The Rise of Cotton Mills in the South Part 2

Very convincing in his fact findings and often strikingly happy in his interpretations is Olmsted; his work benefited by being saved from the pa.s.sion of Helper and the venom of Sidney Andrews. In accounting in 1856 for the reason for the stagnation in Virginia as compared with the industrial activity of New England and old England, he 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 I find to be universal in the minds of strangers, and it 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. Give Virginia blood fair play, remove it from the atmosphere of slavery, and it shows no lack of energy and good sense."[79] He took to be an average expression of the views "Not of the majority of the people (of Virginia)--they are not quite so demented as yet--but 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 paper of the State that it was glad to find its contemporaries willing to discuss "the true and great question of the day--_The Existence of slavery as a permanent issue in the South_. Every moment's reflection but convinces us of the absolute impregnability of the Southern position on this subject. Facts, which can not be questioned, come thronging in support of the true doctrine--that slavery is the best condition of the black race in this country ..."; and from another newspaper in the year previous (1854): "African slavery ... is a thing that we can not do without, that is _righteous_, _profitable_, and permanent, and that belongs to Southern Society as inherently, intricately, as durably as the white race itself."[80]

Olmsted was at pains to show how the people were duped by Charlatan guidance of their political leaders; this comes out particularly in his quotation of and comments upon the famous election speech in Virginia in the fifties, in which the aspirant declared to his audience that "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 G.o.ds in your iron foundries; you have not yet spun more than coa.r.s.e cotton enough, in the way of manufacture, to clothe your own slaves. You have had no commerce, no mining, no manufactures. You have relied alone on the single power of agriculture--and such agriculture! Your sedge-patches outs.h.i.+ne the sun....

Instead of having to feed cattle on a thousand hills, you have had to chase the stum-tailed steers 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 Nero propose, it will be wondered, to remedy this so very amusing stupidity, poverty, and debility? Very simply and pleasantly. By building railroads and ca.n.a.ls, s.h.i.+ps and mills; by establis.h.i.+ng manufactories, opening mines, and setting up smelting-works and foundries. 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 holding out promise of wholesome measures which contemplated everything but the attacking of slavery,[81] the politicians were just laughing at the people.[82]

A reflection just as sorrowful as the confirmed bias of the people, however, is one that Olmsted did not see in this and myriad other episodes, namely, the blindness of the leaders that, with no doubt strong elements of quackery, showed even stronger signs of being themselves duped by a situation. Not that the crowd was believing, but that the leaders were so largely sincere, was most melancholy. As to both considerations, however, a pa.s.sage 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 mis-government had continued so long, and in such an immense variety of circ.u.mstances and conditions, the governors could have been alone to blame. I envied those leaders of popular thought whose confidence in themselves and in their followers 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."[83]

As opposed to the brightening signs which some have seen in the years just preceding the Civil War, it has been said, "yet 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 inst.i.tution that they felt to be a burden, but which they could see no safe way to abolish. Compa.s.sed as it was by political compromises, slavery must ultimately have topped 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."[84]

The deterrent effect of slavery upon immigration of white laborers 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 in the North. In the decade from 1850 to 1860 the South's quota of foreign-born in the whole country dropped from 14 to 13 per cent.[85] The South was deprived of her share of foreign mechanics, so largely responsible for the industries in this country in the first half of the nineteenth century, not only by the fact that independent artizans avoided compet.i.tion with slave labor, but because few of them had the means of acquiring slaves, and disapproved of the inst.i.tution besides.[86] The increase in population in North Carolina in the single decade of 1870 to 1880 about equalled that of the four decades preceding. The comprehensive influence here upon immigration by the abolition of slavery is not greatly modified by the fact that in the period before 1870 fell the losses from the Civil War.[87] The tide of immigration to Mecklenburg County in this State dwindled from the introduction of slavery as a system until 1825, and thereafter set in the emigration of persons from the county, an even severer influence and stronger indication of the baleful labor system.[88]

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 inst.i.tution, varied manufactures, farming was conducted with successful enterprise and capital was found to be invested in a railroad venture. Slavery was not relied upon.[89] Sidney Andrews in 1865 found the northwestern counties of Georgia, which were held to be strongly opposed to secession in 1860-61, and which furnished a good many soldiers to the federal armies, probably better disposed to the national government than any other part of the State. Slaves had const.i.tuted less than a fourth of the total population, the people were industrious and hardy; though cruder than those from the lower parts of the State, the delegates from this section to the const.i.tutional convention of 1865 were said to have a well-informed outlook for the Commonwealth. After the war the industry displayed by the white people of this region was taken as attesting their better traditions of ante-bellum years.[90]

At a time when the average wages of female operatives in the cotton mills of Georgia was half that of the same workers in the mills of Ma.s.sachusetts, factory girls from New England were induced by high pay to go to the Southern States to enter newly-established plants, but soon returned North because their position was unpleasant in the midst of "the general degradation of the laboring cla.s.s."[91] It was observed very truly that compet.i.tion of the slave was not distantly matched in hurtfulness by the example of the more prosperous white men, with whom acquisition of the comforts and dignities of life did not proceed from daily toil.[92]

The dependence of the ante-bellum South upon the North and upon Europe for the most substantial and the most trivial appurtenances of civilization, is perhaps less in dispute than any topic here treated. The extent of this dependence, with the accompanying neglect of provision for production of the commodities at home, is evidenced by its continuance for years after the war. It might be said, not only in justification of this practice, but in apology for the total one-sidedness of the old South, that the section was animated by a natural and universal law, in responding to and acting upon the principle of comparative economic advantage. And certainly the most absolute conception of the territorial division of labor could not require a more exclusive devotion to the making of cotton and a more complete reliance upon other less peculiarly favored districts for supply not only of manufactured goods but of food stuffs and other raw materials, than the South displayed. But, however, strictly in conformity with the superficial dictates of this policy from an international and even national point of view, the program was ruinous to the section, the country and, in a broad sense, to the deeper economic welfare of the world. Easy yielding to the principle did not suggest to the great bulk of the South's statesmans.h.i.+p the reflection that the section 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. Accompanying and directly by agency of the post-bellum activities in industry is seen not a less but a more economical and larger output of the staple.

Some of the most humorous pa.s.sages in the literature of the economic history of the South were called forth by the need of the section to go to the North for a thousand and one essentials of daily existence, and in their very humor they serve to show the seriousness of the situation.

William Gregg, too lonely in his advocacy of home industry to treat the subject in other than its fundamental considerations, declared in 1845 to his own community, than which there was no greater sinner: "It ought to make every citizen who feels an interest in his country, ashamed to visit the clothing stores of Charleston, and see the vast exhibition of ready-made clothing, manufactured mostly by the women of Philadelphia, New York, Boston and other Northern cities, to the detriment and starvation of our own countrywomen, hundreds of who may be found in our own good city in wretched poverty, unable to procure work by which they would be glad to earn a decent living."[93] And again: "A change in our habits and industrial pursuits is a far greater desideratum than any change in the laws of our Government...."[94] His point of view comes out well in this pa.s.sage: "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 will be fed on Yankee baker's bread. Pardon me for repeating the call on South Carolina to go to work.

G.o.d speed the day when her politicians will be exhorting the people to domestic industry, instead of State resistance; when our Clay Clubs and Democratic a.s.sociations 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 in every department of Manufacturing...."[95]

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 utility and adornment, from matches, shoe-pegs and paintings up to cotton-mills, steams.h.i.+ps and statuary ... this unmanly and unnational dependence, ... is so glaring that it can not fail to be apparent to even the most careless and superficial observer. All the world sees, or ought to see, that in a commercial, mechanical, manufactural, financial, and literary point of view, we are as helpless as babes...."[96]

Gregg remarked the supply by the North not only of the articles of major manufacture, but of articles of those makes which should naturally be the adjuncts of agriculture--axe, hoe and broom handles, pitch-forks, rakes, and hand-spikes for rolling logs, s.h.i.+ngles and pine boards; and even that "the Charleston market is supplied with fish and wild game by Northern men, who come out here, as regularly as the winter comes, for this purpose, and from our own waters and forests often realize, in the course of one winter, a sufficiency to purchase a small farm in New England."[97]

An orator at the Southern Commercial Convention, New Orleans, 1855, adapted for the occasion, thought Olmsted, a speech made in the British Parliament on taxes, familiarized in "Child's First Speaker", 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 that was a favorite one with platform and pen, and many examples of the employment of which may be found.[98]

A Virginia land-owner wrote to a farm paper regretting the widespread and intimate dependence upon the North, and stated quite as clearly as was observed thirty years later that goods which could be bought in the North, paying a profit to the manufacturer there, then transported to the South at heavy cost and sold at a profit to the tradesman, might surely be manufactured in the South in the first place, saving maker's profit to home industry and obviating charges of carriage altogether.[99]

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 va.s.sals of Northern brokers and money-changers_? 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."[100] But another and wiser paper in the same State, urging manufacturing development for Virginia towns and cities, and particularly the textile industry for Richmond, antic.i.p.ated with a different mind the event invited in the excerpt above quoted, and foretold with prophecy all too good, what later was patent to everybody: "It must be plain to the South that if our relations with the North should ever be severed--and how soon they may be, none can know (may G.o.d 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. In fact, we would be reduced to a state more abject than we are willing to look at, even prospectively. And yet, with all these things staring us in the face, we shut our eyes, and go on blindfold."[101]

It is thought well, in summary of the decidedly non-industrial character of the ante-bellum South, to set forth some material and some observations of a general character. In spite of its length, it is useful to give in its setting an episode related by Tompkins. It shows more aptly than almost in anything in spite of its incidental happening, 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.

"I heard of an incident, that occurred in a political contest between Mr.

Gregg and Chancellor Carroll, for the place of State Senator from Edgefield District. It was the habit for candidates to appear together and speak to the people from the same platform.... On one of these occasions, Mr. Gregg spoke first. He stated that he solicited votes on the ground that he had built a factory, which gave work to poor white people. It enhanced the value of cotton by manufacturing it. He had planted peach orchards to develop new avenues of profit and advantage to the people, &c., &c. Whereas, Chancellor Carroll had never made two blades of gra.s.s grow where only one grew before.

"Mr. Carroll flowed Mr. Gregg. He was an accomplished orator, and praised in eloquent terms, Mr. Gregg's enterprise in building a factory. He eulogized his plans for fruit culture. He admitted, with humility, all the delinquencies Mr. Gregg charged against him excepting only one: 'He says I never made two blades of gra.s.s grow where only one grew before. Having faith in Mr. Gregg's plans and advice about orchards, I planted one, and if anybody is disposed to believe I never made gra.s.s grow, I simply invite them to go look at that orchard. It is literally run away with gra.s.s.' The crowd laughed, voted for Mr. Carroll and the cause of slavery went forward while Mr. Gregg staid at home and the cause of civilization languished."[102]

But Gregg preached his doctrine undaunted; his works are to be taken less as an indication of anything like general ante-bellum awakening to suicidal policies than as the bright exception that proves the melancholy rule.

He showed that even cotton, the great G.o.d, drove enterprise from South Carolina, for, with the returns from its culture under ordinary management amounting to 3 or 4 and in some instances only 2 per cent., the inclination for planters to remove with their slave capital to the richer south-west was strong, thus keeping the population of the State at a standstill.[103]

Mr. Ingle has stated the case broadly: "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."[104] An "address to the Farmers of Virginia" read at a convention for the formation of the Virginia 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 acc.u.mulate 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 with more propriety, the _demagogue_!... With a widespread 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."[105]

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 South Carolina or the whole South, for that matter, to rise superior to Calhoun's sway, and a.s.serting 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 distinguished 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."[106]

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 case. 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." His footnote to this pa.s.sage shows how calmly, in his comprehensive grasp of the whole situation, Gregg could estimate the bias of his opponents and point out to them how even their selfish ambitions could only be served by attention to such reasoning as his: "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 for our agricultural productions."[107]

Gregg felt keenly the opposition to cotton manufactures, which took point, moreover, from the failure of mills in the South, particularly in his own State. This he combatted by showing that not lack of natural advantages but gross mismanagement had been responsible for the fate of these enterprises.[108] He tried to take heart for the South in the reflection that those who commenced the textile industry in Rhode Island had the whole country against them and the experience of England closed to them, whereas his section had the encouragement of New England and access to the machinery and mechanical skill of the world, and he added, "It will be remembered, that the wise men of the day predicted the failure of _steam navigation_, and also of our own railroad; it was said we were deficient in mechanical skill, and that we could not manage the complicated machinery of a steam engine, yet these works have succeeded--we have found men competent to manage them--they grow up amongst us...."[109]

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, the estimate which Gregg gave in 1856 of Charleston's att.i.tude toward home industry is interesting. As a delegate from Edgefield District in the South Carolina house of representatives he spoke against the grant of aid by the State to the South Carolina Railroad, stoutly declaring, although he was a stockholder in the venture and the men in control were his personal friends, that he believed every dollar the State might put into the scheme would be lost; he observed that the railroad was purely for the commercial aggrandizement of Charleston, and that, perhaps, not honestly, its spokesmen being unwilling themselves to take stock. Instead of commercial policies selfishly followed by "wealthy gentlemen, some of whom have s.h.i.+ps floating in every sea", he declared "That her (Charleston's) destiny was fixed and indissoluble with the State of South Carolina, and that mainly her great investment in Internal Improvements should be made with a view to developing the resources of the immediate country around her. That certain and cheap modes of transportation from all quarters of the State could not fail to re-act on the general prosperity of the city.

That the dormant wealth of Charleston might be so directed as to be felt in the remotest parts of the State, in stimulating agriculture, draining our great 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."[110] Instead of this just ideal for leaders.h.i.+p and helpfulness, he found it to be the unfortunate fact that, "There is no city in the Union which has acc.u.mulated more wealth, to its size, than Charleston--none that has shown so little inclination to put forth her wealth in such a way as to develop the resources of the State. Her millionaires die in New York. There is scarcely a day that pa.s.ses that does not send forth Charleston capital to add to the growth and wealth of that great city. There is a silent and an imperceptible drain in that direction; the aggregate of which for twenty years would more than build a railroad from Charleston to Cincinnati."[111]

The economic thinking of the old South, with its inertia and its inconsistency, is well ill.u.s.trated in a statement of Robert N. Gourdin, a cotton factor of Charleston and representative of the aristocratic type of its citizens.h.i.+p, made to the correspondent of the New York Herald in connection with the Atlanta Cotton exposition in 1881. After going over the old matter of the war, and the South's vanquishment by superior numbers only, he said: "We (in the South) did not manufacture because there was no necessity for our doing so. With our wonderfully productive soil, our marvellous climate, and with plenty of labor to cultivate our farms, we would acc.u.mulate wealth, live comfortably and even luxuriously without troubling ourselves with diggings for minerals or manufacturing cloth. We did not object to the inventions and manufactures of the North, but we did protest against being obliged to pay for them."[112]

The prohibition by city ordinance of the use of the steam engine in Charleston is an extreme evidence of a frame of mind that was general in the South. In order to appreciate how completely deflected from industry the Southern thought and habit had become, it is interesting to observe the seriousness with which in 1845 Gregg was forced to argue against this regulation which now seems so absurd that it could not have existed since the Middle Ages. Its opponent showed that he was linked in his sympathies with other sections and with later years, not only by his antagonism but by the humor which he could not fail to find in the situation.[113]

The characteristic inclination toward the individual rather than corporate form of enterprise which was noticed as showing itself in the textile and other industries 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, and, as in others of his pamphlets and speeches, he made a.n.a.lysis of the conditions that would seem to have been plain enough to convince the most stolid; he was quick to hold up New England as a business model to the South; in marked contrast to most men of affairs of the time, he saw economic inst.i.tutions in their social perspective.[114]

Those who have sought to magnify to the largest proportions the industrial activities of the old South have frequently failed to take account of the differences in organization which distinguished the ventures from those of post-bellum years. The textile industry could not be a movement in economic society so long as investment partic.i.p.ation sprang from and ended with individual initiative. Until the widespread emergence of the joint-stock form, the mills could not 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.

Not only was there self-satisfaction coupled with dependence upon the North for manufactured commodities in the low-country of the ante-bellum South, but the up-country, that 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.[115] Olmsted was struck with finding at Fayetteville, "the point of transfer from wagon to boat, being at the head of navigation",[116] the long wagon trains of highland farmers. He counted sixty wagons in the main street of the town; this was the method of bringing produce to market. "Several of the wagons had come from a hundred miles distant; and one of them from beyond the Blue Ridge, nearly two hundred miles." The teams made less than a score of miles a day through the bad roads.[117] This isolation of one district in the South from another brought lack of concert in political and economic life. "Small landowners in the highlands could not always sympathize with men of princely domain in the low country; and misapprehensions were magnified by separation.... Diffusion of population ... was revealed in the scantiness of common-school facilities; in the division of capital among several small factories or mills, instead of its concentration in a few; in literary, religious, and social life. In 1860, for instance, the South had proportionately more church buildings than the North; but its 22,655 buildings had an average seating-capacity of 307, and an average value of $1,777, while the 31,344 of the North would accommodate 388 persons each, and were $4,183 on an average.... 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...."[118]

Strong as is the proof of the non-industrial character of the old South as revealed by scrutiny of internal economic facts, evidence afforded by the reflection of this condition in aspects which may be called external, is quite as striking. So much is this the case, that it is believed that an examination of the social, political, educational and moral inst.i.tutions, const.i.tuting the sh.e.l.l of the South, is satisfying as to the character of the egg without looking at the vital cell at the center. The fruits of the tree are conclusive of the sap.

Of these external phenomena, the political is that which will most readily occur to everyone. Pervasive economic conditions are shown crystallized in political pretensions; economic transitions are registered in alterations of 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 spite of Webster's explanation that New England was acquiescing, against her inclination, in the expressed will of the country, it is the bottom truth that, as Lodge declares, "Opinion in New England changed for good and sufficient business reasons, and Mr. Webster changed with it ... when the weight of interest in New England s.h.i.+fted from free trade to protection Mr. Webster following it." And Mr. Scherer has done justice to the underlying forces in saying, "Calhoun was neither better nor worse. Both of them simply swung true to the economic interests of their respective const.i.tuencies."[119]

Cotton, nearly exclusively in the South, and to a notable degree in New England, was responsible underneath for the changes which were displayed in the superficial play of politics. It was the disintegration of manufactures brought about by the 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 the relative relinquis.h.i.+ng of commerce, that made New England protectionist instead of, as before, the champion of free trade.[120]

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 re-established 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 all to get together. We ought to get together for 'Protection and Reciprocity.'"[121]

In summary of the ante-bellum years, which have just been under review, Mr. Clark writes:

"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 co-operation 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."[122]

Two objections against this pa.s.sage 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.[123] The plants set up by the New Englanders earlier were in response to individual enterprise, and that enterprise born out of the boundaries of the South. Co-operation 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 an effect of agitation, William Gregg was almost solely responsible. It has been pointed out above that Gregg was a voice crying in the wilderness--he was a missionary who spoke an unaccepted faith. He was not a social exponent. Also, while some real factories were built, it seems that to speak of these as const.i.tuting a "real factory development" is questionable. In the second place, it is rather 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, and in which no beginnings could grow and become permanent. Could the war be regarded simply as an occurrence, an unfortunate happening, there might be ground for a.s.suming that industrial enterprise might have been built into and finally changed wholesomely the economic regime of the Southern States, but facts show that it was a case where mastery between mutually exclusive plans had to be made 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 foregoing pages have not dwelt, except by chance, upon the decade 1850-1860. These years have been reserved for specific discussion because of the effort which has been made by two writers to invest them with a character of industrialism superior to that of the ante-bellum period generally. Not only is the argument defeated by external evidence, but an internal examination of Mr. Edmonds' presentation shows his own consciousness of serious modifications upon the doctrine, and explains in a very natural light the occasion for the point of view which he sometimes too dogmatically expresses. The late Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy, in treating the subject, was heavily influenced in his opinion by Mr. Edmonds' work; it will be seen that in his disciples.h.i.+p, while he rid Mr. Edmonds'

statement of one outstanding error, he failed to notice some of the major allowances made by him, and altogether Murphy's p.r.o.nouncement is more positive and absolute than that of the source from which he chiefly drew his beliefs.

Mr. Edmonds is practically on all fours which Tompkins and others quoted in this study, in recognizing that certainly from early in the nineteenth century until the fifth decade industry was little attended to in the South. This he attributes to the high prices to be obtained from cotton, averaging for the years 1800 to 1839 a fraction over seventeen cents a pound. Then he declares: "Beginning with 1840 there came a period of extremely low prices and the cotton States suffered very much from this decline. In that year the average of New York prices dropped to nine cents, a decline of four cents from the preceding year, and this was followed by a continuous decline until 1846, when the average was 5.63 cents.... In 1847 the crop was short and prices advanced sharply, only to drop back to eight and then to seven and one-fourth cents, making the average from 1840 to 1849 the lowest ever known in the cotton trade for a full decade.

"These excessively low prices brought about a revival of public interest in other pursuits than cotton cultivation, and the natural tendency of the people to industrial matters, as evidenced by the history of the colonies prior to the Revolution, but which had long been dormant, was again aroused, and for some years there was a very active spirit manifested in the building of railroads and the development of manufactures.

"The decade ending with 1860 witnessed a very marked growth in Southern railroad and manufacturing interests.... In 1850 the South had 2335 miles of railroad, and the New England and Middle States 4798 miles; by 1860 the South had increased its mileage to 9897 miles, a quadrupling of that of 1850, while the New England and Middle States had increased to 9510 miles.

The conditions were reversed by 1860, and the South then led by 387 miles.... While devoting great attention to the building of railroads, the South also made rapid progress during the decade ending with 1860 in the development of its diversified manufactures." Flour and meal, sawed and planed lumber mills are mentioned, with iron founding and the manufacture of steam engines and machinery. "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." Noting that while most of the Southern manufacturing enterprises were comparatively small, those of New England in the early stages were of the same character, he says that "In the aggregate, however, the number of Southern factories swelled to very respectable proportions, the total number of 1860 having been 24,590, with an aggregate capital invested of $175,100,000.

"A study of the facts ... should convince anyone that the South in its early days gave close attention to manufacturing development,[124] 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 astonis.h.i.+ng advance in railroad construction and in manufactures."[125]

Figures are set up to show the favorable economic condition of the South in 1860 as compared with the North, and these head up naturally in the observation that, "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."[126]

In criticism of these quotations specifically it is to be said that the early development in industrial pursuits and the thorough lapse before 1840 are properly observed. The present writer believes that Mr. Edmonds has exaggerated in his own mind both the spirit for manufactures, particularly in the decade from 1850 to 1860, and the extent of their establishment. The recital that there were 24,590 plants, with an investment of $175,100,000, seems at first to be striking, but a simple division shows 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 enterprises 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 establishments points away from any concerted movement toward manufacturing. As to the railroad construction, much of it was narrow-gauge, and all of the facts tend to show that railroads were looked upon as facilitating commerce rather than manufactures; 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" typefied in Cincinnati; as rails were laid, piecemeal, through the Piedmont, advantages afforded by them for the erection of factories were seldom mentioned, and their utility in tapping pools of available labor was not considered. The easier transport of cotton and the development of the South Atlantic ports were the thoughts uppermost.

To vaunt property figures of the South of 1860 by including, as Mr.