id="Page_2" class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[Pg 2]"/> complete genesis, about the year 1880. It is plain that in order to present, however, the conclusions of students who have believed they discerned signs of it in earlier years, it is necessary to include in these preliminary pages much that will not appear as fact exhibit, but rather as opinion. And not simply this, but in seeking to make clear the opposite theory, free recourse is taken to the findings and statements of others than the writer.

No apology is made for the incorporation of secondary material. On the contrary, this is intentioned. Lying, after all, outside of the central facts to come under view in this essay, exclusively original research in so extended a period has not seemed justified. In the second place, it has not appeared necessary for the reason that there has been usually less dispute as to the facts and the completeness of the data that much study has uncovered, than as to the right interpretation of material evidences agreed upon. Besides these considerations, it should be understood that much which might carelessly be taken as second-hand information, is really entirely and valuably first-hand. Peculiarly in the case of the economic history of the South, the statements of those who spoke from intimate elbow-touch with and active participation in the events of the various periods are sources in the finest sense. This is particularly true with respect to the work of the late Mr. D. A. Tompkins, which is repeatedly made use of. No document giving a photograph of conditions at one point of time could replace an utterance which sprang from his rich association with the whole fabric of the South's economic life, and which voiced the result of his long and sensitive responsiveness to stimuli external and internal. He absorbed influences as a sponge does water, and when pressed his books and speeches yield observations quick, living, liquid. There is considerable reason for belief, too, that Mr. Tompkins' concepts, however correctly or incorrectly interpretative of the past, stood in a causal relation to the cotton manufacturing development in his active period and continuing to a less extent even to the present.

While there has perhaps been no previous effort to bring the several beliefs into parallel presentation, concerning the rise of cotton mills in the South a little body of theory has grown up. Many of the statements are not well-informed, and in other cases they are almost too studied. Aside from a preparatory instance, designed to show the limits of divergence between the various views, the method here chosen is that of relating the different assertions to all of the periods to which they apply, rather than attempting to give at once expositions of each in continuity. It is hoped that in trying to examine the views in detail, the relative weighing of periods as intended by the writers will not be lost.

One who made his study with empirical purpose, and may believed to have been not deeply interested in the historical setting of the cotton mills, has made the following observation for South Carolina, taken by him as typical of the Southern States:

"The story of the development of the cotton manufacturing industry in South Carolina is not wanting in impressive elements. From the beginning in 1790 till 1900 it was a struggle of gradually increasing intensity and extension."[1] This is a very positive statement of what may be called the continuity theory. Mr. Goldsmith's view is in marked contrast with a representative expression of Mr. Tompkins, like himself a Southerner for considerable time a resident of the North:

"The settlement of mountainous and middle North Carolina was practically by the same elements,—Scotch-Irish, Germans, Moravians, and Quakers,—as came to Pennsylvania. Many emigrants landing at Philadelphia and New Castle, Delaware, settled first in Pennsylvania and moved southward through the Valley and Piedmont of Virginia to the Carolinas. Others landed at Charleston and moved northwestward. In South Carolina even the names of several of the northern counties are identical with those of Pennsylvania, as Lancaster, Chester, and York counties.

"These settlers brought with them a large degree of knowledge and skill in manufacturing. All along the Piedmont and even in the mountains from Pennsylvania to Georgia, they not only followed agriculture, but developed varied household manufactures in the period between 1750 and 1800.... In 1800 many charcoal blast furnaces making pig iron and many catlin forges and rolling mills making wrought iron bars, and other products of iron, indicate that a manufacturing development throughout the Piedmont region of the South might have continued parallel with that which has taken place in Pennsylvania, except for the circumstances of the combined influence of the invention of the cotton gin, the institution of slavery, and the checking of this immigration. As late as 1810 the manufactured products of Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia exceeded in variety and value those of the entire New England States. By Whitney's invention, and its improvement by Holmes, cotton planting became so profitable, that for a period of forty years the price remained above twenty-five cents a pound. Factories were abandoned, the owners going into the production of cotton with slave labor. Some of the factory workers ... went into a precarious agriculture. The factory workers and small farmers were largely ... located on the mountain sides, and the development of cotton production with slave labor tended further to separate this democracy from the white race aristocracy of the low country. As cotton and slavery advanced, the population of free white work people were driven farther and farther into the mountain country, and thus many of the white industrial workers of 1800 became the poor mountain farmers of 1850.... the owners of factories who operated with free white labor in 1800 had become in 1850 the cotton planters operating with black slave labor.... when the abolition of slavery removed one great difficulty of industries and the white people who had formerly deserted manufacturers for agriculture went back to the pursuits of their fathers, these mountaineers formed the labor supply.... it was found that the descendants of the industrial workers of 1800 could, with a little training, do as good work as their forbears did."[2]

This opinion is not so categorical as that of a close observer of the South who believes that "from 1810 to 1880 the section was industrially a desert of Sahara", but it makes clear the view that from a point early in the century until a date subsequent to the Civil War absorption in cotton culture threw manufacturing of all sorts into the discard. This conception may be held to be so generally accepted as to be commonplace and not requiring of proof; to examine in detail, however, the varying statements that would cast doubt upon this, so far from being a tilting at windmills, will serve to fix with some conclusiveness the date most nearly according with the commencement of the industry, and so accomplish the chief object of this introductory discussion.

And now to begin.

In declaring in 1908 that Spartanburg was regaining the position of a central point in one of the most forward manufacturing developments in America, such as the place had been a century earlier, Mr. Tompkins said: "When I left South Carolina to go