The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills

by John Trotwood Moore

Besides, the roar and clatter drowned everything else.

Shiloh was too small to see, to know; but had she looked to the right as she entered, she had seen a sight which would have caused a stone man to flush with pity. It was Byrd Boyle, one of the mill hands who ran a slubbing machine, and he held in his arms (because they were too young to walk so far) twins, a boy and a girl. And they looked like half made up dolls left out on the grass, weather-beaten by summer rains. They were too small to know where their places were in the room, and as their father sat them down, in their proper places, it took the two together to run one side of a spinner, and the tiny little workers could scarcely reach to their whirling bobbins.

To the credit of Richard Travis, this working of children under twelve years of age in the mills was done over his protest. Not so with Kingsley and his wife, who were experienced mill people from New England and knew the harm of it—morally, physically. Travis had even made strict regulations on the subject, only to be overruled by the combined disapproval of Kingsley and the directors and, strange to say, of the parents of the children themselves. His determination that only children of twelve years and over should work in the mill came to naught, more from the opposition of the parents themselves than that of Kingsley. These, to earn a little more for the family, did not hesitate to bring a child of eight to the mill and swear it was twelve. This and the ruling of the directors,—and worse than all, the lack of any state law on the subject,—had brought about the pitiful condition which prevailed then as now in Southern cotton mills.

There was no talking inside the mill. Only the Big Thing was permitted to talk. No singing—for songs come from the happy heart of labor, unshackled. No noise of childhood, though the children were there. They were flung into an arena for a long day's fight against a thing of steel and steam, and there was no time for anything save work, work, work—walk, walk, walk—watch, forever watch,—the interminable flying whirl of spindle and spool.

Early as it was, the children were late, and were soundly rebuffed by the foreman.

The scolding hurt only Shiloh—it made her tremble and cry. The others were hardened—insensible—and took it with about the same degree of indifference with which caged and starved mice look at the man who pours over their wire traps the hot water which scalds them to death.

The fight between steel, steam and child-flesh was on.

Shiloh, Appomattox and Atlanta were spinners.

Spinners are small girls who walk up and down an aisle before a spinning-frame and piece up the threads which are forever breaking. There were over a hundred spindles on each side of the frame, each revolving with the rapidity of an incipient cyclone and snapping every now and then the delicate white thread that was spun out like spiders' web from the rollers and the cylinders, making a balloon-like gown of cotton thread, which settled continuously around the bobbin.

All day long and into the night, they must walk up and down, between these two rows of spinning-frames, amid the whirling spindles, piecing the broken threads which were forever breaking.