Footnote 1:
Reprinted from Harper’s Magazine, Oct., 1881.
IT has long been the fortune of the South to deal with special
problems—slavery, secession, reconstruction. For fifty years has the
settlement of these questions engaged her people, and challenged the
attention of the world. As these issues are set aside finally, after
stubborn and bloody conflict, during which she maintained her position
with courage, and abided results with fortitude, she finds herself
confronted with a new problem quite as important as either of those that
have been disposed of. In the cultivation and handling, under the new
order of things, of the world’s great staple, cotton, she is grappling
with a matter that involves essentially her own welfare, and is of the
greatest interest to the general public. To the slaveholder the growing
of cotton was straight and easy, as the product of his land was
supplemented by the increase of his slaves, and he prospered in spite of
himself. To the Southern farmer of _post-bellum_ days, impoverished,
unsettled, and thrown upon free labor, working feverishly with untried
conditions, poorly informed as to the result of experiments made by his
neighbors, and too impatient to wait upon his own experience, it is
quite a different affair. After sixteen years of trial, everything is
yet indeterminate. And whether this staple is cultivated in the South as
a profit or a passion, and whether it shall bring the South to
independence or to beggary, are matters yet to be settled. Whether its
culture shall result in a host of croppers without money or credit,
appealing to the granaries of the West against famine, paying toll to
usurers at home, and mortgaging their crops to speculators abroad even
before it is planted—a planting oligarchy of money-lenders, who have
usurped the land through foreclosure, and hold by the ever-growing
margin between a grasping lender and an enforced borrower—or a
prosperous self-respecting race of small farmers, cultivating their own
lands, living upon their own resources, controlling their crops until
they are sold, and independent alike of usurers and provision
brokers—which of these shall be the outcome of cotton culture the future
must determine. It is certain only in the present that the vigor of the
cotton producers and the pace at which they are moving are rapidly
forcing a settlement of these questions, and that the result of the
experiments now swiftly working out in the South will especially concern
a large part of the human race, from the farmer who plods down the
cotton row, cutting through his doubts with a hoe, to the spinner in
Manchester who anxiously balances the totals of the world’s crop.
It may be well to remark at the outset that the production of cotton in
the South is practically without limit. It was 1830 before the American
crop reached 1,000,000 bales, and the highest point ever reached in the
days of slavery was a trifle above 4,500,000 bales. The crop of 1880-81
is about 2,000,000 in excess of this, and there are those who believe
that a crop of 8,000,000 bales is among the certainties of the next few
years. The heavy increase in the cotton crop is due entirely to the
increase of cotton acreage brought about by the use of fertilizers.
Millions of acres of land, formerly thought to be beyond the possible
limit of the cotton belt, have been made the best of cotton lands by
being artificially enriched. In North Carolina alone the limit of cotton
production has been moved twenty miles northward and twenty miles
westward, and the half of Georgia on which no cotton was grown twenty
years ago now produces fully half the crop of the State. The “area of
low production” as the Atlantic States are brought to the front by
artificial stimulation is moving westward, and is now central in Alabama
and Florida. But the increase in acreage, large as it is, will be but a
small factor in the increase of production, compared to the intensifying
of the cultivation of the land now in use. Under the present loose
system of planting, the average yield is hardly better than one bale to
three acres. This could be easily increased to a bale an acre. In
Georgia five bales have been raised on one acre, and a yield of three
bales to the acre is credited to several localities. President Morehead,
of the Mississippi Valley Cotton Planters’ Association, says that the
entire cotton crop of the present year might have been easily raised in
fourteen counties along the Mississippi River. It will be seen,
therefore, that the capacity of the South to produce cotton is
practically limitless, and when we consider the enormous demand for
cotton goods now opening up from new climes and peoples, we may conclude
that the near future will see crops compared to which the crop of the
past year, worth $300,000,000, will seem small.
Who will be the producers of these vast crops of the future? Will they
be land-owners or tenants—planters or farmers? The answer to this
inquiry will be made by the average Southerners without hesitation.
“Small farms,” he will say, “well tended by actual owners, will be the
rule in the South. The day of a land-holding oligarchy has passed
forever.” Let us see about this.
The history of agriculture—slow and stubborn industry that it is—will
hardly show stronger changes than have taken place in the rural
communities of the South in the past fifteen years. Immediately after
the war between the States there was a period of unprecedented disaster.
The surrender of the Confederate armies found the plantations of the
South stripped of houses, fences, stock, and implements. The planters
were without means or prospects, and uncertain as to what should be
done. The belief that extensive cotton culture had perished with slavery
had put the price of the staple up to thirty cents. Lured by the
dazzling price, which gave them credit as well as hope, the owners of
the plantations prepared for vast operations. They refitted their
quarters, repaired their fences, summoned hundreds of negro croppers at
high prices, and invested lavishly their borrowed capital in what they
felt sure was a veritable bonanza. The few years that followed are full
of sickening failure. Planters who had been princes in wealth and
possessions suddenly found themselves irretrievably in debt and reduced
to beggary. Under the stimulation of high prices the crops grew, until
there was a tumble from thirty to ten cents per pound. Unable to meet
their engagements with their factors, who, suddenly awakening to the
peril of the situation, refused to make further advances or grant
extensions, the planters had no recourse but to throw their lands on the
market. But so terrible had been their experience—many losing $100,000
in a single season—that no buyers were found for the plantations on
which they had been wrecked. The result of this panic to sell and
disinclination to buy was a toppling of land values. Plantations that
had brought from $100,000 to $150,000 before the war, and even since,
were sold at $6000 to $10,000, or hung on the hands of the planter and
his factor at any price whatever. The ruin seemed to be universal and
complete, and the old plantation system, it then seemed, had perished
utterly and forever. While no definite reason was given for the
failure—free labor and the credit system being the causes usually and
loosely assigned—it went without contradiction that the system of
planting under which the South had amassed its riches and lived in
luxury was inexorably doomed.
Following this lavish and disastrous period came the era of small farms.
Led into the market by the low prices to which the best lands had
fallen, came a host of small buyers, to accommodate whom the plantations
were subdivided, and offered in lots to suit purchasers. Never perhaps
was there a rural movement, accomplished without revolution or exodus,
that equalled in extent and swiftness the partition of the plantations
of the ex-slave-holders into small farms. As remarkable as was the
eagerness of the negroes—who bought in Georgia alone 6850 farms in three
years—the earth-hunger of the poorer class of the whites, who had been
unable under the slave-holding oligarchy to own land, was even more
striking. In Mississippi there were in 1867 but 412 farms of less than
ten acres, and in 1870, 11,003; only 2314 of over ten and less than
twenty acres, and 1870, 8981; only 16,024 between twenty and one hundred
acres, and in 1870, 38,015. There was thus in this one State a gain of
nearly forty thousand small farms of less than one hundred acres in
about three years. In Georgia the number of small farms sliced off of
the big plantations from 1868 to 1873 was 32,824. In Liberty County
there were in 1866 only three farms of less than ten acres; in 1870
there were 616, and 749 farms between ten and twenty acres. This
splitting of the old plantations into farms went on with equal rapidity
all over the South, and was hailed with lively expressions of
satisfaction. A population pinned down to the soil on which it lived,
made conservative and prudent by land-ownership, forced to abandon the
lavish method of the old time as it had nothing to spare, and to
cultivate closely and intelligently as it had no acres to waste, living
on cost as it had no credit, and raising its own supplies as it could
not afford to buy—this the South boasted it had in 1873, and this many
believe it has to-day. The small farmer—who was to retrieve the
disasters of the South, and wipe out the last vestige of the planting
aristocracy, between which and the people there was always a lack of
sympathy, by keeping his own acres under his own supervision, and using
hired labor only as a supplement to his own—is still held to be the
typical cotton-raiser.
But the observer who cares to look beneath the surface will detect signs
of a reverse current. He will discover that there is beyond question a
sure though gradual rebunching of the small farms into large estates,
and a tendency toward the re-establishment of a land-holding oligarchy.
Here and there through all the Cotton States, and almost in every
county, are reappearing the planter princes of the old time, still lords
of acres, though not of slaves. There is in Mississippi one planter who
raises annually 12,000 bales of cotton on twelve consolidated
plantations, aggregating perhaps 50,000 acres. The Capeheart estate on
Albemarle Sound, originally of several thousand acres, had $52,000 worth
of land added last year. In the Mississippi Valley, where, more than
anywhere else, is preserved the distinctive cotton plantation, this
re-absorbing of separate farms into one ownership is going on rapidly.
Mr. F. C. Morehead, an authority on these lands, says that not one-third
of them are owned by the men who held them at the close of the war, and
that they are passing, one after the other, into the hands of the
commission merchants. It is doubtful if there is a neighborhood in all
the South in which casual inquiry will not bring to the front from ten
to a dozen men who have added farm after farm to their possessions for
the past several years, and now own from six to twenty places. It must
not be supposed that these farms are bunched together and run after the
old plantation style. On the contrary, they are cut into even smaller
farms, and rented to small croppers. The question involved is not
whether or not the old plantation methods shall be revived. It is the
much more serious problem as to whether the lands divided forever into
small farms shall be owned by the many or by the few, whether we shall
have in the South a peasantry like that of France, or a tenantry like
that of Ireland.
By getting at the cause of this threatened re-absorption of the small
farmer into the system from which he so eagerly and bravely sought
release, we shall best understand the movement. It is primarily credit—a
false credit based on usury and oppression, strained to a point where it
breeds distrust and provokes a percentage to compensate for risk, and
strained, not for the purchase of land, which is a security as long as
the debt is unpaid, but for provisions and fertilizers, which are
valueless to either secure the lender or assist the borrower to pay.
With the failure of the large planters and their withdrawal from
business, banks, trust companies, and capitalists withdraw their money
from agricultural loans. The new breed of farmers held too little land
and were too small dealers to command credit or justify investigation.
And yet they were obliged to have money with which to start their work.
Commission merchants therefore borrowed the money from the banks, and
loaned it to village brokers or store-keepers, who in turn loaned it to
farmers in their neighborhood, usually in the form of advancing
supplies. It thus came to the farmer after it had been through three
principals, each of whom demanded a heavy percentage for the risk he
assumed. In every case the farmer gave a lien or mortgage upon his crop
of land. In this lien he waived exemptions and defense, and it amounted
in effect to a deed. Having once given such a paper to his merchant, his
credit was of course gone, and he had to depend upon the man who held
the mortgage for his supplies. To that man he must carry his crop when
it was gathered, pay him commission for handling it, and accept the
settlement that he offered. To give an idea of the oppressiveness of
this system it is only necessary to quote the Commissioner of
Agriculture of Georgia, who by patient investigation discovered that the
Georgia farmers paid prices for supplies that averaged fifty-four per
cent. interest on all they bought. For instance, corn that sold for
eighty-nine cents a bushel cash was sold on time secured by a lien at a
dollar and twelve cents. In Mississippi the percentage is even more
terrible, as the crop lien laws are in force there, and the crop goes
into the hands of the merchant, who charges commission on the estimated
number of bales, whether a half crop or a full one is raised. Even this
maladjustment of credits would not impoverish the farmer if he did not
yield to the infatuation for cotton-planting, and fail to plant anything
but cotton.
Those who have the nerve to give up part of their land and labor to the
raising of their own supplies and stock have but little need of credit,
and consequently seldom get into the hands of the usurers. But cotton is
the money crop, and offers such flattering inducements that everything
yields to that. It is not unusual to see farmers come to the cities to
buy butter, melons, meal, and vegetables. They rely almost entirely upon
their merchants for meat and bread, hay, forage, and stock. In one
county in Georgia last year, from the small dépôts, $80,000 worth of
meat and bread was shipped to farmers. The official estimate of the
National Cotton Planters’ Association, at its session of 1881, was that
the Cotton States lacked 42,252,244 bushels of wheat, 166,684,279
bushels of corn, 77,762,108 bushels of oats, or 286,698,632 bushels of
grain, of raising what it consumed. When to this is added 4,011,150 tons
of hay at thirty dollars a ton, and $32,000,000 paid for fertilizers, we
find that the value of the cotton crop is very largely consumed in
paying for the material with which it was made. On this enormous amount
the cotton farmer has to pay the usurous percentage charged by his
merchant broker, which is never less than thirty per cent., and
frequently runs up to seventy per cent. We can appreciate, when we
consider this, the statement of the man who said, “The commission
merchants of the South are gradually becoming farmers, and the farmers,
having learned the trick, will become merchants.”
The remedy for this deplorable tendency is first the establishment of a
proper system of credit. The great West was in much worse condition than
the South some years ago. The farms were mortgaged, and were being sold
under mortgages, under a system not half so oppressive as that under
which the Southern farmer labors. Boston capital, seeking lucrative
investment, soon began to pour toward the West, in charge of loan
companies, and was put out at eight per cent., and the redemption of
that section was speedily worked out. A similar movement is now started
in the South. An English company, with headquarters at New Orleans,
loaned over $600,000 its first year at eight per cent., with perfect
security. The farmers who borrowed this money were of course immensely
relieved, and the testimony is that they are rapidly working out. In
Atlanta, Georgia, a company is established with $2,000,000 of Boston and
New York capital, which it is loaning on farm lands at seven per cent.
In the first three months of its work it loaned $120,000, and it has now
appointed local agents in thirty counties in the State, and advertises
that it wishes to lend $50,000 in each county. The managers say that
they can command practically unlimited capital for safe risks at seven
per cent. Companies working on the same plan have been established
elsewhere in the South, and it is said that there will be no lack of
capital for safe risks on rural lands in a few years.
The first reform, however, that must be made is in the system of
farming. The South must prepare to raise her own provisions, compost her
fertilizers, cure her own hay, and breed her own stock. Leaving credit
and usury out of the question, no man can pay seventy-five cents a
bushel for corn, thirty dollars a ton for hay, twenty dollars a barrel
for pork, sixty cents for oats, and raise cotton for eight cents a
pound. The farmers who prosper at the South are the “corn-raisers,”
_i.e._, the men who raise their own supplies, and make cotton their
surplus crop. A gentleman who recorded 320 mortgages last year testified
that not one was placed on the farm of a man who raised his own bread
and meat. The shrewd farmers who always have a bit of money on hand with
which to buy any good place that is to be sold under mortgage are the
“corn-raisers,” and the moment they get possession they rule out the
all-cotton plan, and plant corn and the grasses. That the plan of
farming only needs revision to make the South rich beyond measure is
proven by constant example. A corn-raiser bought a place of 370 acres
for $1700. He at once put six tenants on it, and limited their cotton
acreage to one-third of what they had under cultivation. Each one of the
six made more clear money than the former owner had made, and the rents
for the first year were $1126. The man who bought this farm lives in
Oglethorpe, Georgia, and has fifteen farms all run on the same plan.
The details of the management of what may be the typical planting
neighborhood of the South in the future are furnished me by the manager
of the Capeheart estate in North Carolina. This estate is divided into
farms of fifty acres each, and rented to tenants. These tenants are
bound to plant fifteen acres in cotton, twelve in corn, eight in small
crops, and let fifteen lie in grass. They pay one-third of the crop as
rent, or one-half if the proprietor furnishes horses and mules. They
have comfortable quarters, and are entitled to the use of surplus
herring and the dressings of the herring caught in the fisheries annexed
to the place. In the center of the estate is a general store managed by
the proprietor, at which the tenants have such a line of credit as they
are entitled to, of course paying a pretty percentage of profit on the
goods they buy. They are universally prosperous, and in some cases,
where by skill and industry they have secured 100 acres, are laying up
money. The profits to Dr. Capeheart are large, and show the margin there
is in buying land that is loosely farmed, and putting it under
intelligent supervision. Of the $52,000 worth of land added to his
estates last year, at a valuation of twenty-five dollars per acre, he
will realize in rental nine dollars per acre for every acre cultivated,
and calculates that in five years at the most the rentals of the land
will have paid back what he gave for it.
Amid all this transition from land-owner to tenant there is, besides the
corn-raiser, one other steadfast figure, undisturbed by change of
relation or condition, holding tenaciously to what it has, though little
inclined to push for more. This is Cuffee, the darky farmer. There is no
more interesting study in our agriculture than this same dusky,
good-natured fellow—humble, patient, shrewd—as he drives into town with
his mixed team and his one bag of cotton, on which, drawn by a
sympathetic sense of ownership, his whole family is clustered. Living
simply and frugally, supplementing his humble meal with a ’possum caught
in the night hunt, or a rabbit shot with the old army musket that he
captured from some deserted battle-field, and allowing no idlers in the
family save the youngsters who “tend de free school,” he defies alike
the usurer and the land-shark. In the State of Georgia he owns 680,000
acres of land, cut up into farms that barely average ten acres each, and
in the Cotton States he owns 2,680,800 acres, similarly divided. From
this possession it is impossible to drive him, and to this possession he
adds gradually as the seasons go by. He is not ambitious, however, to
own large tracts of land, preferring the few acres that he has
constantly under his eye, and to every foot of which he feels a rude
attachment.
The relations of the negro to cotton are peculiar. Although he spends
the most of his life in the cotton field, and this staple is the main
crop with which he is concerned, it does not enter into his social life,
catch his sentiment, or furnish the occasion for any of his pleasures.
None of his homely festivals hinge upon the culture or handling of the
great staple. He has his corn-shuckings, his log-rollings, his quilting
bees, his threshing jousts, and indeed every special work about the farm
is made to yield its element of frolic, except the making of cotton.
None of those tuneful melodies with which he beguiles his work or
gladdens his play-time acknowledge cotton as a subject or an incident.
None of the folklore with which the moonlight nights are whiled away or
the fire-lit cabins sanctified, and which finds its home in the corn
patch or the meadows, has aught to do with the cotton field. I have
never heard a negro song in which the cotton field is made the
incidental theme or the subject of allusion, except in a broken
perversion of that incomparable ballad, “The Mocking-Bird,” in which the
name of the heroine, the tender sentiment, and the tune, which is a
favorite one with the negroes, are preserved. This song, with the flower
of Southern girlhood that points the regretful tenderness changed into a
dusky maiden idealized by early death, with the “mocking-bird singing
o’er her grave,” and sung in snatches almost without words or coherence,
is popular with the field hands in many parts of the South.
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.
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