But when we have discussed the questions involved in the planting and culture of the cotton crop, as serious as they are, we have had to do with the least important phase of our subject. The crop of 7,000,000 bales, when ready for the market, is worth in round numbers $300,000,000. The same crop when manufactured is worth over $900,000,000. Will the South be content to see the whole of this added value realized by outsiders? If not, how much of the work necessary to create this value will she do within her own borders? She has abundant water-powers, that are never locked a day by ice or lowered by drought, that may be had for a mere song; cheap labor, cheap lands, an unequaled climate, cheap fuel, and the conditions of cheap living. Can these be utilized to any general extent?
It may be premised that there are questions of the utmost importance to the South outside of the manufacture of the lint, which is usually held to cover the whole question of cotton manufacture. There is no particle of the cotton plant that may not be handled to advantage. Mr. Edward Atkinson is authority for the statement that if a plant similar to cotton, but having no lint, could be grown in the North, it would be one of the most profitable of crops. And yet it is true that up to a late date the seed of the cotton has been wholly wasted, and even now the stalk is thrown away as useless. A crop of 7,000,000 bales will yield 3,500,000 tons of cotton seed. Every ounce of this seed is valuable, and in the past few years it has been so handled as to add very heavily to the value of the crop. The first value of the seed is as a fertilizer. It has been discovered of late that the seed that had been formerly allowed to accumulate about the gin-houses in vast piles and rot as waste material, when put upon the fields would add twenty-five to thirty-three per cent. to the crop, and was equal to many of the fertilizers that sell in the market for $25 per ton. In 1869 a mill was established in New Orleans for the purpose of pressing the oil from the cotton seed, and manufacturing the bulk into stock food. Its success was so pronounced that there are now fifty-nine seed-oil mills in the South, costing over $6,000,000, and working up $5,500,000 worth of seed annually. The product of the seed used sells for $9,600,000, so that the mills create a value of $4,500,000 annually. They used only one-seventh of the seed produced in the South. A ton of seed which can be worked for $5.50 a ton, and cost originally $8 to $10, making an average cost when worked of $15, is estimated to produce thirty-five gallons of oil worth $11.50, seed-cake worth $5.50, and lint worth $1.50—a total of $18.50, or profit of $3.50, per ton. The oil is of excellent quality, and is used in the making of soaps, stearine, white oils, and when highly refined is a table oil of such flavor and appearance as will deceive the best judges. A quality has been lately discovered in it that makes it valuable as a dye-stuff. It is shipped largely to Europe, 130,000 barrels having been exported last year, chiefly to Antwerp. It is put up carefully, and re-shipped to this country as olive-oil to such an extent that prohibitory duties have been put on it by the Italian government, and it is ruled out of that country. Before it is placed in the oil mill the cotton seed is hulled. The hulls are valuable, and may be used for tanning, made into pulp for paper stock, or used as fuel, and the ashes sold to the soap-makers for the potash they contain. The mass of kernels left after the hulls have been removed and the oil pressed out is made into seed-cake, a most desirable food for stock, which is exported largely to Europe. It is also worked into a fertilizer that yields under analysis $37.50 in value per ton, and can be sold for $22 a ton. It is a notable fact that the ton of seed-cake is even more valuable as a stock food after the $11.50 worth of oil has been taken from it than before, and quite as valuable as a fertilizer. In the four hundred pounds of lint in a bale of cotton there are but four pounds of chemical elements taken from the soil; in the oil there is little more; but in the seed-cake and hulls there are forty pounds of potash and phosphate of lime. But admirable as is the disposition of the cotton seed for manufacture, ample as is the margin of profit, and rapid as has been the growth in the industry, there exists the same disorganization that is noticeable in the handling of the whole cotton question. Although less than one-seventh of the seed raised is needed by the mills, they are unable to get enough to keep them running. The cotton is ginned in such awkward distribution, and in such small quantity at any one locality, that it cannot be gathered promptly or cheaply enough for the oil mills. Of the 3,500,000 tons of seed, 500,000 tons only are worked up, and perhaps as much more used for seed. This leaves 2,500,000 tons not worked, and in which is lost nearly $30,000,000 worth of oil. For whether this two and a half million tons is used as a fertilizer or fed to the stock, it would lose none of its value for either purpose if the thirty-five gallons of oil, worth $11.50, were extracted from each ton of it.
Even when the South has passed beyond the proper handling of cotton seed, she has very important ground to cover before she arrives at what is generally known as cotton manufacturing. “The manufacture of this staple,” says a very eminent authority, “is a unit, beginning at the field where the cotton is picked, and ending at the factory from which the cloth is sent to the merchant.” How little this essential truth has been appreciated is apparent from the fact that, until the last census, ginning, pressing, and baling have been classed with the “production” of cotton, and its manufacture held to consist solely of spinning and weaving. Yet there is not a process to which the lint is submitted after it is thrown from the negro’s “pocket” that does not act directly on the quality of the cloth that is finally produced, and on the cheapness and efficiency with which the cloth is made. The separation of the fibre from the seed, the disposition made of the fluffy lint before it is compressed, the compression itself, and the baling of the compressed cotton—these are all delicate operations, involving the integrity of the fibre, the cost of getting it ready for the spindle, and the ease with which it may be spun. Indeed, Mr. Hammond, of South Carolina, a most accomplished writer, contends that the gin-house is the pivotal point around which the whole manufacture of cotton revolves. There is no question that with one-tenth of the money invested in improved gins, cleaners, and pressers that would be required for factories, and with incomparably less risk, the South could make one-half the profit, pound for pound, that is made in the mills of New England. Mr. F. C. Morehead, already alluded to in this article, says: “A farmer who produces 500 bales of cotton—200,000 pounds—can, by the expenditure of $1500 on improved gins and cleaners, add one cent per pound to the value of his crop, or $2000. If he added only one-half of one cent, he would get in the first year over fifty per cent. return of his outlay.” Mr. Edward Atkinson—to close this list of authorities—says that the cotton crop is deteriorated ten per cent. at least by being improperly handled from the field to the factory. It is, of course, equally true that a reform in this department of the manufacture of cotton would add ten per cent. to the value of the crop—say $30,000,000—and that, too, without cost to the consumer. Much of the work now done in the mills of New England is occasioned by the errors committed in ginning and packing. Not only would the great part of the dust, sand, and grit that get into cotton from careless handling about the gin-house be kept out if it were properly protected, but that which is in the fibre naturally could be cleaned out more efficiently and with one-third the labor and cost, if it were taken before it has been compressed and baled. Beyond this, the excessive beating and tearing of the fibre necessary to clean it after the sand has been packed in, weaken and impair it, and the sand injures the costly and delicate machinery of the mills.
The capital available to the farmers of any neighborhood in the South is entirely adequate to make thorough reform in this most important, safest, and most profitable department of the manufacture of cotton. A gin-house constructed on the best plan, supplied with the new roller gins lately invented in England, that guarantee to surpass in quantity of cotton ginned as well as quality of lint our rude and imperfect saw gins, having automatic feeders to pass the picking to the gin, and an apron to receive the lint as it comes from the gin and carry it to the beater, or cleaner, where all the motes and dust can be taken from the freshly ginned fibre and then, instead of rolling this fleecy mass on a dirty floor, where it would catch every particle of dust and grit, to carry it direct to a Dedrick press that would compress forty pounds within a cubic foot, and reduce the little bale of one hundred and twenty pounds to the consistency of elm-wood, and as little liable to soak water or catch dirt—an establishment of this sort would add one cent per pound to every pound of cotton put through it, and would be worth more as an example than a dozen cotton factories. Annexed to this gin-house should be a huller to take the hulls from the seed and to this huller the seed should be taken as it comes from the gins. Once hulled, the hulls should be fed to the stock, restored to the soil, or sold, and the kernels sent to the nearest oil mill, the oil sold, and the meal fed to sheep or stock, or used as a fertilizer. These improvements, costing little, and within the skill of ordinary laborers, would bring as good a profit as could be realized by a factory involving enormous outlay, great risk, and the utmost skill of management. The importance of reform here will be seen when we state that there is half as much capital—say $70,000,000—invested in machinery for baling, pressing, and ginning cotton as there is invested in the United States in machinery for weaving and spinning it. So great has been the progress in invention, and so sluggish the cotton farmer to reform either his methods or his machinery, that experts agree that the ginning, pressing, and baling of the crop could be done with one-half or possibly one-third of the labor and cost of the present, and done so much better that the product would be worth ten per cent. more than it now commands, if the best machinery were bought, and the best methods employed.
The urgency and the magnitude of the reforms needed in the field and about the gin-house have not deterred the South from aspiring to spin and weave at least the bulk of the cotton crop. Indeed, there is nothing that so appeals to Southern pride as to urge the possibility that in time the manufacture of this crop as well as the crop itself shall be a monopoly of the cotton belt. As the South grows richer and the conditions of competition are nearer equal, there will be a tendency to place new machinery intended for the manufacture of cotton near the field in which the staple is growing; but the extent to which this tendency will control, or the time in which it will become controlling, is beyond the scope of this article. We shall rather deal with things as they are, or are likely to be in the very near future. We note, then, that in the past ten years the South has more than doubled the amount of cotton manufactured within her borders. In 1870, there were used 45,032,866 pounds of cotton; in 1880, 101,937,256 pounds. In 1870, there were 11,602 looms and 416,983 spindles running; in 1880, 15,222 looms and 714,078 spindles. This array of figures hardly indicates fairly the progress that the South will make in the next ten years, for the reason that the factories in which these spindles are turned are experiments in most of the localities in which they are placed. It is the invariable rule that when a factory is built in any city or country it is easier to raise the capital for a subsequent enterprise than for the first one. At Augusta, Georgia, for instance, where the manufacture of cloth has been demonstrated a success, the progress is remarkable. In the past two years two new mills, the Enterprise and Sibly, with 30,000 spindles each, have been established; and a third, the King, has been organized, with a capital of $1,000,000 and 30,000 spindles. The capital for these mills was furnished about one-fourth in Augusta, and the balance in the North. With these mills running, Augusta will have 170,000 spindles, and will have added about 70,000 spindles to the last census returns. In South Carolina the same rapid growth is resulting from the establishment of one or two successful mills; and in Columbus, Georgia, the influence of one successful mill, the Eagle and Phœnix, has raised the local consumption of cotton from 1927 bales in 1870 to 19,000 bales in 1880. In Atlanta, Georgia, the first mill had hardly been finished before the second was started; a third is projected; and two companies have secured charters for the building of a forty-mile canal to furnish water-power and factory fronts to capital in and about the city. These things are mentioned simply to show that the growth of cotton manufacture in the South is sympathetic, and that each factory established is an argument for others. There is no investment that has proved so uniformly successful in the South as that put into cotton factories. An Augusta factory just advertises eight per cent. semi-annual dividend; the Eagle and Phœnix, of Columbus, earned twenty-five per cent. last year; the Augusta factory for eleven years made an average of eighteen per cent. per annum. The net earnings of the Langley Mills was $480,000 for its first eight years on a capital of $400,000, or an average of fifteen per cent. a year. The earnings of sixty Southern mills, large and small, selected at random, for three years, averaged fourteen per cent. per annum.
Indeed, an experience varied and extended enough to give it authority teaches that there is absolutely no reason why the South should not profitably quadruple its capacity for the manufacture of cotton every year in the next five years except the lack of capital. The lack of skilled labor has proved to be a chimerical fear, as the mills bring enough of skilled labor to any community in which they are established to speedily educate up a native force. It may be true that for the most delicate work the South will for a while lack the efficient labor of New England that has been trained for generations, but it is equally true that no factory in the South has ever been stopped a week for the lack of suitable labor. The operatives can live cheaper than at the North, and can be had for lower wages. As sensible a man as Mr. Edward Atkinson claimed lately that in the cotton country proper a person could not keep at continuous in-door labor during the summer. The answer to this is that during the present summer, the hottest ever known, not a Southern mill has stopped for one day or hour on account of the heat, and this, too, when scores of establishments through the Western and Northern cities were closed. One of the strongest points of advantage the South has is that for no extreme of climate, acting on the machinery, the operatives, or the water-supply, is any of her mills forced to suspend work at any season. Beyond this, Southern water-powers can be purchased low, and the land adjacent at a song; there are no commissions to pay on the purchase of cotton, no freight on its transportation, and it is submitted to the picker before it has undergone serious compression. Mr. W. H. Young, of Columbus, perhaps the best Southern authority, estimates that the Columbus mills have an advantage of nine-tenths of a cent per pound over their Northern competitors, and this in a mill of 1600 looms will amount to nine per cent. on the entire capital, or $120,099. The Southern mills, without exception, pulled through the years of depression that followed the panic of 1873, paying regular dividends of from six per cent. to fifteen, and, it may be said, have thoroughly won the confidence of investors North and South. The one thing that has retarded the growth of manufacturing in the Cotton States, the lack of capital, is being overcome with astonishing rapidity. Within the past two years considerably over $100,000,000 of Northern capital has been subscribed, in lots of $1,000,000 and upward, for the purchase and development of Southern railroads and mining properties; the total will probably run to $120,000,000. There is now being expended in the building of new railroads from Atlanta, Georgia, as headquarters, $17,800,000, not one dollar of which was subscribed by Georgians or by the State of Georgia. The men who invest these vast amounts in the South are interested in the general development of the section into which they have gone with their enterprise, and they readily double any local subscription for any legitimate local improvement. By the sale of these railroad properties to Northern syndicates at advanced prices the local stockholders have realized heavily in cash, and this surplus is seeking manufacturing investment. The prospect is that the next ten years will witness a growth in this direction beyond what even the most sanguine predict.
The International Cotton Exposition, opening October 5, of the present year, in Atlanta, must have a tremendous influence in improving the culture, handling, and manufacture of the great staple of the South. The Southern people do not lack the desire to keep abreast with improvement and invention, but on the contrary have shown precipitate eagerness in reaching out for the best and newest. Before the war, when the Southern planter had a little surplus money he bought a slave. Since the war, he buys a piece of machinery. The trouble has been that he was forced to buy without any guide as to the value of what he bought, or its adaptability to the purposes for which he intended it. The consequence is that the farms are littered with ill-adapted and inferior implements and machines, representing twice the investment that, intelligently placed, would provide an equipment that with half the labor would do better work. It is the purpose of the exposition to bring the farmers face to face with the very best machinery that invention and experience have produced. The buildings themselves will be models each of its kind, and will represent the judgment of experts as to cheapness, durability, safety and general excellence. The past and present will be contrasted in the exhibition. The old loom on which the rude fabrics of our forefathers were woven by hands gentle and loving will be put against the more elaborate looms of to-day. The spinning wheel of the past, that filled all the country-side with its drowsy music, as the dusky spinner advanced and retreated, with not ungraceful courtesy and a swinging sidewise shuffle, will find its sweet voice lost in the hum of modern spindles. The cycle of gins and ginning will be there completed, invention coming back, after a half-century of trial with the brutal saw, to a perfected variation of the patient and gentle roller with which the precious fleece was pulled from the seed years upon years ago. There are the most wonderful machines promised, including a half-dozen that claim to have solved the problem—supposed to be past finding out—of picking cotton by machinery. Large fields flank the buildings, and on these are tested the various kinds of cotton seed, fed by the various kinds of fertilizers, each put in fair competition with the others.
One of the most important special inventions at the exposition will be the Clement attachment—a contrivance for spinning the cotton as it comes from the gin. The invention is simply the marriage of the gin to the spindle. These are joined by two large cards that take the fibre from the gin, straighten it out, and pass it directly to the spinning boards, where it is made into the best of yarns. The announcement of this invention two years ago created very great excitement. If it proved a success, the whole system of cotton manufacture was changed. If the cotton could be spun directly from the gin, all the expense of baling would be eliminated, and four or five expensive steps in the process of cotton from field to cloth would be rendered unnecessary. Better than all, the South argued, the Clement attachment brought the heaviest part of manufacturing to the cotton field, from which it could never be divorced. By the simple joining of the spindles to the gin, the cotton, worth only eight or nine cents as baled lint, in which shape it had been shipped North, became worth sixteen to eighteen cents as yarns. The home value of the crop was thus to be doubled, and by such process as New England could never capture. Several of the attachments were put to work, and were visited by thousands. They produced an excellent quality of yarns, and made a clear profit of two cents per pound on the cotton treated. The investment required was small, and it was held that $5000 would certainly bring a net annual profit of $2200. Many of these little mills are still running, and profitably; but difficulties between the owner and his agents, and a general suspicion raised by his declining to put the machine on its merits before certain agricultural associations, prevented its general adoption. That this attachment, or some machine of similar character for spinning the cotton into yarns near the field where it is grown, will be generally adopted through the South in the near future, I have not a particle of doubt; that the exposition with its particular exhibits on this point will hasten the day, there is every reason to hope. There are many yarn mills already scattered through the South, but none of them promise the results that will be achieved when the spindles are wedded to the gin, and the same motive power drives both, carrying the cotton without delay or compression from seed to thread.
Such, then, in brief and casual review, is King Cotton, his subjects, and his realm. Vast as his concerns and possessions may appear at present, they are but the hint of what the future will develop. The best authority puts the amount of cotton goods manufactured in America at about fourteen pounds per head of population, of which twelve pounds per capita are retained for home consumption, leaving only a small margin for export. On the Continent there is but one country, probably—Switzerland—that manufactures more cotton goods than it consumes; and the Continent demands from Great Britain an amount of cotton cloth that, added to its own supply, exhausts nearly one-half the product of the English mills. It is hardly probable that, under the sharp competition of American mills, the capacity of either England or the Continent for producing ordinary cotton cloths will be greatly increased. But, with the yield of the English and Continental mills at least measurably defined and now rapidly absorbed, there is an enormous demand for machine-made cotton fabrics springing from new and virtually exhaustless sources. The continents of Asia, Africa, South America, Australia, and the countries lying between the two American continents, contain more than 800,000,000 people, according to general authority. This immense population is clothed in cotton almost exclusively, and almost as exclusively in hand-made fabrics. That the cheap and superior products of the modern factory will displace these hand-made goods as rapidly as they can be delivered upon competing terms, cannot be doubted. To supply China alone with cotton fabrics made by machine, deducting the 35,000,000 people or thereabout already supplied, and estimating the demand of the remainder at five pounds per capita, would require 3,000,000 additional bales of cotton and 30,000,000 additional spindles. The goods needed for this demand will be the lower grades of cottons, for the manufacture of which the South is especially adapted, and in which there is serious reason to believe she has demonstrated she has advantages over New England. The demand from Mexico, Central and South America, will grow into immense proportions as cotton and its products cheapen under increased supply, and improved methods of culture and manufacture. The South will be called upon to furnish the cotton to meet the calls of the peoples enumerated. That she can easily do so has been made plain by previous estimate, but it may be added that hardly three per cent. of the cotton area is now devoted to cotton, and that on one-tenth of a single Cotton State—Texas—double the present crop might be raised. Whether or not she will do this profitably, and without destroying the happiness and prosperity of her former population, and building up a land-holding oligarchy, depends on a reform in her system of credit and her system of planting. The first is being effected by the introduction of capital that recognizes farming lands as a safe risk worthy of a low percentage of interest; the latter must depend on the intelligence of her people, the force of a few bright examples, and the wisdom of her leaders. She will be called upon to supply a large proportion of the manufactured goods for this new and limitless demand. It has already been shown that she has felicitous conditions for this work.