The Importance and Power of Cotton
COTTON is the fabric of civilization. It has built up peoples, and has riven them apart. It has brought to the world vast and permanent wealth. It has enlisted the vision of statesmen, the genius of inventors, the courage of pioneers, the forcefulness of manufacturers, the initiative of merchants and shipbuilders, and the patient toil of many millions.
A whole library could be written on the economic aspects of cotton alone. It could be told in detail, how and why the domination of the field of its manufacture passed from India to Spain, to Holland, and finally to England, which now shares it chiefly with the United States. The interdependence of nations which it has brought about has been the subject of numerous books and articles.
Genius that Served
The World’s Need
Nor is the history of the inventions which have made possible to-day’s great production of cotton fabrics less impressive. From the unnamed Hindu genius of pre-Alexandrian days, through Arkwright and Eli Whitney, down to Jacquard and Northrop, the tale of cotton manufacture is a series of romances and tragedies, any one of which would be a story worth telling in detail. Yet, here is a work that is by no means finished. Great inventors who will apply their genius to the improvement of cotton growing and manufacture are still to be born.
The present purpose, however, is to explain, as briefly as may be, the growth of the cotton industry of the United States, in its more important branches, and to endeavor, on the basis of recognized authority, to indicate its position in relation to the cotton industries of the remainder of the world.
America the Chief
Source of Raw Material
For the present, and for the future, as far as that may be seen, the United States will have to continue to supply the greater part of the world’s raw cotton. Staples of unusual length and strength have been grown in some foreign regions, and short and inferior fibers have come from still others. But the cotton belt of the Southern States, producing millions of bales, is the chief source of supply for all the world.
The following table, taken from "The World’s Cotton Crops, 1915," by J. A. Todd, gives the comparative production of the great cotton-growing areas, for the 1914-1915 season:
| America | 16,500,000 | bales | of | 500 | pounds |
| India | 5,000,000 | " | " | 500 | " |
| Egypt | 1,300,000 | " | " | 500 | " |
| Russia | 1,300,000 | " | " | 500 | " |
| China | 4,000,000 | " | " | 500 | " |
| Others | 1,300,000 | " | " | 500 | " |
| ----------- | |||||
| Total | 29,400,000 | " | " | 500 | " |
The American crop is thus approximately fifty-six per cent. of the world’s 6 total. The other producing countries have shown since the beginning of the century an interesting, if not a remarkable growth, that of China being the largest in quantity, and that of Russia, the largest in proportion. The American increase has been larger, absolutely, than that of any other region, and there is little indication that it will not continue to hold first position.
English Spinners
Dominate World Market
In the manufacture of cotton, Great Britain’s supremacy, while not so great proportionately as that of America in growing it, is for the present not likely to be challenged. The following table of the number of spindles in the chief manufacturing countries is based on English figures compiled shortly before the outbreak of the World War. The number of spindles is the usual basis upon which the size of the industry is judged. It is not a perfect method, but it has fewer objections than any other:
| Great Britain | 55,576,108 |
| United States | 30,579,000 |
| Germany | 10,920,426 |
| Russia | 8,950,000 |
| France | 7,400,000 |
| India | 6,400,000 |
| Austria | 4,864,453 |
| Italy | 4,580,000 |
| Latin America | 3,100,000 |
| Japan | 2,250,000 |
| Spain | 2,200,000 |
| Belgium | 1,468,838 |
| Switzerland | 1,398,062 |
| Scattering | 2,499,421 |
| ---------- | |
| Total Spindles 1 | 42,186,308 |
Such figures can be only approximate. The war has brought growth in the United States and in Japan, but has certainly reduced the numbers of spindles in Germany, Austria, and Russia. It is doubtful, moreover, how well the French industry has been able to maintain itself. But the tabulation is accurate enough to show the relative standing of the various countries. There are, as has been indicated, other standards than the number of spindles. The United States, through the fact that it specializes, generally speaking, on the coarser fabrics, uses about 5,000,000 bales of cotton annually, as compared with Great Britain’s 4,000,000. The British product, however, sells for much more. Thus the value of the spindle standard is affirmed. England, then, produces well in excess of one-third of the cotton cloth of the world; the United States considerably more than one-fifth of it, with the other countries trailing far behind, but prospering nevertheless.
The Individuality
of the Cotton Fiber
The cotton fiber—a highly magnified view, showing the twist
It is a curious ruling of fate which makes the spinning of cotton fiber possible. There are many other short vegetable fibers, but cotton is the only one which can profitably be spun into thread. Hemp and flax, its chief vegetable competitors, are both long fibered. The individuality of the cotton fiber lies in its shape. Viewed through the microscope, the fiber is seen to be, not a hollow cylinder, but rather a flattened cylinder, shaped in cross-section something like the figure eight. But the chief and valuable characteristic is that the flattened cylinder is not straight, but twisted. It is this twist which gives its peculiar and overwhelming importance to cotton, for without this apparently fortuitous characteristic, the spinning of cotton, if possible at all, would 7 result in a much weaker and less durable thread. The twist makes the threads "kink" together when they are spun, and it is this kink which makes for strength and durability.
Though the cotton plant seems to be native to South America, Southern Asia, Africa, and the West Indies, its cultivation, was largely confined at first to India, and later to India and the British West Indies. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the West Indies, because of their especial fitness for growing the longer staples were supplying about seventy per cent. of the food of the Lancashire spindles. The United States having made unsuccessful attempts to produce cotton in the early days of the colonies, first became an important producing country toward the end of the eighteenth century. American Upland cotton, by reason of its comparatively short staple, and the unevenness of the fibers, as well as the difficulty of detaching it from the seed, was decidedly inferior to some other accessible species. The Southern planters who grew it, moreover, found it next to impossible to gin it properly, the primitive roller gin of the time being unsuited to the task, and the work of pulling off the fibers by hand being both tedious and expensive. In 1792, the amount exported from the United States was equivalent to only 275 bales.
Eli Whitney, the schoolmaster inventor of the cotton gin
The next year, 1793, is the most important in the history of cotton growing in the United States. In the autumn of 1792, Eli Whitney, a young Massachusetts man who had just been graduated from Yale College, sailed from New York to South Carolina where he intended to teach school. On shipboard he met the widow of Nathaniel Greene, the Revolutionary general. Mrs. Greene invited the youth to begin his residence in the South on her plantation at Mulberry Grove, Georgia. Here one evening, some officers, late of General Greene’s command, were discussing the great wealth which might come to the South were there a suitable machine for removing stubborn Upland fiber from its green seed. The story goes that while the discussion was at its height, Mrs. Greene said:
"Gentlemen, apply to my young friend, Mr. Whitney. He can make anything."
Whitney commenced work on the problem. A room was set aside as his workshop, and it was not long before he had produced the beginnings of the gin. He fixed wire teeth in a board, and found that by pulling the fibers through with his fingers he could leave the tenacious seed behind. He carried this basic idea further by putting the teeth on a cylinder and by providing a rotating brush to clean the fiber from the teeth.
The changes which followed immediately 8 upon the introduction of the cotton gin were tremendous in scope and almost innumerable. There was a time, before cotton became a staple, when the South led New England in manufacturing. That time passed almost immediately. Iron works and coal mines were abandoned, and men turned their energies from the culture of corn, rice, and indigo largely to the raising of the cotton.
Expansion in
Production
The following figures, giving production in the equivalent of 500 pound bales for the year at the close of each ten-year period, give some idea of the tremendous expansion which ensued.
| Year |
500 Pound Bales |
| 1790 | 3,138 |
| 1800 | 73,222 |
| 1810 | 177,824 |
| 1820 | 334,728 |
| 1830 | 732,218 |
| 1840 | 1,347,640 |
| 1850 | 2,136,083 |
| 1860 | 3,841,416 |
| 1870 | 4,024,527 |
| 1880 | 6,356,998 |
| 1890 | 8,562,089 |
| 1900 | 10,123,027 |
| 1910 | 11,608,616 |
| 1917 | 11,302,375 |
By this table it will be seen that the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves held up production only temporarily. In 1914, the banner year, the crop reached the tremendous total of 16,134,930 bales of five hundred pounds each.
Some little spinning had been done in the seventeenth century, but in 1787-88 the first permanent factory, built of brick, and located in Beverly, Massachusetts, on the Bass river, was put into operation by a group headed by John Cabot and Joshua Fisher. This factory failed to justify itself economically, chiefly because of the crudeness of its machinery. But Samuel Slater, newly come from England with models of the Arkwright machinery in his brain, set up a factory in Pawtucket in 1790. From that time forth the growth was steady and sure, if not always extremely rapid.
The following table,[A] which covers the whole country, relates particularly to New England in the years before 1880, because the cotton manufacturing industry until then was largely concentrated there. It shows how the manufacturing interests of the country profited by the discovery that brought wealth to the agricultural South:
| Year |
Number of Estab- lish- ments |
Number of Spindles |
Cotton Used in Million Pounds |
Number of Employes |
Value of Product in Dollars |
| 1810 | 87,000 | ||||
| 1820 | 220,000 | ||||
| 1830 | 795 | 1,200,000 | 77.8 | 62,177 | $32,000,000 |
| 1840 | 1240 | 2,300,000 | 113.1 | 72,119 | 46,400,000 |
| 1850 | 1094 | 3,600,000 | 276.1 | 92,286 | 61,700,000 |
| 1860 | 1091 | 5,200,000 | 422.7 | 122,028 | 115,700,000 |
| 1870 | 956 | 7,100,000 | 398.3 | 135,369 | 177,500,000 |
| 1880 | 756 | 10,700,000 | 750.3 | 174,659 | 192,100,000 |
| 1890 | 905 | 14,200,000 | 1,118.0 | 218,876 | 268,000,000 |
| 1900 | 973 | 19,000,000 | 1,814.0 | 297,929 | 332,800,000 |
| 1910 | 1208 | 27,400,000 | 2,332.2 | 371,120 | 616,500,000 |
| 1918 | 34,940,830 | 3,278.2 |
This tabulation includes spinning and weaving establishments only.
The North, having this growing interest in an industry struggling against the experience and ability of the more firmly established English market, sought naturally for the protection given by a high tariff. The South, having definitely dropped manufacturing, pleaded with Congress always for a low tariff, and the right to deal in human chattels.
There is little need to go further into the rift which began to develop almost immediately. In 1861 the split occurred. The war between the States caused hardly more suffering than the blockade which cut off the spinners of Manchester from the vegetable wool which supplied them the means of living. Cotton proved its power and its domination. It was a beneficent monarch, but it brooked no denial of its overlordship.
Early Exports
to England Heavy
The invention of the Whitney Gin, as we have just said, found the United States able to use but a small part of the cotton grown. What became of the remainder? Obviously, it was exported to provide the means for operating the English mills. Here is a table which shows how American cotton left the Southern ports for England and the Continent in the alternate decennial years beginning in 1790, three years before the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney. The figures are exclusive of linters.
| Year |
Exports in Equivalent of 500 Pound Bales |
| 1790 | 379 |
| 1810 | 124,116 |
| 1830 | 553,960 |
| 1850 | 1,854,474 |
| 1870 | 2,922,757 |
| 1890 | 5,850,219 |
| 1910 | 8,025,991 |
| 1917 | 4,587,000 |
In 1910 American cotton made up almost exactly three-quarters of the whole amount imported into Great Britain. The other countries of Europe have developed a spinning industry by no means inconsiderable. American cotton is sent to almost all those European countries which spin and weave.
Such a movement had of course a profound effect upon the currents of world trade. The cotton crop is the second in value of all the crops produced in the United States, and such a large part of it is exported that the credit it gives to its sellers enables them to buy in return some of the most valuable of the products manufactured in Europe.
The following table gives the amount of cotton, expressed in the equivalent of 500 pound bales, exported to the various countries named in the decennial years:
| Year |
United Kingdom | Germany | France | Italy | Russia | Netherlands | Belgium |
| 1821 | 175,438 | 1,496 | 54,878 | 1,796 | 609 | 8,372 | |
| 1830 | 419,661 | 2,246 | 150,212 | 471 | 223 | 17,135 | |
| 1840 | 989,830 | 18,317 | 358,180 | 7,805 | 4,406 | 21,698 | 25,780 |
| 1850 | 863,062 | 10,090 | 251,668 | 18,707 | 8,677 | 8,590 | 25,492 |
| 1860 | 2,528,274 | 132,145 | 567,935 | 54,037 | 43,396 | 25,515 | 29,601 |
| 1870 | 1,298,332 | 173,552 | 306,293 | 14,549 | 30,341 | 17,050 | 3,452 |
| 1880 | 2,433,255 | 308,045 | 359,693 | 59,126 | 204,500 | 65,325 | 17,896 |
| 1890 | 2,905,152 | 837,641 | 484,759 | 129,751 | 193,163 | 17,438 | 93,588 |
| 1900 | 2,302,128 | 1,619,173 | 736,092 | 443,951 | 54,950 | 74,635 | 148,319 |
| 1910 | 2,444,558 | 1,887,657 | 968,422 | 393,327 | 67,203 | 18,823 | 102,346 |
| 1917 | 2,387,101 | 658,553 | 369,213 | 15,945 | 10,098 |