The Rise of Cotton Mills in the South

by Broadus Mitchell

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 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 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 passage 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 attitude 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 ships 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 leadership and helpfulness, he found it to be the unfortunate fact 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 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 passes 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 illustrated in a statement of Robert N. Gourdin, a cotton factor of Charleston and representative of the aristocratic type of its citizenship, 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 accumulate 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 analysis 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 institutions 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 participation 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 institutions, constituting the shell 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 shifted 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 constituencies."[119]