Courier, Charleston, Jan. 12, 1882. News of mills from a distance, too, was frequent; it was noticed that enterprises at Wesson, Miss., were paying handsomely, that a mill building was constructing at Natchez, that companies were organizing at Vicksburg and New Orleans; when a mill at Nashville declared a 14 per cent dividend another was built; mills at Pulaski, Tenn., were anxious to double their capacity; $50,000 was subscribed for a plant at Jackson, Tenn.; Dallas was starting a $200,000 factory and Sherman wanted a $75,000 mill (ibid., Aug. 12, 1881).

        223 Winston Leader, quoted in Observer, Raleigh, June 17, 1880. "The Statesville Landmark, with its characteristic level-headedness, calls for the building of manufactures. With this would come commercial strength for our beloved South" (News and Observer, Raleigh, Dec. 12, 1880)

the Newberry News suggests that the buildings at Helena might be easily converted into a cotton factory."224

        224 News and Courier, Charleston, March 22, 1881.

        It was reported that "the 'Cotton Mill Campaign' is progressing satisfactorily in Yorkville. We heard an old citizen remark some days ago that he had never seen the town so thoroughly aroused and united. . . . Yorkville to all appearances is moving forward with a determined purpose to put into successful operation a cotton mill. . . . The shares have been placed at $500 each, and up to this writing about $25,000 have been subscribed. I would state that this amount has been raised within the limits of the town."225

        225 News and Courier, Charleston, March 25, 1881. "The signers to the prospectus of the mill are among the most reliable and responsible men in York County" (ibid., March 31, 1881).

        226 News and Courier, Charleston, Feb. 23, 1881. "One gentleman at Griffin, Ga., offers to subscribe one-fourth the amount necessary to build a cotton factory" (ibid., March 25, 1881).

        227 News and Courier, Charleston, Feb. 26, 1881. Cf. ibid., Jan. 9, 1882, as to Fort Mill. From Marion came this notice: "Our wants: A bank, an academy, a cotton factory, a comfortable room for passengers at the depot, an iron foundry . . . " (ibid., Feb. 22, 1881). "There is not a cotton factory at Raleigh, but there are not less than five large planing mills, two foundries, two boiler factories . . . ," and newspapers and schools are mentioned (ibid., Jan. 26, 1881). Cf. as to Henderson, Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Oct. 14, 1882.

        Town pride expressed itself in keen rivalry. "One little place would have a mill, and its neighbors would say: 'Here,

we can't let that town get ahead of us. We must start a cotton mill.' "228

        228 Henry E. Litchford, int., Richmond, Va., Aug. 29, 1916.

        229 Benjamin Gossett, int., Anderson, S. C., Sept. 11, 1916. A promoter, by visiting other mills, assured himself of the profitableness of an enterprise in his town: "Will a mill pay in Sumter? Why not? Every mill I visited had to pay $2 per cord for wood--it will cost less here in Sumter. . . . Every one of the mills received their cotton in bales . . . at a loss of $1.90 to $2 per bale on bagging and ties. A factory in Sumter can use at least one-third of cotton without being packed . . . " (quoted from Sumter Southron, in News and Courier, Charleston, March 31, 1881). Many out of the way places came into notice through erection of cotton mills that would never otherwise have been heard of; ventures in every part of the South, small and large, visionary or likely to mature, were not only chronicled, but were watched in their development from week to week. Interesting references, similar to those given already, may be found in News and Courier, Charleston, Jan. 4, 6, 21, 26, Feb. 3, 24, 26, March 23, April 6, May 21, Sept. 1, Oct. 21, 1881; Deutsche Zeitung, Charleston, Feb. 28, 1881; Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, June 3, Aug. 26, Sept. 2, 23, 30, Nov. 18, 1882; Observer, Raleigh, Jan. 2, Feb. 20, 1880; News and Observer, Raleigh, March 18, Sept. 15, 18, Oct. 12, Dec. 24, 1800; Baltimore Sun, Jan. 20, 1880.

        It has been said that the Charleston Manufacturing Company, in all but its ill success, was the type enterprise of the Cotton Mill Campaign. It was peculiarly the child of the slogan, "Bring the Mills to the Cotton."230

        230 Little memorandum books informally kept by officers of the company covering organization, building and operation, show with what inexperience and yet with what genuinely affectionate solicitude this project was undertaken and followed through the seven years of its luckless career. A flyleaf gives: "Facts & Figures relating to the Charleston Mfg. Co. Born March, 1881; died Feby., 1888, leaving a large circle of disconsolate stockholders to mourn their loss. 'Requiescat in Pace,' " and there is the significant addition: " 'Bring the Mills to the Cotton.'--News and Courier" (Punctuation is the writer's). Dawson, editor of the paper, was one of the incorporators.

        231 "Charleston is in a fair way to have two large cotton factories in a short while. . . . Camden is preparing for a cotton factory. Hodges . . . is preparing for a cotton factory. Rock Hill has a cotton factory. Greenville has several cotton factories. Newberry, the best location for a factory in the State, and the place most needing one, is not preparing for a cotton factory, and there is no present likelihood that she ever will. . . . There are numbers of people ready to aid in the enterprise . . . but there is nobody to take the lead" (Newberry Herald, quoted in News and Courier, Charleston, Feb. 8, 1881). It was not long before a citizen of Newberry did take the lead in erecting a cotton mill. "Why does not Fairfield make the experiment? It is said that fifteen thousand dollars will set in motion over five hundred spindles, and continual additions can be made. . . . The way to begin the new era is to erect a small factory in every county, and then to improve as facilities increase. Imagine Fairfield converting her eighteen or twenty thousand bales of cotton into yarn or cloth each year, and realizing a double price. If we can do no better let us spin a hundred bales at first. . . . Shall the effort be made, or shall other counties, once far behind us in wealth, take the lead and rapidly outstrip us?" (Winnsboro News, quoted in ibid.). The Barnwell Sentinel approved Charleston's course, and the Keowee Courier said Charleston had set the entire state an example (ibid.).

of the taking of subscriptions and of erection of the plant was watched with the most absorbed interest.232

        232 Cf. News and Courier, Charleston, Feb. 1, March 16, 28, April 9, July 6, Sept. 2, 1881; Jan. 14, 1882; Deutsche Zeitung, Charleston, March 21, 1881. At the same time a movement among German citizens of Charleston to establish a cotton mill with $100,000 capitalization got as far as application for a charter, but apparently no farther. Cf. News and Courier, Charleston, Jan. 27, March 30, May 4, 23, 1881, Deutsche Zeitung, Charleston, March 31, April 21, 1881.

        The speed with which companies were organized and plants erected was significant of impatience to be at the task that invited. The company that erected the Huguenot Mill at Greenville formed February 10, 1881; a charter was obtained March 13; a lot was bought in the heart of the city and the first brick was laid March 23, the last June 2; by July 22 the machinery was in place and the mill was weaving cloth.233

        233 Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, Oct. 28, 1882. "Inside of four months from the commencement of the building, the mill was in operation and the capital invested yielding returns to its owners." A mill at Rome, Ga., the cornerstone of which was laid in June, was to be in operation in November (ibid., June 17, 1882). From the organization of Pelzer to completion of the initial plant, including development of the water power for two later factories, required fourteen months (E. A. Smyth, int., Greenville, Sept. 12, 1916). Cf. News and Courier, Charleston, March 25, May 18, Sept. 10, 1881.

        At the same time that new enterprises outright were being undertaken, old mills were being greatly enlarged or

equipped with new machinery, plants were changing hands, those that chanced to burn were promptly rebuilt, factory projects that had lapsed were revived and pushed to completion, buildings were converted from other uses to be cotton manufactories, places which had previously had mills reestablished them. Low prices brought by some factories early in 1880 contrasted with the profitableness of the industry a few months later and indicate how suddenly cotton manufacturing burst upon the South; small ventures which had had a chequered career, doing a small business and frequently failing, were taken by progressive managements that made them over and put new life into them.234

        234 Cf. Daily Constitution, Atlanta, Jan. 20, Feb. 29, 1880; Baltimore Journal of Commerce and Manufacturers' Record, July 15, Sept. 16, 1882; News and Courier, Charleston, Feb. 18, March 4, Aug. 19, Dec. 14, 1881; Augusta Trade Review, Oct., 1884; Kohn and Berry, Descriptive Sketch of Orangeburg, 1888, p. 12.

CHAPTER III
THE LABOR FACTOR

        The story of the rise of cotton mills in the South is a human story. Loyalty, love, purpose, charity, hope and faith are so intertwined with the specifically economic motive as to be inseparable from it. This is true of the narrative in all of its aspects. England may be said to have launched upon her Industrial Revolution unawares. "With the South the movement was conscious, distinctly marked in its commencement in the minds and hearts of the people." In Britain the human problems came as a consequence of the development; in the South they emerged with it and remained, for a long period at least, coeval with the industrial advance."

        In this view, one would naturally expect the business impulse to be less dominant in the labor factor than in other particulars, but it is singularly characteristic of the inception of the Southern cotton mills that other phases of the history, as for example the activities of entrepreneurs and the securing of capital, were as much bound up with the essential aspirations of the section as was the participation of men, women and children as operatives. Even machinery was wrapped with idealism and devotion. As the industry has succeeded, with the passing of years there has been a separation of the economic and humanistic elements so intermixed at its beginning; the opaque solution has been clarified by precipitation. Forces that were unified at the outset have developed contrary directions and have shown unequal power.

        The story of the workpeople has become less and less the story of the employers. Just as the erection of plants, once the object of close concern on the part of a whole community, has changed to a technical problem, and just as the monetary operations of the companies, forty years ago part

and parcel of the public life, have narrowed to their purely financial qualities, so divergent interests of capital and labor have emerged. In a region as newly industrial as the South, this has brought questions broadly and acutely social. In this study of the infancy of the manufacture, it is not attempted, except sketchily, to trace the lines of later development.

        The part played by labor in the rise of the mills cannot be understood unless it is recognized that the white population of the South is homogeneous and has always been so. There is no distinction in blood between employers and employees. The inauguration of the industry, in point of capital and labor alike, took place within the Southern family. It made for an intimacy which at first rendered impossible and which continues to retard division between factory owners and workers according to economic interest. The settlers of the South were of the same strains and possessed the same characteristics. For an initial period they moved along the same occupational lines. The invention of the cotton gin placed slavery in the ascendant. Cotton cultivation became dominant. The healthy industrial impulse which had shown itself gave way before agriculture. The gin, slavery and cotton formed the wedge that pried a unified population apart. Landowners stood separated from the propertyless; as industry could not compete with agriculture, so those without farming land could not compete with slave labor.

        The "poor whites" were dispossessed, not only of progressive occupation, but of participation in the larger life of the section. From the time that cotton began to control until after the period of Reconstruction, these people lapsed into the background.1

        1 Cf. Tompkins, in South in Building of Nation, vol. vi, p. 58. "There is no difference in blood or heritage between them [the operatives] and the mill managements. . . . " It is interesting to see how a writer in 1809, regretting the exclusion of propertyless whites through the cultivation of indigo and rice, welcomed the new cotton farming as bringing these people back to economic participation, little knowing how cotton itself would soon work their vaster ruin: "By the introduction of the new staple the poor became of value, for they generally were or at least might be elevated to this middle grade of society. Land suitable for cotton was easily attained. . . . The culture of it might be carried on profitably by individuals or white families without slaves, and afforded employment for children whose labor was of little or no account on rice or indigo plantations. . . . The poor having the means of acquiring property without the degradation of working with slaves, had new and strong incitements to industry. From the acquisition of property the transition was easy to that decent pride of character which secures from low vice, and stimulates to seek distinction by deserving it. . . . In estimating the value of cotton, its capacity to incite industry among the lower classes of people, and to fill the country with an independent industrious yeomanry, is of high importance. It has had a large share in moralizing the poor white people of the country" (Ramsay, History of South Carolina, quoted in Scherer, pp. 170-171). As it turned out, cotton in another phase, in manufacture, as William Gregg observed nearly fifty years later, was the means of "developing the character of the poor people of South Carolina." The mills, however, have dangers of being harmful in their evolution as they were helpful in their inception, if they are allowed to be an economic pressure instead of stimulus.

        When the "poor whites" entered the mills, they reentered the life of the South. As cotton culture had blocked progress, so cotton mills, while not dispelling the certainty of painful readjustments, opened the way to a rational economic future.

        The settlers of the South were mainly English, German, Swiss, French Huguenot and Scotch-Irish. They were able pioneers--hardy, industrious, independent, self-sufficient. They desired to have their own religions and to maintain their political and economic freedom. Whether from the Barbadoes, from New England, Pennsylvania, Virginia; whether Moravians setting up their churches and industries; whether Highlanders loyal to the Stuarts and fleeing Scotland by shiploads after the battle of Culloden, they blended to make a stock which has no superior.2

        2 Material as to the blood-strains in the Southern white population is plentiful. The following references are convenient ones, and in several instances give illustration of the character and early life of the people: Tompkins, ibid., and History of Mecklenburg, vol. i, pp. 4-6, 14-15, 18-19, 97-98; Thompson, pp. 17-18, 20-22; Hart, p. 32. County and State histories are helpful in this connection.

        The term "poor white" is not easily defined, although every Southerner knows pretty accurately what it means. Writers, some through carelessness and others after better

consideration, are mainly at variance on three points. The first is whether there was and continues to be a difference in essential character between the indigent classes in the mountains and foothills and in the low country; second, whether the name "poor whites" is applicable to both of these groups; third, whether there was a middle class in the South, at and before the period of mill building, which was to be distinguished from the lowest stratum of population.

        Fortunately for purposes of illustration, observations of writers anywhere from about 1840 forward can be used, because the character of the people from whom factory hands were recruited did not change materially from the time that cotton became king until their ranks had become greatly thinned by influx to the mills.

        One who employed broad terms spoke of the "non-slaveholding white men . . . outside the essential councils of the South," who "stood aloof; they were supposed to follow where others led,"3

        3 Murphy, pp. 14-15.

        4 Ibid., pp. 104-105. Cf. ibid., p. 103, and Phillips, in South Mobilizing for Social Service, p. 567.

        Mr. Thompson asserts a difference between the indigent whites of the mountains and those nearer the middle portion of North Carolina, saying that in the extreme west the inhabitants in 1860 lived the same primitive lives as their grandfathers, while unpropertied whites in the Piedmont were not socially distinguished from their more fortunate neighbors until a late date. White men would often assist a landowner whose slaves were insufficient, at such times sleeping in his house and eating at his table. "Indeed, it is not too much to say that the Piedmont section of North Carolina was more nearly a social democracy after 1840 than were the manufacturing sections of New England, where by that date there was a well-defined manufacturing aristocracy." The Civil War, however, marked the commencement

of the increase of tenant farmers and sharecroppers with consequent class cleavage. Those afterwards in very poor circumstances had been closely associated in general estimation with the small traders and professional men.5

        5 Thompson, p. 99 ff. Early title deeds show the settlers in the Piedmont of North Carolina to have been weavers, joiners, coopers, wheelwrights, wagon makers, tailors, teachers, blacksmiths, hatters, merchants, wine makers, surveyors, fullers and "gentlemen" (Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg, vol. i, pp. 24-25). Slavery and cotton had worked their change by 1856, when Olmsted wrote that "the slaveholders have . . . secured the best circumstances for the employment of that slave-labor which is the most valuable part of their capital. They need no assistance from the poor white man; his presence near them is disagreeable and unprofitable. Condemned to the poorest land, and restricted to the labor of merely providing for themselves the simple necessities of life, they are equally indifferent and incompetent to materially improve their minds or their wealth" (p. 515). Cf. ibid., p. 296; Tompkins, ibid., p. 88.

        The common origin of mountain whites and tenant whites and the applicability of the term "poor whites" to both groups is noticed by Mr. Hammond, who calls them all quite properly, in view of circumstances in which they found themselves, "parasitic."6

        6 Speaking of cotton culture before the War, "the majority of the white laborers were of the class of 'poor whites,' many of them descendants of the 'redemptioners.' . . . these people . . . had become the parasites of Southern society. Some of them were forced into the mountain region of eastern Tennessee and Kentucky and western North Carolina, and others were left on the abandoned cotton and tobacco lands of the sand hill region of South Carolina and Georgia" (Hammond, p. 97).

the white race must have reached a yet lower depth of squalid and beastly wretchedness."7

        7 Andrews, pp. 335-336. "The Georgia 'Cracker' . . . seems to me to lack not only all that the negro does, but also even the desire for a better condition and the vague longing for the enlargement of his liberties and his rights."

        That the poor whites were the victims of the economic regime and that their laziness was to be attributed in large measure to this prime fact, has been made clear by a keen and sympathetic student of Southern economic history. "All whites who were poor were not 'poor whites,' but many embraced in that term of contempt and pity were poor . . . in the ambition to contend against what seemed to be the inevitable." He thinks that, corresponding to the countryman in New England, there were very moderately circumstanced whites in the South that might be taken as constituting a "yeomanry," but that below these were "the neglected people who . . . were but little removed from the status of the settled Indian. . . . They were the degenerates, the children of ancient poverty and wrong, with little or no opportunity to better their condition among surroundings of a corrective character. . . . Had they not been too lazy to wander far from their apologies for home, they would have become American gypsies. . . . The victims of heredity and of institutions in which they had no interest, placed under laws made for them rather than by them, they were happily removed from the pressure of population that would undoubtedly have reduced them to the criminal or the dependent class."8

        8 Ingle, p. 22 ff. "John Forsythe of Mobile hit off some of their traits in contrasting the unadulterated 'Cracker' and an unadulterated Yankee, born and bred in the country. 'One is slow . . . and the other quick; one takes a minute to rise from his seat, the other never sits at all except in pursuance of a calculation; one is not without faculties, but they seem to be all asleep, the other with all his wits alive with sagacity, curiosity, invention. The one content to doze away life with as little labor as possible and all the enjoyment compassable; his log hut, wool hat, homespun suit, and corn and bacon the limits of his desires . . . ; loving his gun and his horse, addicted to tobacco and strong drink, quick to anger, a dangerous enemy, and a fast friend. The other instinct with life . . . never satisfied with the present wellbeing while anything better is beyond to tempt his longings and his wits.' " A South Carolinian who seemed to be informed gave Olmsted his opinion that communities of poor whites on the banks of the Congaree River were in more hopeless plight than the degraded peons of Mexico, and a rice planter described similar people living in the pine barrens nearest the coast: "They seldom have any meat . . . except they steal hogs, which belong to the planters, or their negroes, and their chief diet is rice and milk. They are small, gaunt, and cadaverous, and their skin is just the color of the sandhills they live on. They are quite incapable of applying themselves steadily to any labor, and their habits are very much like those of the old Indians" (p. 505 ff.). A Northerner told Olmsted of stopping once at a sand-hiller's cabin. One of the four grown daughters was weaving, the others seeming to have nothing to do. " 'I asked the girl at the loom how much she could make a day by her work. She did not know, but I ascertained that the stuff she wove was bought at a factory in the vicinity, to be used for bagging yarn; and she was paid in yarn. . . . She traded off the yarn at a store for what she had to buy. . . . If she worked steadily from daylight to dark . . . her wages . . . were less than sixteen cents a day, boarding herself. . . . These people are regarded by the better class with as little respect as slaves . . . ' " (ibid., p. 507). This was in South Carolina. Twenty-five or thirty years later such establishments as this bagging mill had largely disappeared, the bartering of yarn was no longer practiced, and such a family of girls as here described was in all likelihood working immediately in a cotton factory for money wages.

        Governor Hammond, of South Carolina, was moderate when he said: "According to the best calculations which, in the absence of statistic facts, can be made, it is believed that, of the 300,000 white inhabitants of South Carolina, there are not less than 50,000, whose industry, such as it is, and compensated as it is, is not, in the present condition of things, and does not promise, hereafter, to be, adequate to procure them, honestly, such a support as every white person in this country is and feels himself entitled to."9

        9 Quoted in Olmsted, p. 514. Here again is the thought that they were crowded out of occupations: "Some cannot be said to work at all. They obtain a precarious subsistence by occasional jobs, by hunting, by fishing, sometimes by plundering fields or folds, and, too often, by . . . trading with slaves, or seducing them to plunder for their benefit."

        Professor Hart believes that the term "poor whites" means lowlanders, and that the mountaineers belong in a different category. His reason is chiefly that the mountain whites do not have to contend with the universal presence of the Negro. It is to be remembered that this distinction is of later emergence, and that slavery was responsible for

the history of the class of unfortunate whites, whether they were left in the low-country, stranded upon the sandhills between coastal plain and Piedmont, or driven into the hills.10

        10 Southern South, p. 30. For some account of the middle-country poor whites, with a list of the disparaging names applied to them, see ibid., p. 38; a description of the mountaineers (p. 34 ff.) is most dismal.

        The pertinence of recent accounts of the poorer mountain and tenant whites in their native surroundings is illustrated by the fact that the mills very recently were receiving families in just as destitute condition as those which first entered the factory communities.11

        11 An admirable recent picture of the life of the poor whites in mountain and lowland sections is contained in a painstaking pamphlet by Frances Sage Bradley and Margaretta A. Williamson, "Rural Children in Selected Counties of North Carolina," published by the Children's Bureau of the U. S. Department of Labor.

        12 Columbia Record, Textile Ed., 1916. Of a factory at Rock Hill it is reported: "A man who moved to the mill from Union County a few years ago was so poverty stricken that he had not even a bed upon which to sleep. He was in such poverty that it was a matter of jest" (ibid.). Of another mill village it is told that "nineteen families have moved into this community within the last fourteen years, bringing their entire worldly possessions in one wagon load . . . ; none of these . . . families had a stick of furniture or a sack of flour or the means to provide for the same" (ibid.).

        The most recent historian of the American industry in his description of the people who filled the mills of the South does not distinguish between Piedmont, mountain, and lowland (tenant) whites.13

        13 Copeland, pp. 40-41.

        It has been seen that while many of the Southern mill ventures were undertaken partly with the express purpose

of giving work to the poor whites, in a good many cases the opportunity for profitable employment of these people was entirely overlooked, this giving color to the belief that in proportion as the poor whites dropped out of participation in the economic order, they tended to drop out of the mind of the dominant class. The abolition of slavery did not bring the neglected men and women immediately back into the thought and sympathy of the South any more than into the employment of the South.14

        14 A Virginia correspondent of the American Agriculturist before the War asserted that whites could be got to work for less price than blacks, but the slaves were preferred. Newcomers were advised, if they wished to use whites, to bring them with them, since the native white population was inferior to the black (quoted in Olmsted, pp. 211-212). A farmer in the same State who employed only free labor found Irishmen at $120 a year the best workers; native whites were declared worse than free blacks (ibid., p. 99).

        It has been seen that William Gregg, the builder of the Graniteville Factory in South Carolina, was the father, in the sense that he was the anticipator, of a new economic life for the South. His keen consciousness of the poor whites stands out in striking contrast to the state of mind indicated in the preceding paragraphs. It is interesting to notice a statement of Gregg's which shows clearly the condition of the lower strata of the white population fifteen years before the war; it is to be remarked that he was combating a tendency not simply to omit the poor whites from consideration, but to place the negroes ahead of these even, as possible industrial workers. "Should we stop," he asked, "at the effort to prove the capacity of blacks for manufacturing? Shall we pass unnoticed the thousands of poor, ignorant, degraded white people among us, who, in this land of plenty, live in comparative nakedness and starvation?" And he continued:

        Many a one is reared in proud South-Carolina, from birth to manhood, who has never passed a month in which he has not some part of the time, been stinted for meat. Many a mother is there, who will tell you that her children are but scantily supplied with bread. . . . These are startling statements, but they are nevertheless true, and if not believed in Charleston, the members of our Legislature, who have traversed the State, in electioneering campaigns, can attest their truth.

        It is only necessary to build a manufacturing village of shanties, in a healthy location in any part of the State, to have crowds of these poor people around you, seeking employment at half the compensation given to operatives at the North. It is indeed pitiful to be brought in contact with such ignorance and degradation; but on the other hand, it is pleasant to witness the change, which soon takes place in the condition of those who obtain employment. The emaciated, pale-faced children, soon assume the appearance of robust health. . . . It is, perhaps, not generally known, but there are twentynine thousand white persons in this State, above the age of twelve years, who can neither read nor write--this is about one in every five of the whole population.15

        15 Domestic Industry, p. 22. It is to be observed that knowledge of the plight of the poor whites gained in electioneering campaigns was passive, and did not awaken a purpose to improve conditions. Gregg himself, as a member of the legislature, was the exception that proved the rule. Despite the difficulty of travel and the absence of "statistic facts," as Governor Hammond said, public ignorance of a 20 per cent illiteracy in the white population is as reprehensible as the fact of the illiteracy itself. When Gregg was working out his philosophy in practice, he reported to his Graniteville stockholders in 1855 that 79 in 100 grown girls who came to the mill could neither read not write, adding that "that reproach has long since been removed" (quoted in Kohn, Cotton Mills of S. C., p. 21). Cf. statement of a colporteur in Olmsted, p. 510.

        A writer already quoted refers to the poor whites of the ante-bellum South as constituting part of the last grade of a class distinguishable from both the unpropertied and the influential landowners, which might be termed a "yeomanry," but he notices their tendency to sink rather than rise in the social order.16

        16 Ingle, pp. 20-21.

        Thus again it is indicated how the pressure of slavery, if it worked to bring a small number to the surface, gave to masses an impulse ever downward.

        There is very little to show the character of the white operatives in the small and scattered factories that existed in the South prior to the great rise of mills about 1880. Many were doubtless immigrants or descendants of recent immigrants. The Graniteville mill had workpeople who did not differ materially in their economic or social aspects from those in later manufacturing communities, and perhaps the same may be said of a few other establishments in the ante-bellum period. But Graniteville was not typical of

its time. Graniteville tapped a class of labor as a class; the smaller factories, with all sorts of local limitations in situation, power, machinery and peculiarities of operation, attracted only individuals, had no labor objective. It was not recognized that any widespread condition existed that made employment in mills desirable, and no distinctive problems grew out of the collecting of persons in the little villages surrounding the factories. That many negroes were used in these enterprises, alone or with whites, helps to blur the picture of the white operatives. In the matter of labor, these early establishments corresponded roughly with grist mills and saw mills then and today. Nobody bothered about where the employees came from or why. It is probable that in most instances they had been living in the immediate localities. It may be concluded that the difference between the mills before the great period and those which followed, with respect to labor, was one of size of the manufacturing unit and of degree of standardization of the industry.17

        17 Glimpses of before-the-war operatives frequently indicate foreign birth or ancestry, and are not always inspiriting. Cf. Olmsted, pp. 356-357; Buckingham, Slave States of America, vol. i, p. 171.

        The amount that had to be done for the poor whites after they came to the mills (speaking now of the large development of factories), and their too evident entire newness to the demands of progressive living, reflect a light back upon the years in which they had been pushed aside. The history of the industry since 1880, in the human phase, has been chiefly the effort at reinstatement of a great portion of the population previously neglected.18

        18 A recent president of the chamber of commerce of a capital city said that while in office he refused to give his especial support to projects to establish cotton mills in the place because of all the people who came to a factory, only five or six families would be composed of desirable citizens, the rest lowering the average of population. "You have to take care of these people when they are sick," he explained, "and you must give them schools and churches. Thousands of dollars, of course, were spent in eradicating the hook worm."

total dependence upon the management for moral care and physical upbuilding.19

        19 The head of a large establishment told how "ninety per cent of the operatives--kids and all--used to use snuff. We would get from the loom-boxes, where they would leave them, a barrel of snuff boxes a week in cleaning. Now not fifteen per cent use snuff" (T. S. Raworth, int., Augusta, Ga., Dec. 30, 1916).

        However much the poor whites had failed of recognition before, instances are rare in which mill men, at the outset of the factory era in the South or later, have complained of the quality of the operatives. It may be said that the work of a cotton mill, certainly a mill on coarse goods, is scarcely skilled at all, and that in the beginning management was as unaccustomed to its task as spinner and weaver to theirs. It may be observed that labor was above all cheap, and that advantage thus conferred silenced all objection. But the fact is not altered that Southern mill owners showed a splendid faith in the capacity of their workpeople. Northern superintendents in Southern manufactories seemed unanimous in their satisfaction with the labor.

        One of the most distinguished of Southern mill projectors wrote in reply to some doubting remarks of another Southern manufacturer: "I do not admit that the Northern people are any better material out of which to make cotton manufacturers and operatives than our own, and especially in the 'Piedmont belt,' of the South, is the best in the United States, and capable of being educated to as high an order of skill as any other. I have been in most of the best mills at the North . . . and have observed their operations closely, and I challenge that there is as high skill and an equal degree of expertness in the operatives of the Piedmont Mill, as far as the kind of goods made requires . . . as is to be found in any mill in New England."20

        20 Letter of H. P. Hammett to Atlanta Constitution, quoted in Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, Feb. 1, 1883. An old man, looking back to the starting of his mill forty years ago, said to the writer with a determined look in his eye: "In a speech made in Atlanta at the Exposition [1881] Edward Atkinson told us that we couldn't manufacture goods in the Southern States because we couldn't get help down here; that we should let them manufacture the cotton and we raise the cotton. I saw the help coming in from dinner at Fall River in the eighties, and it couldn't compare to ours!" (Charles Estes, int., Augusta). Another old man declared: "North Carolina has within its borders more Anglo-Saxon blood than any other State in the Union. There is no better labor in the United States than in the cotton mills of North Carolina" (Charles McDonald, int., Charlotte, N. C., Sept. 3, 1916). It has been properly observed that the term "poor white trash," common in writing about the South, is rarely used by Southern whites. "They are unprogressive, they fail to make the most of their opportunities, but they are not degraded. It is suspended or arrested development rather than degeneracy" (Thompson, p. 113).

        It has been seen that some writers would distinguish between the mountain whites, the poor whites of the Piedmont belt and the corresponding group in the coastal plain; that some question exists as to the application of the term "poor whites"; and that some believe there was a tolerably defined middle class in the South before and following the war. However these facts may be, it is chiefly important to understand that the mills drew from all these divisions of poor whites, and if there was a group between them and the upper whites, it did not work to alter the essential economic situation. Whatever technical differences existed prior to the opening of the factories, in the willingness to seek mill employment there was a general merger of types of indigent white people.21

        21 Cf. Thompson, pp. 69-70.

        Generous estimates of the capacities and promise of the poor whites in the mills and out of them are as easy to find as it is natural to give them. Anyone who sees the people in th