]> <emph>The Rise of Cotton Mills in the South:</emph> Electronic Edition. Mitchell, Broadus, 1892- Funding from the Institute for Museum and Library Services supported the electronic publication of this title. Text transcribed by Apex Data Services, Inc. Images scanned by Tampathia Evans Text encoded by Apex Data Services, Inc., Courtney Vien and Natalia Smith First edition, 2001 ca. 830K Academic Affairs Library, UNC-CH University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001.

© This work is the property of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text.

 The Rise of Cotton Mills in the South The Rise of Cotton Mills in the South Rise of Cotton Mills in the South BROADUS MITCHELL Series XXXIX No. 2 John Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science Under the Direction of the Departments of History, Political Economy, and Political Science viii, 9-281 p., ill. BALTIMORE THE JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS 1921 Call number C677.M68r (North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-CH digitization project, Documenting the American South.

The text has been entered using double-keying and verified against the original. The text has been encoded using the recommendations for Level 4 of the TEI in Libraries Guidelines.

Original grammar, punctuation, and spelling have been preserved. Encountered typographical errors have been preserved, and appear in red type.

All footnotes are inserted at the point of reference within paragraphs.

Any hyphens occurring in line breaks have been removed, and the trailing part of a word has been joined to the preceding line.

All quotation marks, em dashes and ampersand have been transcribed as entity references.

All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as ” and “ respectively.

All single right and left quotation marks are encoded as ’ and ‘ respectively.

All em dashes are encoded as —

Indentation in lines has not been preserved.

Running titles have not been preserved.

Spell-check and verification made against printed text using Author/Editor (SoftQuad) and Microsoft Word spell check programs.

 Library of Congress Subject Headings, 21st edition, 1998 English 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. 2001-12-13, Celine Noel and Wanda Gunther revised TEIHeader and created catalog record for the electronic edition. 2001-04-25, Natalia Smith, project manager, finished TEI-conformant encoding and final proofing. 2001-04-01, Courtney Vien finished TEI/SGML encoding 2001-03-21, Apex Data Services, Inc. finished transcribing the text.

[Spine Image]

[Half-Title Page Image]

[Title Page Image]

[Title Page Verso Image]

 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.

The same is true of the present story of the South's espousal of manufactures in place of whole devotion to agriculture. Rightly set forth, it is not only an industrial chronicle, but a romance, a drama as well. One who himself bore a part in the events here described, at the outset of my project hoped that I would grasp both the economic and the spiritual aspects of the period under review.2

2 Mr. J. C. Hemphill.

This I have tried to transmit to the reader, and I have found that the fuller the account of material circumstance, just so much the clearer becomes the spiritual significance.

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.

My study is little more than illustration of this analysis of the past, this interpretation of the present and future.

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.

This conception of continuity is in marked contrast with a representative expression of another Southerner likewise for some time a resident of the North. After referring to promising industrial beginnings it is declared that: “ . . . a manufacturing development throughout the Piedmont region of the South might have continued parallel with that which has taken place in Pennsylvania, except for the . . . combined influence of the invention of the cotton gin, the institution of slavery, and the checking of . . . immigration. As late as 1810 the manufactured products of Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia exceeded in value those of the entire New England states. By Whitney's invention . . . cotton planting became so profitable, that for a period of forty years the price remained above twenty-five cents a pound. Factories were abandoned. . . . As cotton and slavery advanced, the population of free white work people were driven further and further into the mountain country, and thus many of the white industrial workers of 1800 became the poor mountain farmers of 1850 . . . the owners of factories who operated with free white labor in 1800 had become in 1850 the cotton planters operating with black slave labor . . . When the abolition of slavery removed one great difficulty of industries and the white people who had formerly deserted manufactures for agriculture went back to the pursuits of their fathers, these mountaineers formed the labor supply.”2

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).

In South Carolina early encouragement was given to the manufacture of cotton specifically; one Hugh Templeton, seeking inventor's privileges, in 1789 deposited with State authorities a plan for a carding machine and “a complete draft of a spinning machine, with eighty-four spindles, that will spin with one man's attendance ten pounds of good cotton yarn per day.”4

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

In 1795 the legislature authorized commissioners to project a lottery for the benefit of William McClure in his effort to establish a cotton manufactory to make “Manchester wares.”5

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.

As early as 1770 there was formed in South Carolina a committee to establish and promote manufactures, with Henry Laurens as chairman.8

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

The purchase by Southern States of the patent rights of Whitney's cotton gin is to be interpreted not as a design to leave off cotton manufacturing, but rather as evidence of a prevalent spirit for mechanical improvement.

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.

Domestic production is clearly seen in a statement the same year that a planter in three months trained thirty negroes to make one hundred and twenty yards of cotton and woolen cloth per week, employing a white woman to instruct in spinning and a white man in weaving, and it was said: “He expects to have it in his power not only to clothe his own negroes, but soon to supply his neighbors.”10

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.

However, it is to be remembered that a century and a half ago this and other manufactures in every part of America and in England too bore very much of the domestic character,13

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

and that probably Southern States showed instances of power-driven machinery before Slater set up the first Arkwright mill in Rhode Island. The South had planter-manufacturers it is true, but this link between agriculture and industry as contrasted with New England is easily explained in the more general fertility of the soil and the effect this of course had upon the occupation of the people. Furthermore, the very fact of this coupling indicates the inclination toward economic balance and the promise in these years of a rational development.14

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 South had small cotton farmers of a prevalent sort before ever Knapp taught efficient production. If the old mills were of a notably different stripe from those of the period fifteen years after the War, the genesis of the industry, economically speaking, lies in 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.

In the light of the spirit in which mills were built about 1880 and the demonstrated total newness of the hands to the processes and even the idea of textile manufacture, it seems unnecessary to controvert an opinion that not only did the ante-bellum factories furnish a starting point for the later development, but domestic weaving had accustomed the people to the industry.18

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.

Important facts, however, stand out. 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).

A founder would sell an enterprise, build another and sell it and build a third.21

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

 It was difficult to convey machinery to the factory when purchased at a distance.22

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.

Much machinery was made in local blacksmith shops, and must have been crude even for that period.23

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.

While elaboration of the point falls elsewhere, it is worth notice here that there is a difference between the old and the later mills in the character of their promoters and managers. In the earlier period men came to cotton manufacturing in the South by more normal channels than at the outset of the subsequent development. Like Michael Schenck, they had foreign industrial habits and traditions back of them, and they set up mills in communities populated by Swiss, Scotch-Irish and Germans. Or like William Bates and probably the Hills, Clark, Henry, and the Weavers, they came from the industrial atmosphere of New England, then particularly stimulated by the encouragement lent to textile manufacturing by the embargo laid on English goods by the War of 1812.24

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.

Cotton factories conjoined with gins and saw mills are not unknown in the South today, but in whatever instance this occurs there is indicated a lack of specialization.

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.

The yarn of the Batesville Factory, before the Columbia and Greenville railroad came to Greenville about 1852, passed current almost like money, in ten pound “bunches” covered with blue paper, and although “mountain schooners” carried it sometimes a hundred and fifty miles into North Carolina and Tennessee, it was given in barter for meat and rags.28

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.

George Tucker in 1843 first pointed out that slavery was showing signs of decay from economic causes and as a system would finally lapse of its own accord.33

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.

 A study of 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.).

It is difficult to see the distinction which Mr. Clark desires to draw between the effect of the presence of the negro and the presence of slavery. While it is true that for long years after emancipation, and continuing to this day, the influence of the negro's presence in restraining inflow of immigrants is evident, the lessening of this deterrent and the removal of nearly equal drawbacks could not proceed or commence while slavery existed. From the point of 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.

Probably not over-induced by bitter animus is Helper's direct charge:

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).

A reflection 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.

 Approaches to rational statesmanship and reasonable moves toward balanced economic activity, found especially in the border States, could be nothing more than 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.

Completer evidence of the damage wrought by slavery is the actual emigration of natives from the section when slaves were crowding; a portion of the population which under other circumstances might have taken root in industrial enterprise within the South was thus driven off.

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).

It was observed that competition of the slave was almost matched in hurtfulness by the example of the prosperous white man with whom acquisition of the comforts and dignities of life did not proceed from daily toil.51

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.

Gregg remarked the supply by the North not only of the articles of major manufacture, but of those adjuncts of agriculture which would naturally be made within the South—axe, hoe and broom handles, pitchforks, rakes, hand-spikes, shingles and pine boards.54

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.

And again, speaking of manufactures, he was regretful of the fact that “our great men are not to be found in the ranks of those who are willing to lend their aid, in promoting this good cause. Are we to commence another ten years' crusade, to prepare the minds of the people of this State for revolution; thus unhinging every department of industry, and paralyzing the best efforts to promote the welfare of our country?”58

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).

The plants set up by New Englanders earlier were in response to individual enterprise, and that enterprise born out of the boundaries of the South. Cooperation with the newcomers was not of the sort that marks the considerable interest of a community. To the extent that mills were built in the forties as a result of public agitation, William 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).

Slaves, though in the legal sense agreed to belong 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.

His real purpose, which does not require ill-considered harking 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.

The steps of Mr. Edmond's argument 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-b