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Cheap Labor and Southern Textiles before 1880

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Abstract

Labor costs historically have been decisive in determining the location of cotton textile production. Despite an apparent advantage in wage rates, however, the southern industry did not achieve sustained relative progress before about 1875. This study argues that in most times and places the region did not have “cheap labor” before this date. What matters is not just the level of wages in any year, but the quality of labor attracted at this wage and the geographic scope of the labor market within which firms operate. The scope of the labor market depends in turn on property rights and incentives toward recruitment activity.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1979

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References

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2 Mitchell, Broadus, Rise of Cotton Mills in the South (Baltimore, 1921), p. viiiGoogle Scholar. Mitchell, who remains intellectually active in the 1970s, can take satisfaction from the fact that his 1921 book has not yet been displaced as a general history.

3 The most explicit statement is Terrill, Tom E., “Eager Hands: Labor for Southern Textiles, 1850–1860,” this Journal, 36 (March 1976), 8499Google Scholar.

4 See Guelman's, Howard “Comment on Paper by Terrill” pp. 100–01Google Scholar: “It is not at all clear that the availability of labor was a critical factor in the location of the textile industry.…” See also Morris, Morris D., “The Recruitment of an Industrial Labor Force in India, with British and American Comparisons,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2 (Apr. 1960), 305–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Interpretations of pean and Japanese experience frequently assign labor supply a more essential role. See, for example, Mokyr, Joel, Industrialization in the Low Countries 1795–1850 (New Haven, 1976)Google Scholar; leberger, Charles P., Europe's Postwar Growth: The Role of Labor Supply (Cambridge, Mass., 1967)Google Scholar.

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16 A number of recent contributions to the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity have stressed this dimension. See particularly Hall, Robert E., “The Process of Inflation in the Labor Market,” Brook-ings Papers on Economic Activity, 2 (1974), 343–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vroman, Wayne, “Worker Upgrading and the Business Cycle,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1 (1977), 229–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar . An early analysis along these lines is Reder, Melvin W., “The Theory of Occupational Wage Differentials,” American Economic Review, 45 (Dec. 1955), 833–52Google Scholar.

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18 Mazumdar, Dipak, “Labour Supply in Early Industrialization: The Case of Bombay Textile Industry,” Economic History Review, 26 (Aug. 1973), 477–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar . See also Uselding, Paul, “An Early Chapter in the Evolution of American Industrial Management,” in Cain, Louis P. and Uselding, Paul J., eds., Business Enterprise and Economic Change (Kent, Ohio, 1973), p. 77Google Scholar.

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21 See Notes on the 170th Anniversary of the Manufacture of Cotton in the United States, 1790–1860,” Cotton History Review, 1 (July 1960), 8387Google Scholar.

22 , Lander, The Textile Industry, p. 5.Google Scholar

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29 Watkins, J. L. states: “The war and the embargo … gave a great impetus to cotton manufacturing in the country, and the domestic consumption increased, to more than 600,000 bales, or nearly 70%.” King Cotton (New York, 1969; originally published 1908), p. 14Google Scholar . The precise dates and sources for this statement are unclear, but it appears to be based on examination of residuals between production estimates and exports; in terms of pounds, such residuals come to 74 percent for both 1813 and 1814. Hammond, citing Woodbury's 1836 report, which in turn cites an 1816 House Committee Report (not accessible to me at this time), puts U.S. consumption at 31.5 million pounds in 1815, less thanhalfofthe 1814–15 crop. This percentage appears to be too low, however. A conservative application of Zevin's estimates of the annual increase of total output in New England, using Gallatin's 1810 estimates as a base, implies that Ne w England consumption must have been over 50,000,000 pounds by 1815. See Hammond, M.B., The Cotton Industry (New York, 1897), p. 242Google Scholar and Appendix; Woodbury, Levi, Secretary of the Treasury, Report on Cotton, Executive Document, 1st Session, 24th Congress, No. 146 (March 4, 1836), pp. 40, 42Google Scholar; Zevin, Robert, “The Growth of Cotton Textile Production after 1815,” in Fogel, Robert and Engerman, Stanley, eds., The Reinterpretation of American Economic History (New York, 1971), pp. 123–24Google Scholar . According to Woodbury exports to France rose to 10.25 million pounds in 1813 but fell to 1.75 million pounds in 1814 (p. 30).

30 The appropriate deflation of the cotton price in Figure 1 is difficult, but employing Cole's index of Charleston prices other than export staples does not alter the pattern displayed. See Cole, Arthur H., Wholesale Commodity Prices in the U.S. (Cambridge, Mass., 1938), pp. 160–61Google Scholar.

31 Preyer, Norris, “Southern Support of the Tariff of 1816—A Reappraisal,” Journal of Southern History, 25 (Aug. 1959), 306–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32 Quoted in ibid., p. 314.

33 Alexander Field, James, “Sectoral Shift in Antebellum Massachusetts: A Reconsideration,” Explorations in Economic History, 15 (Apr. 1978), 146–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 The best known illustration is Ulrich Phillips's graph of slave prices in four markets, in Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston, 1929), p. 177Google Scholar . Phillips's figures have now been superseded by the work of Fogel and Engerman using probate data, and Laurence Kotlikoff using New Orleans sale price data; the results available thus far confirm the picture of a well integrated regional slave market. See Kotlikoff, “The Structure of Slave Prices in New Orleans, 1804 to 1862,” Economic Inquiry (forthcoming).

35 See my analysis in The Political Economy of the Cotton South, pp. 119–25.

36 Layer, Robert G., Earnings of Cotton Mill Operatives, 1825–1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), p. 18Google Scholar; Lebergott, Stanley, Manpower in Economic Growth (New York, 1964), pp. 98, 547Google Scholar . Lebergott presents evidence that for several firms, wages declined between 1824 and 1832 (p. 130).

37 History of Wages in the United States from Colonial Times to 1928. Bureau of Labor Statistics Bulletin No. 604 (Washington, D.C., 1929), pp. 106–07Google Scholar . See also Nickless, Pamela, “Changing Labor Productivity and the Utilization of Native Women Workers in the American Cotton Textile Industry, 1825–1860,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Purdue University, 1976, pp. 3637Google Scholar.

38 Bureau of Labor Statistics Bulletin No. 604, pp. 93–94.

39 Griffin, “Poor White Laborers,” p. 31.

40 Lander, Ernest, “The Development of Textiles in the South Carolina Piedmont Before 1860,” Cotton History Review 1 (July 1960), p. 96.Google Scholar

41 , Griffin, “Poor White Laborers,” p. 29.Google Scholar

42 Cases are discussed in Preyer, Norris, “The Historian, The Slave and the Ante-Bellum Textile Industry,” Journal of Negro History, 46 (Apr. 1961), 7176CrossRefGoogle Scholar; , Starobin, Industrial Slavery, pp. 1214Google Scholar; Miller, Randall, The Cotton Mill Movement in Antebellum Alabama (New York, 1978), pp. 149–53Google Scholar; Jones, Charles C., “Pioneer Manufacturing in Richmond County, Georgia,” Textile History Review, 5 (July 1964), 7981Google Scholar; Stokes, Allen, “Black and White Labor and the Development of the Southern Textile Industry,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of South Carolina, 1977, pp. 51, 61, 114Google Scholar.

43 Buckingham, J.S., The Slave States of America (London, 1842), p. 113.Google Scholar

44 , Miller, “Daniel Pratt's Industrial Urbanism,” p. 22, quoting a statement byGoogle Scholar, DeBow. Cf. Hunt's Merchant Magazine, 22 (Jan. 1850,) p. 581Google Scholar.

45 , Standard and , Griffin, The Cotton Textile Industry, p. 140Google Scholar; , Preyer, “The Historian,” pp. 7374Google Scholar . The Rocky Mount owner “was informed by the planters in 1851 that with the price of cotton rising the slaves were needed in the fields.”

46 , Preyer, “The Historian,” p. 80Google Scholar; , Lander, The Textile Industry, p. 90Google Scholar; , Terrill, “Eager Hands,” p. 86Google Scholar . Starobin's claim that 5000 slaves were working in textiles in 1860 is quite far off (Terrill, ibid., p. 84).

47 See the comments of Charles Lyell on the white-only policy at Columbus, , Georgia. Second Visit to the United States, vol. 2, (New York, 1849), pp. 236–37Google Scholar.

48 Mitchell, Broadus, William Gregg: Factory Master of the Old South (Chapel Hill N.C., 1928), p. 23Google Scholar; , Preyer, “The Historian,” p. 77Google Scholar.

49 Compare the analysis of urban slavery in Goldin, Claudia, Urban Slavery in the American South 1820–1860 (Chicago, 1976)Google Scholar . The essential difference is that the argument presented here does not rely on assumptions about technical substitutability in production.

50 , Griffin, “The Origins,” p. 369.Google Scholar

51 The higher percentage of females at Hamilton might seem to point in the opposite direction. This is not necessarily the case, however, because age-earnings profiles typically show that girls are more productive than boys below the age of 16. Even when the aggregate southern workforce had swung heavily toward males (after 1900), young girls were given more responsible and demanding jobs than young boys.

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59 In 1850 the Scientific American wrote that “Coarse goods can be manufactured cheaper at the South, and with the great number of factories now in operation [in the southern states], how can it be expected that our northern manufacturers can long keep the field against them—they cannot do it.” Quoted in Dunwell, Steve, The Run of the Mill (Boston, 1978), p. 158Google Scholar.

60 Ginger, Ray, “Labor in a Massachusetts Cotton Mill, 1853–1860,” Business History Review, 28 (March 1954), esp. 7478.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

61 See my discussion in The Political Economy of the Cotton South (New York, 1978) pp. 150–54Google Scholar.

62 In Phillips, Ulrich B., ed., Plantation and Frontier (Cleveland, 1909), p. 339Google Scholar.

63 (New York, 1965), esp. Chs. 8 and 9. Many contemporary comments stressed fears of the political consequences of extensive free labor immigration, which may indeed be more important. See Memminger's letter to Hammond (Apr. 28, 1849)Google Scholar , in Martin, Thomas P., “The Advent of William Gregg and the Graniteville Company,” Journal of Southern History, 11 (Aug. 1945), 413Google Scholar ; also Spratt's letter to Perkins (Feb. 1861), in , Phillips, Plantation and Frontier, pp. 176–77Google Scholar.

64 See, for example, Berthoff, Rowland T., “Southern Attitudes Toward Immigration, 1865–1914,” Journal of Southern History, 17 (Aug. 1951) 328–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Williams, E. Russ, “Louisiana's Public and Private Immigration Endeavors: 1866–1893,” Louisiana History, 15 (Spring 1974), 153–73Google Scholar; Loewenberg, Bert James, “Efforts of the South to Encourage Immigration, 1865–1900,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 10 (Oct. 1934), 363–85Google Scholar.

65 Evidence on rates of return and overall Southern manufacturing performance in the 1850s may be found in Fred Bateman and Weiss, Thomas, “Manufacturing in the Antebellum South,” in Research in Economic History, 1 (1976), 144Google Scholar.

66 , Blicksilver, Cotton Manufacturing in the Southeast, pp. 3132Google Scholar; Smith, Robert Sidney, Mill on the Dan (Durham N.C., 1960), pp. 103–04Google Scholar.