A propagandist of the early eighties desiring to organize a development of small cotton mills in the South quoted with approval a correspondent of the Morning News of Savannah, setting forth that before the war the planters saw the advantage for little establishments and were only deterred from manufacturing because "slavery and the factory were declared to be incompatible institutions. They could not exist together."[72]
CHAPTER II
THE BACKGROUND (Continued)
So far from proclaiming cotton as king, there is evidence that some of the wisest Southerners saw that it was in many respects a curse. Said William Gregg in 1845: "Since the discovery that cotton would mature in South Carolina, she has reaped a golden harvest; but it is feared it has proved a curse rather than a blessing, and I believe that she would at this day be in a far better condition, had the discovery never been made. Cotton has been to South Carolina what the mines of Mexico were to Spain...." The "day is not far distant, yea, is close at hand, when we shall find that we can no longer live by that, which has heretofore yielded us ... a bountiful and sumptuous living.... Let us begin at once, before it is too late, to bring about a change in our industrial pursuits ...—let croakers against enterprise be silenced—let the working men of our State who have, by their industry, accumulated capital, turn out and give a practical lesson to our political leaders, that are opposed to this scheme. Even Mr. Calhoun, our great oracle ... is against us in this matter; he will tell you, that no mechanical enterprise can succeed in South Carolina—that good mechanics will go where their talents are better rewarded—that to thrive in cotton spinning, one should go to Rhode Island—that to undertake it here, would not only lead to loss of capital, but disappointment and ruin to those who engage in it."[73]
"The invention of the cotton gin", said Tompkins, "... Before 1860 ... was nearer anything else than a blessing. It was primarily responsible for the system of slavery.... Cotton ... in its manufacture ... is the life of the South, but we could probably have done as well without it until we began to manufacture it."[74]
Not too dogmatic is the opinion expressed that "It seems as clear as day that ... cotton made the South a free trade section and the North protective; cotton lured the South back to slavery;[75] cotton drove the South to an extreme States-rights position ... and cotton at last drove the South to translate extreme States-rights into the terms of Secession...."[76] And with regard to internal policy, "Perhaps the most striking economic change that the new industry (cotton culture) effected in the South after the reintroduction of slavery was the speedy abandonment of manufactures ... what was the use of nerve-racking investment in elaborate and costly machinery when a land-owner could reap ten per cent net profit from a few negroes and mules and a bushel or two of the magical cotton seed? and yet the South had unusual manufacturing facilities ... manufacture soon fell into decay; the Piedmont region being still dotted with the moldering ruins of iron works and other mills that bear witness to the overwhelming power of the new agricultural absorption."[77]
It has been observed that the social difference between North and South before the war, so often looked upon as something existing as of itself apart, as a matter of fact may be fully accounted for simply by the institution of slavery, which arrested development on Southern soil of the industrial type of American civilization.[78]
Very convincing in his fact findings and often strikingly happy in his interpretations is Olmsted; his work benefited by being saved from the passion 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]