1825. THE PLANTING STATES. 227 CHAPTER XLVI. THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. To the many causes of misunderstanding which were thus springing up between the North and West, on the one hand, and the South on the other, and were fast making them two separate nations, must be added yet another directly due to the industrial revolution through which the country was passing. Never before in our history had the contrast been so marked. The invention of the Whitney gin had made cotton-growing wonderfully profitable. The inventions of Hargreaves and Crompton and Arkwright had stimulated the demand for cotton, and these two conditions combined-the existence of a market and the possibility of supplying it with ease and profit -had already made cotton-planting the one absorbing industry of the South. From a petty yield of two million pounds in 1791, the crop increased with astonishing rapidity year by year till it reached thirty-five million pounds in 1800, eighty millions in 1811, and two hundred and eighty millions in 1821, a product worth thirty-five million dollars. Under the influence of this ruling industry the enterprise, the capital, the development of the South became confined to a few restricted lines. Arts and sciences were little cultivated. Mechanical inventions were disregarded. Great natural resources were left untouched. Her deposits of iron ore were enormous. Her coal fields exceeded thirty-nine thousand square miles in area. She had boundless tracts of lumber land and farm land, and factory and mill sites the equal of any in New England. Yet her people neglected the opportunities afforded by the bounteous gifts of Nature, and concentrated all their energies on the cultivation of one plant. Every year at the same time they VOL. V. sowed cotton seed. Every year at the same time they gathered the wool, and ginned, pressed, and sent it to market at New Orleans or Charleston or Savannah. One third was sold for home consumption, two thirds were shipped to Great Britain or Europe, and with the money so obtained goods, wares, and merchandise were purchased for use on the plantations. Every ship that came from Liverpool to Charleston or Savannah for cotton was laden with china, glass, crockery, hardware and cutlery, grindstones and brooms, edged tools, pipes, cotton cloth, shoes, and a hundred other articles the planters consumed. In the course of time, therefore, an immense trade had grown up between Great Britain and the South to the ruin of a like trade which might have existed between the North and the South. It is indeed true that when this trade began very many of the articles thus imported could not possibly have been furnished by the North; but it is also true that it continued long after every want of the planter could have been as fully and as cheaply supplied by the American as by the British manufacturer. These industrial conditions deeply affected the South politically, socially, and economically. The existence of seven States whose population was engaged in growing and marketing one staple gave them an identity of interest and a common point of view. The firm belief that cotton could not be successfully cultivated save by the black man, and that the negro would not work unless compelled to, fastened slavery on the South, shut out the free laborer, and deprived that section of all the blessings that flow from a state of society where every man, from the richest to the poorest, has the right and is earnestly seeking to better his condition. No thrifty, industrious middle class existed. The belief that slave labor could not be utilized in mills and factories prevented the introduction of manufactures. Therefore machine shops, workshops, cotton mills, rolling mills, foundries, mines, and all the many benefits that spring from diversified industry were unknown in the South. To the great forces which in the course of the nineteenth century were to radically change the condition of civilized man she was indifferent. 1825. THE MANUFACTURING STATES. 229 Not so the North. There every art and science which could add to the wealth, increase the prosperity and comfort of the people, and develop the material resources of the country was already assiduously cultivated. Of seventy-five million dollars invested in manufactures in 1825, less than fifteen were in the States south of Pennsylvania and the Ohio, and twelve of the fifteen millions were in Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky. The change which five years had wrought in the industrial development of the North was astonishing. The failure of the tariff of 1816 to accomplish all the good expected, the evils of a disordered currency, the hard times of 1819, the enormous importation of British goods to be sold at auction well-nigh destroyed manufactures before 1820. But with the return of better times and the general revival of business which speedily followed the dark days of 1819, manufactures once more began to thrive and multiply all over the Eastern and Middle States. When the first quarter of the century ended, Saco, in Maine, was soon to boast of the largest cotton mill in our country. Sixty others could be counted in New Hampshire, where such towns as Salmon Falls, Newmarket, and Somersworth were growing rapidly on spots which five years before were in the wilderness. In the same State were more than three hundred tanneries, more than two hundred bark mills, and half a score of paper mills. The men of northern Vermont, stirred to activity by the opportunity opened to them by the Hudson and Champlain Canal, had turned Middlebury into a factory town, had covered their hills with sheep, and were sending to New York iron, copperas, and wool. Within an area seventeen miles square in Massachusetts were five towns making fifty thousand pieces of flannel yearly, and giving employment to twenty-one hundred people. The mills and factories in the State numbered one hundred and sixty-one, with a capital of thirty million dollars. But Rhode Island surpassed this, for in Providence and its neighborhood, including a small district of Massachusetts, were one hundred and fifty manufacturing establishments, employing thirty thousand men and women. Providence now claimed to be the richest city of its size and population in the world. From the cotton and woollen mills of New York came each year cloth valued at eighteen million dollars. But her people also raised wool, and made salt, paper, glass, iron, and leather in immense quantities. The Hudson from Albany to New York city is described as " teeming with manufacturing establishments," and the counties of Dutchess and Oneida as "filled with factories." At Jersey City were carpet, glass, and porcelain works owned by New Yorkers. At Paterson five thousand dollars a week were paid out to the hands in the cotton, flax, and iron factories. In Philadelphia were four thousand weavers. About its suburbs were growing up towns such as Manayunk, whose population was supported entirely by manufactures. Reading was a great hat town. The little county of Delaware contained one hundred and fifty-seven mills and factories. The coal and iron industries were developing with wonderful rapidity, while in Pittsburg was the great manufacturing centre of the Mississippi Valley. Steubenville and Cincinnati were her only rivals. But it is useless to attempt a summary. It is sufficient to know that from Maine to Maryland and from Maryland to Missouri new industries of a hundred sorts were now pursued with untiring energy. In 1820 it was estimated that two hundred thousand persons and a capital of seventy-five million dollars were employed in manufacturing. In 1825 the capital used had been expanded to one hundred and sixty millions and the number of workers to two millions. That the development of innumerable manufactures in the North should give rise to new interests, and that the rise of new interests should be accompanied by a steadily increasing demand for their protection by Government was inevitable. Just as the ship-builder, the ship-owner, the importer, and the merchant had long insisted that Government should make such treaties, pass such laws, impose such duties as were most conducive to the welfare of his business; just as the planter and the farmer had steadily resisted every attempt to do anything which in their opinion would tend to shut their produce from foreign markets, lead other nations to retaliate, or in any way lessen the number of customers at home or abroad, so the manufacturers, the holders of stock in manufacturing com 1821-24. THE TARIFF QUESTION. 231 panies, those who derived a livelihood from labor in mills and factories, machine shops, and foundries, or furnished raw material for consumption, now united in a persistent effort to secure a really protective tariff. The bill introduced in 1820, mild as it was, had suffered defeat in the Senate by the union of commercial and agricultural interests. The bill of 1821 had never been put upon its passage in either house. When the Seventeenth Congress met the great champion of protection was not a member, the speakership was given to a Virginian ‡ opposed to protection, and the Committee on Manufactures was so arranged that it would not report a bill, nor would the House consider that presented by its Ways and Means Committee. Much the same fate befell the fourth attempt in 1823. Monroe in his annual message had asked for further protection; his remarks had been referred to the Committee on Manufactures, and a bill so increasing the existing duties on iron, coarse woollen cloths, and dyed cottons as to prohibit their importation was quickly reported; but no vote was ever reached, and it perished in Committee of the Whole. That the Eighteenth Congress would be more friendly to the protection of domestic industries was fully expected, for Clay was again a congressman, and in his old seat in the Speaker's chair presided over a House to which the States strongly in favor of a new tariff sent more members than ever before. It was therefore with a fine prospect of success that Monroe for the second time appealed to Congress to protect "those articles which we are prepared to manufacture or which are more immediately connected with the defence and independence of the country." His words were referred to the Committee on Manufactures, which soon presented a bill arranging all imported goods, wares, and merchandise in two classes. In the first were silks, linens, spices from the Indies, cutlery from Great Britain, and a long list of articles which were not made in our country, and whose importation would not interfere with home manufac P. P. Barbour. History of the People of the United States, vol. iv, pp. 510-515. |