A second quality differentiating our people from the Northern factory communities of to-day, is what may well be called their unmodified Americanism. Up to the present time there is an entire absence of the foreign element of population among them, and the effect of such absence is very marked. Not only do better manners prevail in this people sprung from our own soil, but better morals, greater social purity, less turbulence and lawlessness. Remember, that observance of law is easier, more natural, even to illiterate Americans, than to other nations, because Law has typified to them from childhood the majesty of right, not the tyranny of might.
MILLS 1, 2 AND 3, PELZER, S. C.
The finer respect for women which marks American manhood, extends also to these toilers. Except among their very lowest, motherhood inspires the regard it meets with in other social strata. And while in many of the mills the number of female employees exceeds that of males, yet in few of the better kind are there any mothers of young children at work.
These considerations lead at once to the questions, Where does such a class of labor come from? What are its antecedents?
The first is easily answered: The operatives have poured into the new factories, not from town or city, but from the country, direct from the cotton fields, we may say, to the mills. It was certainly not an anomalous movement when cotton was bringing 4¾ cents per pound. But as the staple moves back to its old prices, 10 and 12 cents, some reactionary phases must be looked for and provided against.
The antecedents of this class of labor deserve attention. A great majority of the operatives come from the agricultural class known as tenant farmers; that is, men who farm the land for others, paying as rent a considerable portion of each year’s crop. The tenant system was adopted in the South during the period of disorder and chaotic ruin following the Civil War, when our old system of labor was dissolved and no better base remained on which to build anew the fabric of agricultural life. Unfit as it is for a country of such institutions as ours, and the source in itself of very sore evils, the tenant system still had a necessary part in the last half century.
Many of the tenant farmers of the last generation had indeed “seen better days.” Not a few had been freeholders before the war, although usually of the little farms interspersed here and there among the great plantations of the aristocrats. Many others had been overseers, factors, agents of various sorts. A very small proportion came from the class of decayed gentlemen. The rest were made up from those strata usually lumped together in our designation, “crackers,” or, in the South Carolina term, “poor Buckra.”
HOMES FROM WHICH THE MILL PEOPLE COME.