The Rise of Cotton Mills in the South Part 12

[53] Clark, South in Building of Nation, Vol. V. p. 322.

[54] William E. Dodd, in South in Building of Nation, Vol. V. pp. 566-7.

[55] Quoted in Pleasants.

[56] Quoted in Pleasants.

[57] Quoted from Niles' Register, May 10, 1828, in Pleasants. Mr.

Pleasants remarks that not until the late twenties did the leaders of thought awaken to the disintegrating process that had set in two decades before, and he notices the striking fact that in a report to the legislature in 1828 it was said: "Nothing but a change of system can restore health and prosperity at large. With all the material and elements for manufacturing, we annually expend millions for the purchase of articles manufactured in Europe and in the North out of our own raw material. At this rate the state is on the road to bankruptcy. 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."

[58] Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg County, Vol. I, p. 124. Cf. Ibid., pp. 126-7.

[59] Kohn, Cotton Mills of South Carolina, pp. 18-19.

[60] Clark, History of Manufactures in U.S., pp. 553 ff. Cf. Ibid., in South in Building of Nation, Vol. V, pp. 213-214, and pp. 316 ff.

[61] Kohn, Cotton Mills of South Carolina, p. 16.

[62] "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 of pine, live oak, cypress, and other woods in which the South abounded, 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, Southern Sidelights, p. 73.)

[63] Quoted in A. B. Hart, The Southern South, pp. 231-232.

[64] Helper, p. 25.

[65] Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg, Vol. I, p. 100.

[66] Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 200-201.

[67] Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg, Vol. I, pp. 98-99. This statement is strongly influenced by Tench c.o.xe. Cf. Ibid., Cotton Growing, pp. 3-4.

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", and 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.)

[68] Tompkins, Building and Loan a.s.sociations, p. 43. Cf. Ibid., The Cultivation, Picking, Baling and Manufacturing of Cotton from Southern Handpoint, pp. 5-6.

[69] Tompkins, Cotton Mill, Commercial Features, pp. 109-110. It is interesting that this occurs in a book by a practical manufacturer intended to point the way to technical success in mill management. It is perhaps an indication of how social the South is in even its most distinctly industrial aspects.

[70] Another has used the expression that "the South was throttled by an out grown Economic System." (F. T. Carlton, History and Problems of Organized Labor, pp. 19-20.)

[71] Tompkins, Cultivation, Picking, Baling and Manufacturing of Cotton, pp. 5-6. "Agricultural Methods were 'stereotyped'." This writer did more than any other in showing the character of the equipment for cotton cultivation and the alterations made therein after the war.

[72] W. H. Gannon, The Landowners of the South, and the Industrial Cla.s.ses of the North, pp. 7 ff.

[73] William Gregg, Essays on Domestic Industry, pp. 18-19.

[74] Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg, Vol. I, p. 194. "The price which America paid for the introduction and use of cotton was sectionalism, slavery, and war." (James A. B. Scherer, Cotton as a World Power, p. 243.) For a careful description of the circ.u.mstances surrounding the invention of the cotton gin, and the legal doc.u.ments in the dispute over the rights to it, cf. ibid., Cotton and Cotton Oil, pp. 19 to 31, inclusive, 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 cut-throat compet.i.tion amongst ourselves we reduced the price to where there was not a living in it for the cotton producer. We made cotton in a quant.i.ty and at a price to clothe all the world excepting ourselves." (Ibid., Road Building and Repairs, p. 24.)

[75] Ingle, Southern Sidelights, p. 49.

[76] Scherer, p. 253.

[77] Scherer, pp. 168 ff. Cf. Walter H. Page, The Rebuilding of Old Commonwealths, p. 139.

[78] A. D. Mayo, In The Social Economist, Oct., 1893, pp. 203-204.

[79] F. L. Olmsted, The Seaboard Slave States, pp. 140-141. Cf. Ibid., p.

185, pp. 213-214.

[80] Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, pp. 298-299. Cf. "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 on the subject, Ibid., pp. 490-491.)

[81] Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, pp. 179-180.

[82] Ibid., pp. 288 ff.

[83] Plunkett, p. 147.

[84] Ingle, Southern Sidelights, pp. 68-69.

[85] Ingle, Southern Sidelights, p. 11.

[86] Clark, in South in Building of Nation, Vol. V, pp. 213-214. Not only did slavery deter from coming to the South immigrants opposed to the inst.i.tution, but the Southern whites were indisposed to welcome those who refused to grow into the system. A Southern Newspaper of 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 cla.s.s--enemies to our peculiar inst.i.tutions, and formidable barriers to the success of our native mechanics. Not so, however, with another cla.s.s who migrate southward--we mean that cla.s.s known as merchants; they are generally intelligent and trustworthy, and they seldom fail to discover their true interests. They become slaveholders and landed proprietors; and, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, they are better qualified to become const.i.tuents of our inst.i.tution, than even a certain cla.s.s of our native born.... The intelligent mercantile cla.s.s ... are generally valuable acquisitions to society, and every way qualified to sustain 'our inst.i.tution'; but the mechanics, most of them, are pests to society, dangerous among the slave population, and ever ready to form combinations against the interest of the slave-holder, against the laws of the country, and against the peace of the Commonwealth." (Quoted in Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, p. 511.)

[87] Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg, Vol. II, p. 204.

[88] Cf. Ibid., Vol. I, p. 153.

[89] Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, p. 511.

[90] Sidney Andrews, The South Since the War, pp. 342-343.

[91] Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, p. 543.

[92] Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, p. 210.

[93] Gregg, Essays on Domestic Industry, p. 10.

[94] Gregg, Essays on Domestic Industry, pp. 9-10. "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." (Ibid.)

[95] Gregg, Essays on Domestic Industry, pp. 9-10. "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." (Ibid., p. 11.)

[96] Helper, pp. 21 and 23. See these pages also for interesting ill.u.s.trations of dependence upon the North, some of which plainly influenced Henry W. Grady.

[97] William Gregg, Essays on Domestic Industry, p. 8. Nothing is more frequently remarked as indicative of the exclusive attention to the cultivation of cotton than the large reliance of an almost purely agricultural country upon other sections for many articles of food. And not only subsistance for the people, but subsistence for the plantation as such often had to be imported. Missing nothing, Olmsted said, in a description of a rail journey in North Carolina, "The princ.i.p.al other freight of the train was one hundred and twenty bales of Northern hay. It belonged ... to a planter who lived some twenty miles beyond here, and who had bought it in Wilmington at a dollar and a half a hundred weight, to feed to his mules. Including the steam-boat and railroad freight, and all the labor of getting it to his stables, its entire cost to him would not be much less than two dollars a hundred. This would be at least four times as much as it would have cost to raise and make it in the interior of New York or New England.... He had preferred to employ his slaves at other business." (Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, pp. 376-379.)

But Gregg gave encouragement in any brighter aspects that he found, as when he said, "Limited as our manufactures are in South Carolina, we can now, more than supply the State with Coa.r.s.e 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." (Ibid., pp. 11) And he held out to his State the prospect of the results that might reasonably be expected from adoption of his proposals: "Were all our hopes ... consumated, South Carolina would present a delightful picture. Every son and daughter would find healthful and lucrative employment; our roads, which are now a disgrace to us, would be improved; we would no longer be under the necessity of sending to the North for half made wagons and carriages, to break our necks; we would have, if not as handsome, at least as honestly and faithfully made ones.... Workshops would take the place of the throngs of clothing, hat, and shoe stores, and the watch-word would be, from the seaboard to the mountains, success to domestic industry." (Ibid., p. 17.) When Southern resources were exploited, the total benefit might not come to the locality; "The great abundance of the best lumber for the purpose, in the United States, growing in the vicinity of the town, has lately induced some persons to attempt ship-building at Mobile. The mechanics employed are mainly from the North." (Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, p.

567.)

[98] Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, p. 544.

[99] Quoted in Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, p. 175.