Gregg's Question: Cotton, Mills and the 1860 Census

Why Not Make Our Own Cloth?

1In 1844, William Gregg, a Charleston businessman who had made his first fortune as a jeweler, began writing newspaper essays that asked his fellow South Carolinians an uncomfortable question. Their state grew some of the finest cotton in the world. Why did nearly all of it leave the state as raw fiber, while the cloth and shoes people wore came back from New England or Britain?

2Gregg believed he knew the answer. In South Carolina, almost all spare money went into land and enslaved people. Cotton prices were often high, and planters usually bought more fields and enslaved more workers instead of building mills. Merchants in the North earned money shipping the bales, spinning them and selling finished goods back to the South.

3Gregg decided to show that a mill could work in the South. In the late 1840s his company opened a cotton mill at Graniteville, beside a creek in the hills of western South Carolina, near Augusta, Georgia. The rushing water turned the mill's machines. Gregg hired poor white families from the countryside, many of whom had owned little or no land, and built cottages, a church and a school for them. The mill earned steady profits, and visitors praised it. Yet only a few Southern investors followed his example.

4The census of 1860 showed how far apart the regions had grown. Across the South, most free families farmed. Many small farmers raised corn and hogs mainly to feed their own households, while large plantations grew cotton, rice, sugar and tobacco for sale. In older states such as Virginia, where tobacco had worn out much of the soil, many farmers turned to wheat. Many Virginia enslavers sold enslaved people to cotton planters farther south, and families were often torn apart by these sales.

5In the North, factory towns, railroads and cities kept growing, while most farm families still worked their own land. Wage jobs and cheap Midwestern land drew millions of immigrants, most of them from Ireland and Germany. Far fewer immigrants settled in the cotton states, where enslaved people did most of the hard labor and wage jobs were scarcer. New Orleans, a busy port, was the main exception.

6Gregg did not oppose slavery. He argued that the South could keep slavery and still build mills, and he chose white workers for Graniteville. When the Civil War began in 1861, the South had far fewer factories than the North to supply its armies with cloth, shoes and weapons.