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 relinquishing 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 passage 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 constituting 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 assuming 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 discipleship, 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 pronouncement 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 astonishing advance in railroad construction and in manufactures."[125]