_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]
Olmsted was at pains to show how the people were duped by Charlatan
guidance of their political leaders; this comes out particularly in his
quotation of and comments upon the famous election speech in Virginia in
the fifties, in which the aspirant declared to his audience that "Commerce
has long ago spread her sails, and sailed away from you ... you have set
no tilt-hammer of Vulcan to strike blows worthy of the gods in your iron
foundries; you have not yet spun more than coarse cotton enough, in the
way of manufacture, to clothe your own slaves. You have had no commerce,
no mining, no manufactures. You have relied alone on the single power of
agriculture--and such agriculture! Your sedge-patches outshine the sun....
Instead of having to feed cattle on a thousand hills, you have had to
chase the stum-tailed steers through the sedge-patches to procure a tough
beef-steak. (Laughter and applause.) ... The landlord has skinned the
tenant, and the tenant has skinned the land, until all have grown poor
together," "and how," asks Olmsted, "does the fiddling Nero propose, it
will be wondered, to remedy this so very amusing stupidity, poverty, and
debility? Very simply and pleasantly. By building railroads and canals,
ships and mills; by establishing manufactories, opening mines, and setting
up smelting-works and foundries. And, 'Hurrah!' shout the tickled
electors; 'that's exactly what we want.'" And then he showed that it was
much like the quack telling the confirmed paralytic to live generously,
take vigorous exercise and grow well; that with the disease of slavery in
its vitals the South could not do else than languish; that in holding out
promise of wholesome measures which contemplated everything but the
attacking of slavery,[81] the politicians were just laughing at the
people.[82]
A reflection just as sorrowful as the confirmed bias of the people,
however, is one that Olmsted did not see in this and myriad other
episodes, namely, the blindness of the leaders that, with no doubt strong
elements of quackery, showed even stronger signs of being themselves duped
by a situation. Not that the crowd was believing, but that the leaders
were so largely sincere, was most melancholy. As to both considerations,
however, a passage of Sir Horace Plunkett in comment upon Irish politics,
is much to the point: "Deeply as I have felt for the past sufferings of
the Irish people and their heritage of disability and distress, I could
not bring myself to believe that, where mis-government had continued so
long, and in such an immense variety of circumstances and conditions, the
governors could have been alone to blame. I envied those leaders of
popular thought whose confidence in themselves and in their followers was
shaken by no such reflections. But the more I listened to them, the more
the conviction was borne in upon me that they were seeking to build an
impossible future upon an imaginary past."[83]
As opposed to the brightening signs which some have seen in the years just
preceding the Civil War, it has been said, "yet with the line around
slavery being drawn more closely ... the cotton South lagged in the
industrial race, and the border States were hampered by the institution
that they felt to be a burden, but which they could see no safe way to
abolish. Compassed as it was by political compromises, slavery must
ultimately have topped through its own overweight; but in 1860 it was so
valuable for the plantation that it was not only not readily converted
into the factory, but was an obstacle in the way of the employment of
capital and of other labor in that direction."[84]
The deterrent effect of slavery upon immigration of white laborers has
been noticed above. In 1860 only 6 per cent of the white population of the
South was foreign-born, but immigrants made up nearly 20 per cent of that
in the North. In the decade from 1850 to 1860 the South's quota of
foreign-born in the whole country dropped from 14 to 13 per cent.[85] The
South was deprived of her share of foreign mechanics, so largely
responsible for the industries in this country in the first half of the
nineteenth century, not only by the fact that independent artizans avoided
competition with slave labor, but because few of them had the means of
acquiring slaves, and disapproved of the institution besides.[86] The
increase in population in North Carolina in the single decade of 1870 to
1880 about equalled that of the four decades preceding. The comprehensive
influence here upon immigration by the abolition of slavery is not greatly
modified by the fact that in the period before 1870 fell the losses from
the Civil War.[87] The tide of immigration to Mecklenburg County in this
State dwindled from the introduction of slavery as a system until 1825,
and thereafter set in the emigration of persons from the county, an even
severer influence and stronger indication of the baleful labor system.[88]
In the fifties it was declared that the most prosperous community in South
Carolina was a settlement of Germans in the western part of the State.
Here had been founded an educational institution, varied manufactures,
farming was conducted with successful enterprise and capital was found to
be invested in a railroad venture. Slavery was not relied upon.[89] Sidney
Andrews in 1865 found the northwestern counties of Georgia, which were
held to be strongly opposed to secession in 1860-61, and which furnished
a good many soldiers to the federal armies, probably better disposed to
the national government than any other part of the State. Slaves had
constituted less than a fourth of the total population, the people were
industrious and hardy; though cruder than those from the lower parts of
the State, the delegates from this section to the constitutional
convention of 1865 were said to have a well-informed outlook for the
Commonwealth. After the war the industry displayed by the white people of
this region was taken as attesting their better traditions of ante-bellum
years.[90]
At a time when the average wages of female operatives in the cotton mills
of Georgia was half that of the same workers in the mills of
Massachusetts, factory girls from New England were induced by high pay to
go to the Southern States to enter newly-established plants, but soon
returned North because their position was unpleasant in the midst of "the
general degradation of the laboring class."[91] It was observed very truly
that competition of the slave was not distantly matched in hurtfulness by
the example of the more prosperous white men, with whom acquisition of
the comforts and dignities of life did not proceed from daily toil.[92]
The dependence of the ante-bellum South upon the North and upon Europe for
the most substantial and the most trivial appurtenances of civilization,
is perhaps less in dispute than any topic here treated. The extent of this
dependence, with the accompanying neglect of provision for production of
the commodities at home, is evidenced by its continuance for years after
the war. It might be said, not only in justification of this practice, but
in apology for the total one-sidedness of the old South, that the section
was animated by a natural and universal law, in responding to and acting
upon the principle of comparative economic advantage. And certainly the
most absolute conception of the territorial division of labor could not
require a more exclusive devotion to the making of cotton and a more
complete reliance upon other less peculiarly favored districts for supply
not only of manufactured goods but of food stuffs and other raw materials,
than the South displayed. But, however, strictly in conformity with the
superficial dictates of this policy from an international and even
national point of view, the program was ruinous to the section, the
country and, in a broad sense, to the deeper economic welfare of the
world. Easy yielding to the principle did not suggest to the great bulk of
the South's statesmanship the reflection that the section after all was in
only partial compliance; that even for the most efficient production of
cotton as such, there needed to be a wholesome admixture of manufacturing
and of other agricultural interests. Accompanying and directly by agency
of the post-bellum activities in industry is seen not a less but a more
economical and larger output of the staple.
Some of the most humorous passages in the literature of the economic
history of the South were called forth by the need of the section to go to
the North for a thousand and one essentials of daily existence, and in
their very humor they serve to show the seriousness of the situation.
William Gregg, too lonely in his advocacy of home industry to treat the
subject in other than its fundamental considerations, declared in 1845 to
his own community, than which there was no greater sinner: "It ought to
make every citizen who feels an interest in his country, ashamed to visit
the clothing stores of Charleston, and see the vast exhibition of
ready-made clothing, manufactured mostly by the women of Philadelphia, New
York, Boston and other Northern cities, to the detriment and starvation of
our own countrywomen, hundreds of who may be found in our own good city in
wretched poverty, unable to procure work by which they would be glad to
earn a decent living."[93] And again: "A change in our habits and
industrial pursuits is a far greater desideratum than any change in the
laws of our Government...."[94] His point of view comes out well in this
passage: "if we continue in our present habits, it would not be
unreasonable to predict, that when the Raleigh Rail-Road is extended to
Columbia, our members of the Legislature will be fed on Yankee baker's
bread. Pardon me for repeating the call on South Carolina to go to work.
God speed the day when her politicians will be exhorting the people to
domestic industry, instead of State resistance; when our Clay Clubs and
Democratic Associations will be turned into societies for the advancement
of scientific agriculture and the promotion of mechanic art; when our
capitalists will be found following the example of Boston and other
Northern cities, in making such investments of their capital as will give
employment to the poor, and make them producers, instead of burthensome
consumers; when our City Council may become so enlightened as to see the
propriety of following the example of every other city in the civilized
world, in removing the restrictions on the use of the Steam Engine, now
indispensable in every department of Manufacturing...."[95]
A decade later Helper reproached a South that had not given heed to Gregg:
"It is a fact well known to every intelligent Southerner that we are
compelled to go to the North for almost every article of utility and
adornment, from matches, shoe-pegs and paintings up to cotton-mills,
steamships and statuary ... this unmanly and unnational dependence, ... is
so glaring that it can not fail to be apparent to even the most careless
and superficial observer. All the world sees, or ought to see, that in a
commercial, mechanical, manufactural, financial, and literary point of
view, we are as helpless as babes...."[96]
Gregg remarked the supply by the North not only of the articles of major
manufacture, but of articles of those makes which should naturally be the
adjuncts of agriculture--axe, hoe and broom handles, pitch-forks, rakes,
and hand-spikes for rolling logs, shingles and pine boards; and even that
"the Charleston market is supplied with fish and wild game by Northern
men, who come out here, as regularly as the winter comes, for this
purpose, and from our own waters and forests often realize, in the course
of one winter, a sufficiency to purchase a small farm in New England."[97]
An orator at the Southern Commercial Convention, New Orleans, 1855,
adapted for the occasion, thought Olmsted, a speech made in the British
Parliament on taxes, familiarized in "Child's First Speaker", and
beginning, in the Southern version, "It is time that we should look about
us, and see in what relation we stand to the North. From the rattle with
which the nurse tickles the ear of the child born in the South, to the
shroud that covers the cold form of the dead, everything comes to us from
the North. We rise from between sheets made in Northern looms, and pillows
of Northern feathers, to wash in basins made in the North ..." and
continuing in the strain that was a favorite one with platform and pen,
and many examples of the employment of which may be found.[98]
A Virginia land-owner wrote to a farm paper regretting the widespread and
intimate dependence upon the North, and stated quite as clearly as was
observed thirty years later that goods which could be bought in the North,
paying a profit to the manufacturer there, then transported to the South
at heavy cost and sold at a profit to the tradesman, might surely be
manufactured in the South in the first place, saving maker's profit to
home industry and obviating charges of carriage altogether.[99]
A newspaper in Richmond chronicled the sale to Northern interests of a
large coal field in the State, and in unconscious irony placed in
juxtaposition to the notice this confident exhortation: "It is plain that
a new and glorious destiny awaits the South, and beckons us onward to a
career of independence. Shall we train and discipline our energies for the
coming crisis, or _shall we continue the tributary and dependent vassals
of Northern brokers and money-changers_? Now is the time for the South to
begin in earnest the work of self-development! Now is the time to break
asunder the fetters of commercial subjection, and to prepare for that more
complete independence that awaits us."[100] But another and wiser paper in
the same State, urging manufacturing development for Virginia towns and
cities, and particularly the textile industry for Richmond, anticipated
with a different mind the event invited in the excerpt above quoted, and
foretold with prophecy all too good, what later was patent to everybody:
"It must be plain to the South that if our relations with the North should
ever be severed--and how soon they may be, none can know (may God avert
it long!)--we would, in all the South, not be able to clothe ourselves. We
could not fell our forests, plow our fields, nor mow our meadows. In fact,
we would be reduced to a state more abject than we are willing to look at,
even prospectively. And yet, with all these things staring us in the face,
we shut our eyes, and go on blindfold."[101]
It is thought well, in summary of the decidedly non-industrial character
of the ante-bellum South, to set forth some material and some observations
of a general character. In spite of its length, it is useful to give in
its setting an episode related by Tompkins. It shows more aptly than
almost in anything in spite of its incidental happening, just the point of
preoccupation with politics to which the Southern mind came, the degree of
trifling with which the most sober proposals were met, the hopelessness of
change from this state of affairs by anything short of a fundamental moral
awakening.
"I heard of an incident, that occurred in a political contest between Mr.
Gregg and Chancellor Carroll, for the place of State Senator from
Edgefield District. It was the habit for candidates to appear together and
speak to the people from the same platform.... On one of these occasions,
Mr. Gregg spoke first. He stated that he solicited votes on the ground
that he had built a factory, which gave work to poor white people. It
enhanced the value of cotton by manufacturing it. He had planted peach
orchards to develop new avenues of profit and advantage to the people,
&c., &c. Whereas, Chancellor Carroll had never made two blades of grass
grow where only one grew before.
"Mr. Carroll flowed Mr. Gregg. He was an accomplished orator, and praised
in eloquent terms, Mr. Gregg's enterprise in building a factory. He
eulogized his plans for fruit culture. He admitted, with humility, all the
delinquencies Mr. Gregg charged against him excepting only one: 'He says I
never made two blades of grass grow where only one grew before. Having
faith in Mr. Gregg's plans and advice about orchards, I planted one, and
if anybody is disposed to believe I never made grass grow, I simply invite
them to go look at that orchard. It is literally run away with grass.' The
crowd laughed, voted for Mr. Carroll and the cause of slavery went forward
while Mr. Gregg staid at home and the cause of civilization
languished."[102]
But Gregg preached his doctrine undaunted; his works are to be taken less
as an indication of anything like general ante-bellum awakening to
suicidal policies than as the bright exception that proves the melancholy
rule.
He showed that even cotton, the great god, drove enterprise from South
Carolina, for, with the returns from its culture under ordinary management
amounting to 3 or 4 and in some instances only 2 per cent., the
inclination for planters to remove with their slave capital to the richer
south-west was strong, thus keeping the population of the State at a
standstill.[103]
Mr. Ingle has stated the case broadly: "The economic history of the South
from the Revolution to the Civil War is a record of the development of one
natural advantage to the neglect of several others. Fitted by nature to
support a large population engaged in a variety of pursuits based upon
agriculture, it had a small population occupied in the production of raw
material that contributed to the maintenance of a dense population in
regions where artifice contended against harsh climate and a stubborn
soil."[104] An "address to the Farmers of Virginia" read at a convention
for the formation of the Virginia State Agricultural Society in 1852,
adopted, reconsidered and readopted with amendments, and finally
reconsidered again and rejected on the ground that it contained
admissions, however true, which would be useful to abolitionists,
contained the words: "... thus we, who once swayed the councils of the
Union, find our power gone, and our influence on the wane, at a time when
both are of vital importance to our prosperity, if not to our safety. As
other states accumulate the means of material greatness, and glide past us
on the road to wealth and empire, we slight the warnings of dull
statistics, and drive lazily along the field of ancient customs, or stop
the _plow_ to speed the _politician_--should we not, in too many cases,
say with more propriety, the _demagogue_!... With a widespread domain,
with a kindly soil, with a climate whose sun radiates fertility, and whose
very dews distill abundance, we find our inheritance so wasted that the
eye aches to behold the prospect."[105]
In addition to the barrier to manufactures formed by cotton cultivation
under slave labor, and the silent opposition which the prevalent system
engendered, were not infrequent outspoken declarations against industry.
William Gregg was one of the few in South Carolina or the whole South, for
that matter, to rise superior to Calhoun's sway, and asserting that there
were some who were better able to speak of the propriety of factories
than even that statesman, faced him squarely but tactfully. "The known
zeal with which this distinguished gentleman has always engaged in every
thing relating to the interest of South Carolina, forbids the idea that he
is not a friend to domestic manufactures, fairly brought about, and,
knowing, as he must know, the influence which he exerts, he should be more
guarded in expressing opinions adverse to so good a cause."[106]
And again, speaking of manufactures, he was regretful of the fact that
"our great men are not to be found in the ranks of those, who are willing
to lend their aid, in promoting this good case. Are we to commence another
ten years' crusade, to prepare the minds of the people of this State for
revolution; thus unhinging every department of industry, and paralyzing
the best efforts to promote the welfare of our country." His footnote to
this passage shows how calmly, in his comprehensive grasp of the whole
situation, Gregg could estimate the bias of his opponents and point out to
them how even their selfish ambitions could only be served by attention to
such reasoning as his: "Those who are disposed to agitate the State and
prepare the minds of the people for resisting the laws of Congress, and
particularly those who look for so direful a calamity as the dissolution
of our Union, should, above all others, be most anxious so to diversify
the industrial pursuits of South Carolina, as to render her independent of
all other countries; for as sure as this greatest of calamities befalls
us, we shall find the same causes that produced it, making enemies of the
nations which are at present, the best customers for our agricultural
productions."[107]
Gregg felt keenly the opposition to cotton manufactures, which took point,
moreover, from the failure of mills in the South, particularly in his own
State. This he combatted by showing that not lack of natural advantages
but gross mismanagement had been responsible for the fate of these
enterprises.[108] He tried to take heart for the South in the reflection
that those who commenced the textile industry in Rhode Island had the
whole country against them and the experience of England closed to them,
whereas his section had the encouragement of New England and access to the
machinery and mechanical skill of the world, and he added, "It will be
remembered, that the wise men of the day predicted the failure of _steam
navigation_, and also of our own railroad; it was said we were deficient
in mechanical skill, and that we could not manage the complicated
machinery of a steam engine, yet these works have succeeded--we have found
men competent to manage them--they grow up amongst us...."[109]
Because of the striking reversal of front of the city at a later date,
which will be of central importance in subsequent chapters of this study,
the estimate which Gregg gave in 1856 of Charleston's attitude toward home
industry is interesting. As a delegate from Edgefield District in the
South Carolina house of representatives he spoke against the grant of aid
by the State to the South Carolina Railroad, stoutly declaring, although
he was a stockholder in the venture and the men in control were his
personal friends, that he believed every dollar the State might put into
the scheme would be lost; he observed that the railroad was purely for the
commercial aggrandizement of Charleston, and that, perhaps, not honestly,
its spokesmen being unwilling themselves to take stock. Instead of
commercial policies selfishly followed by "wealthy gentlemen, some of whom
have ships floating in every sea", he declared "That her (Charleston's)
destiny was fixed and indissoluble with the State of South Carolina, and
that mainly her great investment in Internal Improvements should be made
with a view to developing the resources of the immediate country around
her. That certain and cheap modes of transportation from all quarters of
the State could not fail to re-act on the general prosperity of the city.
That the dormant wealth of Charleston might be so directed as to be felt
in the remotest parts of the State, in stimulating agriculture, draining
our great swamps and putting into renewed culture our worn-out and waste
lands; diversified industry, stimulating the mechanic arts and increasing
the population and wealth of the State."[110] Instead of this just ideal
for leadership and helpfulness, he found it to be the unfortunate fact
that, "There is no city in the Union which has accumulated more wealth, to
its size, than Charleston--none that has shown so little inclination to
put forth her wealth in such a way as to develop the resources of the
State. Her millionaires die in New York. There is scarcely a day that
passes that does not send forth Charleston capital to add to the growth
and wealth of that great city. There is a silent and an imperceptible
drain in that direction; the aggregate of which for twenty years would
more than build a railroad from Charleston to Cincinnati."[111]
The economic thinking of the old South, with its inertia and its
inconsistency, is well illustrated in a statement of Robert N. Gourdin, a
cotton factor of Charleston and representative of the aristocratic type of
its citizenship, made to the correspondent of the New York Herald in
connection with the Atlanta Cotton exposition in 1881. After going over
the old matter of the war, and the South's vanquishment by superior
numbers only, he said: "We (in the South) did not manufacture because
there was no necessity for our doing so. With our wonderfully productive
soil, our marvellous climate, and with plenty of labor to cultivate our
farms, we would accumulate wealth, live comfortably and even luxuriously
without troubling ourselves with diggings for minerals or manufacturing
cloth. We did not object to the inventions and manufactures of the North,
but we did protest against being obliged to pay for them."[112]
The prohibition by city ordinance of the use of the steam engine in
Charleston is an extreme evidence of a frame of mind that was general in
the South. In order to appreciate how completely deflected from industry
the Southern thought and habit had become, it is interesting to observe
the seriousness with which in 1845 Gregg was forced to argue against this
regulation which now seems so absurd that it could not have existed since
the Middle Ages. Its opponent showed that he was linked in his sympathies
with other sections and with later years, not only by his antagonism but
by the humor which he could not fail to find in the situation.[113]
The characteristic inclination toward the individual rather than corporate
form of enterprise which was noticed as showing itself in the textile and
other industries in the South of the Revolutionary period, was still
strong up to the Civil War. In 1845 Gregg inveighed against it,
particularly as crystallized in legislative refusal to grant charters of
incorporation, and, as in others of his pamphlets and speeches, he made
analysis of the conditions that would seem to have been plain enough to
convince the most stolid; he was quick to hold up New England as a
business model to the South; in marked contrast to most men of affairs of
the time, he saw economic institutions in their social perspective.[114]
Those who have sought to magnify to the largest proportions the
industrial activities of the old South have frequently failed to take
account of the differences in organization which distinguished the
ventures from those of post-bellum years. The textile industry could not
be a movement in economic society so long as investment participation
sprang from and ended with individual initiative. Until the widespread
emergence of the joint-stock form, the mills could not embrace the
generality of the community's resources. And in a period when this device
was not largely turned to, it is plain that industrial stirrings were
comparatively feeble.
Not only was there self-satisfaction coupled with dependence upon the
North for manufactured commodities in the low-country of the ante-bellum
South, but the up-country, that frugal population of which was better
disposed for manufacturing development, was so segregated as to be kept
in mean state, or actually dependent itself upon the coastal districts.
Between the Piedmont and the sea was the barrier of plantations; between
the Piedmont and the industrial North were no transportation
facilities.[115] Olmsted was struck with finding at Fayetteville, "the
point of transfer from wagon to boat, being at the head of
navigation",[116] the long wagon trains of highland farmers. He counted
sixty wagons in the main street of the town; this was the method of
bringing produce to market. "Several of the wagons had come from a hundred
miles distant; and one of them from beyond the Blue Ridge, nearly two
hundred miles." The teams made less than a score of miles a day through
the bad roads.[117] This isolation of one district in the South from
another brought lack of concert in political and economic life. "Small
landowners in the highlands could not always sympathize with men of
princely domain in the low country; and misapprehensions were magnified by
separation.... Diffusion of population ... was revealed in the scantiness
of common-school facilities; in the division of capital among several
small factories or mills, instead of its concentration in a few; in
literary, religious, and social life. In 1860, for instance, the South
had proportionately more church buildings than the North; but its 22,655
buildings had an average seating-capacity of 307, and an average value of
$1,777, while the 31,344 of the North would accommodate 388 persons each,
and were $4,183 on an average.... Isolation gave birth to individualism,
as marked upon the mountain-clearing as upon the plantation; and
beginnings of the co-operative spirit were dwarfed by nature and by human
inclination...."[118]
Strong as is the proof of the non-industrial character of the old South as
revealed by scrutiny of internal economic facts, evidence afforded by the
reflection of this condition in aspects which may be called external, is
quite as striking. So much is this the case, that it is believed that an
examination of the social, political, educational and moral institutions,
constituting the shell of the South, is satisfying as to the character of
the egg without looking at the vital cell at the center. The fruits of
the tree are conclusive of the sap.
Of these external phenomena, the political is that which will most readily
occur to everyone. Pervasive economic conditions are shown crystallized in
political pretensions; economic transitions are registered in alterations
of front. The Protective Tariff of 1816 was introduced and defended,
respectively, by two South Carolinians--Lowndes and Calhoun. The signature
of a Virginia president--Madison--made it a law. This tariff was opposed
by New England in the person of Webster. In 1828, in the debate over the
"Tariff of Abominations", the situation was just the reverse--Calhoun
opposed protection, Webster championed it. In spite of Webster's
explanation that New England was acquiescing, against her inclination, in
the expressed will of the country, it is the bottom truth that, as Lodge
declares, "Opinion in New England changed for good and sufficient business
reasons, and Mr. Webster changed with it ... when the weight of interest
in New England shifted from free trade to protection Mr. Webster following
it." And Mr. Scherer has done justice to the underlying forces in saying,
"Calhoun was neither better nor worse. Both of them simply swung true to
the economic interests of their respective constituencies."[119]
Cotton, nearly exclusively in the South, and to a notable degree in New
England, was responsible underneath for the changes which were displayed
in the superficial play of politics. It was the disintegration of
manufactures brought about by the more and more extensive embracing of
cotton cultivation that turned the South from protection to free trade; it
was the growing absorption in industry, especially cotton manufacture, and
the relative relinquishing of commerce, that made New England
protectionist instead of, as before, the champion of free trade.[120]
This is not the place to remark at length how economic interests are
changing the South back, in partial measure, to the first position. Cotton
is again central. Cotton factories are largely responsible for the little
leaven that is working in a large loaf, producing in the heart of the
Solid South Republican adherents and voices for protection. "Slavery has
been abolished. The South has re-established manufactures. Its interests
in free trade and protection are changed from what they were in 1860. We
need not only domestic trade, but foreign markets. We need, apparently,
protection and free trade at the same time.... The South is as much
interested in protection to home markets as New England is. New England is
as much interested in export markets as the South is. In this situation we
ought all to get together. We ought to get together for 'Protection and
Reciprocity.'"[121]
In summary of the ante-bellum years, which have just been under review,
Mr. Clark writes:
"Between 1810 and 1860 three periods of progress marked the factory
development of the cotton states. During our last war with England ...
mill builders from the North migrated to the Southern highlands, and with
local co-operation established small yarn factories at several places in
the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky.... During the decade
ending with 1833, when hostility to the tariff made the Southern people
bitterly resent economic dependence on the North, there was a second
movement towards manufactures, especially in South Carolina and Georgia,
directed mainly towards the erection of larger and more complete
factories. This agitation bore fruit in some corporate enterprises, most
of which had but qualified success. Finally, in the late forties real
factory development began simultaneously at several points, and had not
two financial crises and a war checked its progress, we should probably
date from this time the beginning of the modern epoch of cotton
manufacturing in the South."[122]
Two objections against this passage have pertinence. In the first place,
these three periods of comparative interest in manufactures can hardly be
called "movements" in any social or economic sense. That of the twenties
and running into the thirties may claim more color of this than the other
two.[123] The plants set up by the New Englanders earlier were in
response to individual enterprise, and that enterprise born out of the
boundaries of the South. Co-operation with the newcomers was not of the
sort that marks the considerable interest of a community. To the extent
that mills were built in the forties as an effect of agitation, William
Gregg was almost solely responsible. It has been pointed out above that
Gregg was a voice crying in the wilderness--he was a missionary who spoke
an unaccepted faith. He was not a social exponent. Also, while some real
factories were built, it seems that to speak of these as constituting a
"real factory development" is questionable. In the second place, it is
rather gratuitous to count upon what would have been the case had not the
war broken in upon declared industrial beginnings. The Civil War was not a
fortuitous event. It had to come. It was the disastrous evidence of the
dominance in the South of a system which gave no room to widespread
industrial enterprise, and in which no beginnings could grow and become
permanent. Could the war be regarded simply as an occurrence, an
unfortunate happening, there might be ground for assuming that industrial
enterprise might have been built into and finally changed wholesomely the
economic regime of the Southern States, but facts show that it was a case
where mastery between mutually exclusive plans had to be made on the basis
of comparative strength; the spirit for manufactures had not sufficient
force to avert the war, but only enough life to show, in expiring, that it
had begun to be born.
The foregoing pages have not dwelt, except by chance, upon the decade
1850-1860. These years have been reserved for specific discussion because
of the effort which has been made by two writers to invest them with a
character of industrialism superior to that of the ante-bellum period
generally. Not only is the argument defeated by external evidence, but an
internal examination of Mr. Edmonds' presentation shows his own
consciousness of serious modifications upon the doctrine, and explains in
a very natural light the occasion for the point of view which he sometimes
too dogmatically expresses. The late Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy, in treating
the subject, was heavily influenced in his opinion by Mr. Edmonds' work;
it will be seen that in his discipleship, while he rid Mr. Edmonds'
statement of one outstanding error, he failed to notice some of the major
allowances made by him, and altogether Murphy's pronouncement is more
positive and absolute than that of the source from which he chiefly drew
his beliefs.
Mr. Edmonds is practically on all fours which Tompkins and others quoted
in this study, in recognizing that certainly from early in the nineteenth
century until the fifth decade industry was little attended to in the
South. This he attributes to the high prices to be obtained from cotton,
averaging for the years 1800 to 1839 a fraction over seventeen cents a
pound. Then he declares: "Beginning with 1840 there came a period of
extremely low prices and the cotton States suffered very much from this
decline. In that year the average of New York prices dropped to nine
cents, a decline of four cents from the preceding year, and this was
followed by a continuous decline until 1846, when the average was 5.63
cents.... In 1847 the crop was short and prices advanced sharply, only to
drop back to eight and then to seven and one-fourth cents, making the
average from 1840 to 1849 the lowest ever known in the cotton trade for a
full decade.
"These excessively low prices brought about a revival of public interest
in other pursuits than cotton cultivation, and the natural tendency of the
people to industrial matters, as evidenced by the history of the colonies
prior to the Revolution, but which had long been dormant, was again
aroused, and for some years there was a very active spirit manifested in
the building of railroads and the development of manufactures.
"The decade ending with 1860 witnessed a very marked growth in Southern
railroad and manufacturing interests.... In 1850 the South had 2335 miles
of railroad, and the New England and Middle States 4798 miles; by 1860 the
South had increased its mileage to 9897 miles, a quadrupling of that of
1850, while the New England and Middle States had increased to 9510 miles.
The conditions were reversed by 1860, and the South then led by 387
miles.... While devoting great attention to the building of railroads, the
South also made rapid progress during the decade ending with 1860 in the
development of its diversified manufactures." Flour and meal, sawed and
planed lumber mills are mentioned, with iron founding and the manufacture
of steam engines and machinery. "Cotton manufacturing had commenced to
attract increased attention, and nearly $12,000,000 were invested in
Southern cotton mills. In Georgia especially this industry was thriving,
and between 1850 and 1860 the capital so invested in that State nearly
doubled." Noting that while most of the Southern manufacturing
enterprises were comparatively small, those of New England in the early
stages were of the same character, he says that "In the aggregate,
however, the number of Southern factories swelled to very respectable
proportions, the total number of 1860 having been 24,590, with an
aggregate capital invested of $175,100,000.
"A study of the facts ... should convince anyone that the South in its
early days gave close attention to manufacturing development,[124] and
that while later on the great profits in cultivation caused a contraction
of the capital and energy of that section in farming operations, yet,
after 1850, there came renewed interest in industrial matters, resulting
in an astonishing advance in railroad construction and in
manufactures."[125]
Figures are set up to show the favorable economic condition of the South
in 1860 as compared with the North, and these head up naturally in the
observation that, "Blot out of existence in one night every manufacturing
enterprise in the whole country, with all the capital employed, (he was
writing in 1894) and the loss would not equal that sustained by the South
as a result of the war.... New England and the Middle States, having grown
rich by the war, almost trebled their property (from 1860 to 1870) while
the South drops from the first place to the third. In 1860 it outranked
the Northern section by $750,000,000."[126]
In criticism of these quotations specifically it is to be said that the
early development in industrial pursuits and the thorough lapse before
1840 are properly observed. The present writer believes that Mr. Edmonds
has exaggerated in his own mind both the spirit for manufactures,
particularly in the decade from 1850 to 1860, and the extent of their
establishment. The recital that there were 24,590 plants, with an
investment of $175,100,000, seems at first to be striking, but a simple
division shows that on an average this made the investment in each only
$7,144.37, which is surely not indicative of considerable importance. Many
of the enterprises must have been much smaller than would be represented
by this average, and the few which were a great deal larger were rare
exceptions. The very disparity in size of establishments points away from
any concerted movement toward manufacturing. As to the railroad
construction, much of it was narrow-gauge, and all of the facts tend to
show that railroads were looked upon as facilitating commerce rather than
manufactures; even after the war the pet scheme to build a railroad over
the mountains gathered sentiment in the long-cherished desire to link
Charleston with "the producing interior" typefied in Cincinnati; as rails
were laid, piecemeal, through the Piedmont, advantages afforded by them
for the erection of factories were seldom mentioned, and their utility in
tapping pools of available labor was not considered. The easier transport
of cotton and the development of the South Atlantic ports were the
thoughts uppermost.
To vaunt property figures of the South of 1860 by including, as Mr.
Edmonds has done, the value of slaves, is an obvious error; and especially
because of the failure to note the inclusion of this factor, the spirit of
the other exhibits is cast in doubt. Though legally they were property, in
the social-economic sense the slaves did not constitute capital any more
than their owners represented capital. The question is rather whether this
part of the population, as productive agents under the system of enforced
labor, did not mean a liability and not an asset at all.[127]
Mr. Edmonds is guilty sometimes of careless statement, as when he says,
"The Southern people do not lack in energy or enterprise, nor did they
prior to 1860.... From the settlement of the colonies until 1860 the
business record proves this."[128] Or again, "the energy and enterprise
displayed by the South in the extension of its agricultural interests was
fully as great as the energy displayed in the development of New England's
manufactures or that of the pioneers who opened up the West to
civilization."[129] Such expressions, it will presently be shown, proceed
from a loyalty to the South and a just desire to defend her against
assault respecting her part in post-bellum development, but facts brought
out in these pages show the mistaken zeal in seeking to place the old
South abreast in industry or even agriculture.
Allowing what is perhaps the exciting cause of Mr. Edmonds' argument to
appear from his own context, light is shed in the following sentences:
"... 'The New South', a term which is so popular everywhere except in the
South, is supposed to represent a country of different ideas and different
business methods from those which prevailed in the old ante-bellum
days.... Its use ... as intended to convey the meaning that the South of
late years is something entirely new and foreign to this section,
something which has been brought about by an infusion of outside energy
and money is wholly unjust to the South of the past and present. It needs
but little investigation to show that prior to the war the South was fully
abreast of the times in all business interests, and that the wonderful
industrial growth which has come since 1880 has been due mainly to
Southern men and Southern money. The South heartily welcomes the
investment of outside capital and the immigration of all good people ...
but it insists that it shall receive from the world the measure of credit
to which it is entitled for the accomplishment of its own people." And
then he instances the cotton mills and Birmingham and Atlanta.[130] His
explanation of the inactivity in the South for ten or fifteen years
following the war, in the fact and causes of which he is entirely
correct,[131] bears out the belief, clearly indicated in the passage just
quoted, that it is his real purpose to accord to the ante-bellum South her
deserved praise. However, he overreached in trying to establish anything
like continuity for Southern enterprise over the ante-bellum years. The
interpretation here given of the new South is now a platitude, but it may
not have been a tilting at windmills when he wrote; indeed, its acceptance
now may be due in no small part to Mr. Edmonds.
Altogether, it is best to rest Mr. Edmonds' theory with the following
passage, in which there is no confusion of his own thought and no
controversy with anyone: "Since 1880, although the South is still (1894)
practically without great accumulated wealth, her people have turned to
manufacturing with a facility that not only shows that they are in no way
lacking in capability to compete in manufacturing pursuits, but,
considering the limited capital, this section has exhibited remarkable
gains in developing its resources under adverse conditions. In a little
more than a decade from the time the work of development may be said to
have begun, it is not a question whether Alabama can compete with
Pennsylvania in iron, but rather whether Pennsylvania can compete with
Alabama. Nobody now doubts that the South can compete with New England in
the manufacture of cotton goods, but many do doubt whether New England can
compete with the South.... Since 1880 the growth of manufactures in the
South and their success has been more than astonishing."[132]
Edgar Gardner Murphy in his spiritual interpretation of the South showed
himself discerning and gifted beyond almost any other writer. His
conception of the economic history of the South may be held to have been
secondary in his purpose and so in his thought. However, his position as
an expositor of the section and the emphasis which he places upon his
economic opinions regarding its past, make it incumbent upon the student
to examine his views. In the following quotation the turn which he gave to
the influencing argument of Mr. Edmonds and his personal slant in
interpretation of this, are apparent:
"The present industrial development of the South is not a new creation. It
is chiefly a revival. Because the labor system of the old South was so
largely attended by the economic disadvantages of slavery, and because the
predominant classes of the white population were so largely affected by
social and political interests, it has often been assumed that the old
order was an order without industrial ambitions.
"The assumption is not well founded. Instead of industrial inaction we
find from the beginnings of Southern history an industrial movement,
characteristic and sometimes even provincial in its methods, but
presenting a consistent and creditable development up to the very hour of
the Civil War. The issue of this war meant no mere economic reversal. It
meant economic catastrophe, drastic, desolate, without respect of persons,
classes or localities.... Thus the later story of the industrial South is
but a story of reemergence."[133] There are then outlined the steps of Mr.
Edmonds' argument, except that Murphy failed to make clear the almost
total lapse of industrial activity by 1840.
The incentive to discover an industrial past for the section, which Mr.
Edmonds found in the desire to establish the South as the magician of her
ante-bellum awakening, is matched in Murphy's motive by a more subtle
design. In one place he said: "... the most distinctive element in the
economic movement of this period (1880 to 1900) is the increasingly
dominant position of manufactures as contrasted with agriculture. This
industrial revival is but the reemergence of the tendency which we found
so manifest in the statistics of 1860. It is but one reassertion of the
genius of the old South."[134] Here with his absolute conception of the
ante-bellum South is hinted the purpose which really animated it. That in
speaking of the post-bellum development as "one reassertion of the genius
of the old South" he did not mean, as very easily might be supposed, that
through the earlier history of the section had run a genius for
industrialism, is made clear in the following passage, which, though it
refers particularly to social relationships, is pertinent for the
industrial bearings:
"The old South was the real nucleus of the new nationalism. The old South,
or in a more general sense the South of responsibility, the men of family,
the planter class, the official soldiery, or (if you please) the
aristocracy,--the South that had had power, and to whom power had taught
those truths of life, those dignities and fidelities of temper, which
power always teaches men,--this older South was the true basis of an
enduring peace between the sections and between the races." He regretted
that this old South was not enabled to come into force until after
Reconstruction because "a doubt was put upon its word given at Appomattox.
Its representatives were subjected to disfranchisement. Power was struck
from its hands. Its sense of responsibility was wounded and
confused."[135]
This is a fine statement of a primary and outstanding truth in the
development of the South that began about the year 1880. The old South
did draw breath with the new. The permanent character of the South, the
forces resident in the South of earlier as of later years, were those
which largely made possible a complete change in viewpoint, which carried
through the measures of, if not indeed giving birth to, the potent
consciousness of a reversal of program. But, as Murphy failed to see
clearly, there is a radical distinction between the continuity of this
quality in the South and any continuity of its evidences in industrial
pursuits. The new South did not receive from the old South a heritage of
industrial tradition; what it received was a traditional and ingrained and
living social morality, not marred in its essential characteristics and
presence, and very likely even assisted, by the institution of slavery. As
again Murphy said: "... this sense of responsibility, deepened rather than
destroyed by the burden of slavery, was the noble and fruitful gift of the
old South to the new, a gift brought out of the conditions of an
aristocracy, but responsive and operative under every challenge in the
changing conditions of the later order."[136]
In this apology for Murphy's view is splendidly apparent the best resource
with which to turn from the South that was to the South that is.