1. History in the U. S.

Much has been written on the subject of the textile industry and perhaps even more still remains to be said. It is not the object of this brief survey to present a complete picture of all the stages of manufacture, but rather to place briefly before the reader a necessarily kaleidoscopic view of the various processes.

Slater’s Mills

Whitney’s Gin

Stimulus of War of 1812

Although the first cotton mill in the United States was founded in Rhode Island by Samuel Slater in 1790, Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793 marked the real beginning of the cotton growing and manufacturing industries in this country, because it solved the hitherto vexatious problem of separating the fibre from the seed. Nevertheless, until the war of 1812, this country exported almost all of its cotton to Great Britain, and imported from there its cotton goods. The war stimulated the textile industry for two reasons: first, because no British goods were available; and second, because it brought about the transference of New England capital from ships and commerce to home manufacturing industries. The census figures for 1805 show 4,500 spindles in the country; in 1825 there were 800,000.

Growth to 1860

Various inventions, notably Lowell’s power loom in 1814, and Jenck’s ring spindle in 1830, made it possible for the New England manufacturer to compete with the skilled labor of England, and up to the time of the Civil War the industry made rapid strides. In 1831 795 establishments with 1,200,000 spindles used 77,800,000 pounds of cotton and manufactured $32,000,000 worth of goods. Thirty years later there were 1091 mills with 5,200,000 spindles using 422,700,000 pounds of cotton and making a product worth $115,700,000. At this time 570 of the mills were in New England, 340 in the Middle Atlantic States, 159 in the South, and 22 in the Western States. The New England mills, however, averaged twice as many spindles as the others, and Massachusetts and Rhode Island alone contained 48% of the total.

Civil War

Home industries at this time supplied most of the coarse drills and sheetings, while the fine goods were imported from England. There was a small export trade of coarse goods to Asia. The Civil War cut off the industrial centers from their raw material so that for five years no progress was made, and when normal life was resumed a new tendency towards concentration became manifest. From then on the number of plants decreased and the individual establishment grew larger, so that in 1880 there were fewer mills and four and one-half times as many spindles as twenty years before.

Rapid Industrial Rise of the South

While we shall discuss the geographical distribution of the industry in a later chapter, it is worthy of note here that the feature of the period beginning about 1880 and extending to the present time, was the gradual growth of the spinning and weaving industry in the South. The social and economic system in the Southern states before the abolition of slavery made those states entirely agrarian, but as soon as a recovery from the war was accomplished, manufacturing, and particularly cotton manufacturing, grew up surprisingly fast. A glance at the growth in spindlage in the United States from 1880 to 1923 will suffice to illustrate. Sixty per cent. of the increase since 1880 was in the South. The units represent millions of spindles.

	1880	1890	1900	1910	1923	Inc. 43 yrs.
North	10.1	12.6	14.5	17.4	19.9	9.8
South	.5	1.7	4.5	11.2	16.3	15.8