The Rise Of The Industrial System
If Jefferson could have lived to see the Stars and Stripes planted on
the Pacific Coast, the broad empire of Texas added to the planting
states, and the valley of the Willamette waving with wheat sown by
farmers from New England, he would have been more than fortified in his
faith that the future of America lay in agriculture. Even a stanch old
Federalist like Gouverneur Morris or Josiah Quincy would have mournfully
co
ceded both the prophecy and the claim. Manifest destiny never seemed
more clearly written in the stars.
As the farmers from the Northwest and planters from the Southwest poured
in upon the floor of Congress, the party of Jefferson, christened anew
by Jackson, grew stronger year by year. Opponents there were, no doubt,
disgruntled critics and Whigs by conviction; but in 1852 Franklin
Pierce, the Democratic candidate for President, carried every state in
the union except Massachusetts, Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee. This
victory, a triumph under ordinary circumstances, was all the more
significant in that Pierce was pitted against a hero of the Mexican War,
General Scott, whom the Whigs, hoping to win by rousing the martial
ardor of the voters, had nominated. On looking at the election returns,
the new President calmly assured the planters that "the general
principle of reduction of duties with a view to revenue may now be
regarded as the settled policy of the country." With equal confidence,
he waved aside those agitators who devoted themselves "to the supposed
interests of the relatively few Africans in the United States." Like a
watchman in the night he called to the country: "All's well."
The party of Hamilton and Clay lay in the dust.
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
As pride often goeth before a fall, so sanguine expectation is sometimes
the symbol of defeat. Jackson destroyed the bank. Polk signed the tariff
bill of 1846 striking an effective blow at the principle of protection
for manufactures. Pierce promised to silence the abolitionists. His
successor was to approve a drastic step in the direction of free trade.
Nevertheless all these things left untouched the springs of power that
were in due time to make America the greatest industrial nation on the
earth; namely, vast national resources, business enterprise, inventive
genius, and the free labor supply of Europe. Unseen by the thoughtless,
unrecorded in the diaries of wiseacres, rarely mentioned in the speeches
of statesmen, there was swiftly rising such a tide in the affairs of
America as Jefferson and Hamilton never dreamed of in their little
philosophies.
The Inventors
Watt and Boulton experimenting with steam in England,
Whitney combining wood and steel into a cotton gin, Fulton and Fitch
applying the steam engine to navigation, Stevens and Peter Cooper trying
out the "iron horse" on "iron highways," Slater building spinning mills
in Pawtucket, Howe attaching the needle to the flying wheel, Morse
spanning a continent with the telegraph, Cyrus Field linking the markets
of the new world with the old along the bed of the Atlantic, McCormick
breaking the sickle under the reaper--these men and a thousand more were
destroying in a mighty revolution of industry the world of the
stagecoach and the tallow candle which Washington and Franklin had
inherited little changed from the age of Caesar. Whitney was to make
cotton king. Watt and Fulton were to make steel and steam masters of the
world. Agriculture was to fall behind in the race for supremacy.
Industry Outstrips Planting
The story of invention, that tribute to
the triumph of mind over matter, fascinating as a romance, need not be
treated in detail here. The effects of invention on social and political
life, multitudinous and never-ending, form the very warp and woof of
American progress from the days of Andrew Jackson to the latest hour.
Neither the great civil conflict--the clash of two systems--nor the
problems of the modern age can be approached without an understanding of
the striking phases of industrialism.
First and foremost among them was the uprush of mills managed by
captains of industry and manned by labor drawn from farms, cities, and
foreign lands. For every planter who cleared a domain in the Southwest
and gathered his army of bondmen about him, there rose in the North a
magician of steam and steel who collected under his roof an army of free
workers.
In seven league boots this new giant strode ahead of the Southern giant.
Between 1850 and 1859, to use dollars and cents as the measure of
progress, the value of domestic manufactures including mines and
fisheries rose from $1,019,106,616 to $1,900,000,000, an increase of
eighty-six per cent in ten years. In this same period the total
production of naval stores, rice, sugar, tobacco, and cotton, the
staples of the South, went only from $165,000,000, in round figures, to
$204,000,000. At the halfway point of the century, the capital invested
in industry, commerce, and cities far exceeded the value of all the farm
land between the Atlantic and the Pacific; thus the course of economy
had been reversed in fifty years. Tested by figures of production, King
Cotton had shriveled by 1860 to a petty prince in comparison, for each
year the captains of industry turned out goods worth nearly twenty times
all the bales of cotton picked on Southern plantations. Iron, boots and
shoes, and leather goods pouring from Northern mills surpassed in value
the entire cotton output.
The Agrarian West Turns to Industry
Nor was this vast enterprise
confined to the old Northeast where, as Madison had sagely remarked,
commerce was early dominant. "Cincinnati," runs an official report in
1854, "appears to be a great central depot for ready-made clothing and
its manufacture for the Western markets may be said to be one of the
great trades of that city." There, wrote another traveler, "I heard the
crack of the cattle driver's whip and the hum of the factory: the West
and the East meeting." Louisville and St. Louis were already famous for
their clothing trades and the manufacture of cotton bagging. Five
hundred of the two thousand woolen mills in the country in 1860 were in
the Western states. Of the output of flour and grist mills, which almost
reached in value the cotton crop of 1850, the Ohio Valley furnished a
rapidly growing share. The old home of Jacksonian democracy, where
Federalists had been almost as scarce as monarchists, turned slowly
backward, as the needle to the pole, toward the principle of protection
for domestic industry, espoused by Hamilton and defended by Clay.
The Extension of Canals and Railways
As necessary to mechanical
industry as steel and steam power was the great market, spread over a
wide and diversified area and knit together by efficient means of
transportation. This service was supplied to industry by the steamship,
which began its career on the Hudson in 1807; by the canals, of which
the Erie opened in 1825 was the most noteworthy; and by the railways,
which came into practical operation about 1830.
With sure instinct the Eastern manufacturer reached out for the markets
of the Northwest territory where free farmers were producing annually
staggering crops of corn, wheat, bacon, and wool. The two great canal
systems--the Erie connecting New York City with the waterways of the
Great Lakes and the Pennsylvania chain linking Philadelphia with the
headwaters of the Ohio--gradually turned the tide of trade from New
Orleans to the Eastern seaboard. The railways followed the same paths.
By 1860, New York had rail connections with Chicago and St. Louis, one
of the routes running through the Hudson and Mohawk valleys and along
the Great Lakes, the other through Philadelphia and Pennsylvania and
across the rich wheat fields of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Baltimore,
not to be outdone by her two rivals, reached out over the mountains for
the Western trade and in 1857 had trains running into St. Louis.
In railway enterprise the South took more interest than in canals, and
the friends of that section came to its aid. To offset the magnet
drawing trade away from the Mississippi Valley, lines were built from
the Gulf to Chicago, the Illinois Central part of the project being a
monument to the zeal and industry of a Democrat, better known in
politics than in business, Stephen A. Douglas. The swift movement of
cotton and tobacco to the North or to seaports was of common concern to
planters and manufacturers. Accordingly lines were flung down along the
Southern coast, linking Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah with the
Northern markets. Other lines struck inland from the coast, giving a
rail outlet to the sea for Raleigh, Columbia, Atlanta, Chattanooga,
Nashville, and Montgomery. Nevertheless, in spite of this enterprise,
the mileage of all the Southern states in 1860 did not equal that of
Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois combined.
Banking and Finance
Out of commerce and manufactures and the
construction and operation of railways came such an accumulation of
capital in the Northern states as merchants of old never imagined. The
banks of the four industrial states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New
York, and Pennsylvania in 1860 had funds greater than the banks in all
the other states combined. New York City had become the money market of
America, the center to which industrial companies, railway promoters,
farmers, and planters turned for capital to initiate and carry on their
operations. The banks of Louisiana, South Carolina, Georgia, and
Virginia, it is true, had capital far in excess of the banks of the
Northwest; but still they were relatively small compared with the
financial institutions of the East.
The Growth of the Industrial Population
A revolution of such
magnitude in industry, transport, and finance, overturning as it did the
agrarian civilization of the old Northwest and reaching out to the very
borders of the country, could not fail to bring in its train
consequences of a striking character. Some were immediate and obvious.
Others require a fullness of time not yet reached to reveal their
complete significance. Outstanding among them was the growth of an
industrial population, detached from the land, concentrated in cities,
and, to use Jefferson's phrase, dependent upon "the caprices and
casualties of trade" for a livelihood. This was a result, as the great
Virginian had foreseen, which flowed inevitably from public and private
efforts to stimulate industry as against agriculture.
It was estimated in 1860, on the basis of the census figures, that
mechanical production gave employment to 1,100,000 men and 285,000
women, making, if the average number of dependents upon them be
reckoned, nearly six million people or about one-sixth of the population
of the country sustained from manufactures. "This," runs the official
record, "was exclusive of the number engaged in the production of many
of the raw materials and of the food for manufacturers; in the
distribution of their products, such as merchants, clerks, draymen,
mariners, the employees of railroads, expresses, and steamboats; of
capitalists, various artistic and professional classes, as well as
carpenters, bricklayers, painters, and the members of other mechanical
trades not classed as manufactures. It is safe to assume, then, that
one-third of the whole population is supported, directly, or indirectly,
by manufacturing industry." Taking, however, the number of persons
directly supported by manufactures, namely about six millions, reveals
the astounding fact that the white laboring population, divorced from
the soil, already exceeded the number of slaves on Southern farms and
plantations.
Immigration.--The more carefully the rapid growth of the industrial
population is examined, the more surprising is the fact that such an
immense body of free laborers could be found, particularly when it is
recalled to what desperate straits the colonial leaders were put in
securing immigrants,--slavery, indentured servitude, and kidnapping
being the fruits of their necessities. The answer to the enigma is to be
found partly in European conditions and partly in the cheapness of
transportation after the opening of the era of steam navigation. Shrewd
observers of the course of events had long foreseen that a flood of
cheap labor was bound to come when the way was made easy. Some, among
them Chief Justice Ellsworth, went so far as to prophesy that white
labor would in time be so abundant that slavery would disappear as the
more costly of the two labor systems. The processes of nature were aided
by the policies of government in England and Germany.
The Coming of the Irish.--The opposition of the Irish people to the
English government, ever furious and irrepressible, was increased in the
mid forties by an almost total failure of the potato crop, the main
support of the peasants. Catholic in religion, they had been compelled
to support a Protestant church. Tillers of the soil by necessity, they
were forced to pay enormous tributes to absentee landlords in England
whose claim to their estates rested upon the title of conquest and
confiscation. Intensely loyal to their race, the Irish were subjected in
all things to the Parliament at London, in which their small minority of
representatives had little influence save in holding a balance of power
between the two contending English parties. To the constant political
irritation, the potato famine added physical distress beyond
description. In cottages and fields and along the highways the victims
of starvation lay dead by the hundreds, the relief which charity
afforded only bringing misery more sharply to the foreground. Those who
were fortunate enough to secure passage money sought escape to America.
In 1844 the total immigration into the United States was less than
eighty thousand; in 1850 it had risen by leaps and bounds to more than
three hundred thousand. Between 1820 and 1860 the immigrants from the
United Kingdom numbered 2,750,000, of whom more than one-half were
Irish. It has been said with a touch of exaggeration that the American
canals and railways of those days were built by the labor of Irishmen.
The German Migration.--To political discontent and economic distress,
such as was responsible for the coming of the Irish, may likewise be
traced the source of the Germanic migration. The potato blight that fell
upon Ireland visited the Rhine Valley and Southern Germany at the same
time with results as pitiful, if less extensive. The calamity inflicted
by nature was followed shortly by another inflicted by the despotic
conduct of German kings and princes. In 1848 there had occurred
throughout Europe a popular uprising in behalf of republics and
democratic government. For a time it rode on a full tide of success.
Kings were overthrown, or compelled to promise constitutional
government, and tyrannical ministers fled from their palaces. Then came
reaction. Those who had championed the popular cause were imprisoned,
shot, or driven out of the land. Men of attainments and distinction,
whose sole offense was opposition to the government of kings and
princes, sought an asylum in America, carrying with them to the land of
their adoption the spirit of liberty and democracy. In 1847 over fifty
thousand Germans came to America, the forerunners of a migration that
increased, almost steadily, for many years. The record of 1860 showed
that in the previous twenty years nearly a million and a half had found
homes in the United States. Far and wide they scattered, from the mills
and shops of the seacoast towns to the uttermost frontiers of Wisconsin
and Minnesota.
The Labor of Women and Children.--If the industries, canals, and
railways of the country were largely manned by foreign labor, still
important native sources must not be overlooked; above all, the women
and children of the New England textile districts. Spinning and weaving,
by a tradition that runs far beyond the written records of mankind,
belonged to women. Indeed it was the dexterous housewives, spinsters,
and boys and girls that laid the foundations of the textile industry in
America, foundations upon which the mechanical revolution was built. As
the wheel and loom were taken out of the homes to the factories operated
by water power or the steam engine, the women and, to use Hamilton's
phrase, "the children of tender years," followed as a matter of course.
"The cotton manufacture alone employs six thousand persons in Lowell,"
wrote a French observer in 1836; "of this number nearly five thousand
are young women from seventeen to twenty-four years of age, the
daughters of farmers from the different New England states." It was not
until after the middle of the century that foreign lands proved to be
the chief source from which workers were recruited for the factories of
New England. It was then that the daughters of the Puritans, outdone by
the competition of foreign labor, both of men and women, left the
spinning jenny and the loom to other hands.
The Rise of Organized Labor
The changing conditions of American
life, marked by the spreading mill towns of New England, New York, and
Pennsylvania and the growth of cities like Buffalo, Cincinnati,
Louisville, St. Louis, Detroit, and Chicago in the West, naturally
brought changes, as Jefferson had prophesied, in "manners and morals." A
few mechanics, smiths, carpenters, and masons, widely scattered through
farming regions and rural villages, raise no such problems as tens of
thousands of workers collected in one center in daily intercourse,
learning the power of cooeperation and union.
Even before the coming of steam and machinery, in the "good old days" of
handicrafts, laborers in many trades--printers, shoemakers, carpenters,
for example--had begun to draw together in the towns for the advancement
of their interests in the form of higher wages, shorter days, and
milder laws. The shoemakers of Philadelphia, organized in 1794,
conducted a strike in 1799 and held together until indicted seven years
later for conspiracy. During the twenties and thirties, local labor
unions sprang up in all industrial centers and they led almost
immediately to city federations of the several crafts.
As the thousands who were dependent upon their daily labor for their
livelihood mounted into the millions and industries spread across the
continent, the local unions of craftsmen grew into national craft
organizations bound together by the newspapers, the telegraph, and the
railways. Before 1860 there were several such national trade unions,
including the plumbers, printers, mule spinners, iron molders, and stone
cutters. All over the North labor leaders arose--men unknown to general
history but forceful and resourceful characters who forged links binding
scattered and individual workers into a common brotherhood. An attempt
was even made in 1834 to federate all the crafts into a permanent
national organization; but it perished within three years through lack
of support. Half a century had to elapse before the American Federation
of Labor was to accomplish this task.
All the manifestations of the modern labor movement had appeared, in
germ at least, by the time the mid-century was reached: unions, labor
leaders, strikes, a labor press, a labor political program, and a labor
political party. In every great city industrial disputes were a common
occurrence. The papers recorded about four hundred in two years,
1853-54, local affairs but forecasting economic struggles in a larger
field. The labor press seems to have begun with the founding of the
Mechanics' Free Press in Philadelphia in 1828 and the establishment of
the New York Workingman's Advocate shortly afterward. These
semi-political papers were in later years followed by regular trade
papers designed to weld together and advance the interests of particular
crafts. Edited by able leaders, these little sheets with limited
circulation wielded an enormous influence in the ranks of the workers.
Labor and Politics
As for the political program of labor, the main
planks were clear and specific: the abolition of imprisonment for debt,
manhood suffrage in states where property qualifications still
prevailed, free and universal education, laws protecting the safety and
health of workers in mills and factories, abolition of lotteries, repeal
of laws requiring militia service, and free land in the West.
Into the labor papers and platforms there sometimes crept a note of
hostility to the masters of industry, a sign of bitterness that excited
little alarm while cheap land in the West was open to the discontented.
The Philadelphia workmen, in issuing a call for a local convention,
invited "all those of our fellow citizens who live by their own labor
and none other." In Newcastle county, Delaware, the association of
working people complained in 1830: "The poor have no laws; the laws are
made by the rich and of course for the rich." Here and there an
extremist went to the length of advocating an equal division of wealth
among all the people--the crudest kind of communism.
Agitation of this character produced in labor circles profound distrust
of both Whigs and Democrats who talked principally about tariffs and
banks; it resulted in attempts to found independent labor parties. In
Philadelphia, Albany, New York City, and New England, labor candidates
were put up for elections in the early thirties and in a few cases were
victorious at the polls. "The balance of power has at length got into
the hands of the working people, where it properly belongs,"
triumphantly exclaimed the Mechanics' Free Press of Philadelphia in
1829. But the triumph was illusory. Dissensions appeared in the labor
ranks. The old party leaders, particularly of Tammany Hall, the
Democratic party organization in New York City, offered concessions to
labor in return for votes. Newspapers unsparingly denounced "trade union
politicians" as "demagogues," "levellers," and "rag, tag, and bobtail";
and some of them, deeming labor unrest the sour fruit of manhood
suffrage, suggested disfranchisement as a remedy. Under the influence
of concessions and attacks the political fever quickly died away, and
the end of the decade left no remnant of the labor political parties.
Labor leaders turned to a task which seemed more substantial and
practical, that of organizing workingmen into craft unions for the
definite purpose of raising wages and reducing hours.
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND NATIONAL POLITICS
Southern Plans for Union with the West
It was long the design of
Southern statesmen like Calhoun to hold the West and the South together
in one political party. The theory on which they based their hope was
simple. Both sections were agricultural--the producers of raw materials
and the buyers of manufactured goods. The planters were heavy purchasers
of Western bacon, pork, mules, and grain. The Mississippi River and its
tributaries formed the natural channel for the transportation of heavy
produce southward to the plantations and outward to Europe. Therefore,
ran their political reasoning, the interests of the two sections were
one. By standing together in favor of low tariffs, they could buy their
manufactures cheaply in Europe and pay for them in cotton, tobacco, and
grain. The union of the two sections under Jackson's management seemed
perfect.
The East Forms Ties with the West
Eastern leaders were not blind to
the ambitions of Southern statesmen. On the contrary, they also
recognized the importance of forming strong ties with the agrarian West
and drawing the produce of the Ohio Valley to Philadelphia and New York.
The canals and railways were the physical signs of this economic union,
and the results, commercial and political, were soon evident. By the
middle of the century, Southern economists noted the change, one of
them, De Bow, lamenting that "the great cities of the North have
severally penetrated the interior with artificial lines until they have
taken from the open and untaxed current of the Mississippi the commerce
produced on its borders." To this writer it was an astounding thing to
behold "the number of steamers that now descend the upper Mississippi
River, loaded to the guards with produce, as far as the mouth of the
Illinois River and then turn up that stream with their cargoes to be
shipped to New York via Chicago. The Illinois canal has not only swept
the whole produce along the line of the Illinois River to the East, but
it is drawing the products of the upper Mississippi through the same
channel; thus depriving New Orleans and St. Louis of a rich portion of
their former trade."
If to any shippers the broad current of the great river sweeping down to
New Orleans offered easier means of physical communication to the sea
than the canals and railways, the difference could be overcome by the
credit which Eastern bankers were able to extend to the grain and
produce buyers, in the first instance, and through them to the farmers
on the soil. The acute Southern observer just quoted, De Bow, admitted
with evident regret, in 1852, that "last autumn, the rich regions of
Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were flooded with the local bank notes of
the Eastern States, advanced by the New York houses on produce to be
shipped by way of the canals in the spring.... These moneyed facilities
enable the packer, miller, and speculator to hold on to their produce
until the opening of navigation in the spring and they are no longer
obliged, as formerly, to hurry off their shipments during the winter by
the way of New Orleans in order to realize funds by drafts on their
shipments. The banking facilities at the East are doing as much to draw
trade from us as the canals and railways which Eastern capital is
constructing." Thus canals, railways, and financial credit were swiftly
forging bonds of union between the old home of Jacksonian Democracy in
the West and the older home of Federalism in the East. The nationalism
to which Webster paid eloquent tribute became more and more real with
the passing of time. The self-sufficiency of the pioneer was broken down
as he began to watch the produce markets of New York and Philadelphia
where the prices of corn and hogs fixed his earnings for the year.
The West and Manufactures
In addition to the commercial bonds
between the East and the West there was growing up a common interest in
manufactures. As skilled white labor increased in the Ohio Valley, the
industries springing up in the new cities made Western life more like
that of the industrial East than like that of the planting South.
Moreover, the Western states produced some important raw materials for
American factories, which called for protection against foreign
competition, notably, wool, hemp, and flax. As the South had little or
no foreign competition in cotton and tobacco, the East could not offer
protection for her raw materials in exchange for protection for
industries. With the West, however, it became possible to establish
reciprocity in tariffs; that is, for example, to trade a high rate on
wool for a high rate on textiles or iron.
The South Dependent on the North
While East and West were drawing
together, the distinctions between North and South were becoming more
marked; the latter, having few industries and producing little save raw
materials, was being forced into the position of a dependent section. As
a result of the protective tariff, Southern planters were compelled to
turn more and more to Northern mills for their cloth, shoes, hats, hoes,
plows, and machinery. Nearly all the goods which they bought in Europe
in exchange for their produce came overseas to Northern ports, whence
transshipments were made by rail and water to Southern points of
distribution. Their rice, cotton, and tobacco, in as far as they were
not carried to Europe in British bottoms, were transported by Northern
masters. In these ways, a large part of the financial operations
connected with the sale of Southern produce and the purchase of goods in
exchange passed into the hands of Northern merchants and bankers who,
naturally, made profits from their transactions. Finally, Southern
planters who wanted to buy more land and more slaves on credit borrowed
heavily in the North where huge accumulations made the rates of interest
lower than the smaller banks of the South could afford.
The South Reckons the Cost of Economic Dependence
As Southern
dependence upon Northern capital became more and more marked, Southern
leaders began to chafe at what they regarded as restraints laid upon
their enterprise. In a word, they came to look upon the planter as a
tribute-bearer to the manufacturer and financier. "The South,"
expostulated De Bow, "stands in the attitude of feeding ... a vast
population of [Northern] merchants, shipowners, capitalists, and others
who, without claims on her progeny, drink up the life blood of her
trade.... Where goes the value of our labor but to those who, taking
advantage of our folly, ship for us, buy for us, sell to us, and, after
turning our own capital to their profitable account, return laden with
our money to enjoy their easily earned opulence at home."
Southern statisticians, not satisfied with generalities, attempted to
figure out how great was this tribute in dollars and cents. They
estimated that the planters annually lent to Northern merchants the full
value of their exports, a hundred millions or more, "to be used in the
manipulation of foreign imports." They calculated that no less than
forty millions all told had been paid to shipowners in profits. They
reckoned that, if the South were to work up her own cotton, she would
realize from seventy to one hundred millions a year that otherwise went
North. Finally, to cap the climax, they regretted that planters spent
some fifteen millions a year pleasure-seeking in the alluring cities and
summer resorts of the North.
Southern Opposition to Northern Policies
Proceeding from these
premises, Southern leaders drew the logical conclusion that the entire
program of economic measures demanded in the North was without exception
adverse to Southern interests and, by a similar chain of reasoning,
injurious to the corn and wheat producers of the West. Cheap labor
afforded by free immigration, a protective tariff raising prices of
manufactures for the tiller of the soil, ship subsidies increasing the
tonnage of carrying trade in Northern hands, internal improvements
forging new economic bonds between the East and the West, a national
banking system giving strict national control over the currency as a
safeguard against paper inflation--all these devices were regarded in
the South as contrary to the planting interest. They were constantly
compared with the restrictive measures by which Great Britain more than
half a century before had sought to bind American interests.
As oppression justified a war for independence once, statesmen argued,
so it can justify it again. "It is curious as it is melancholy and
distressing," came a broad hint from South Carolina, "to see how
striking is the analogy between the colonial vassalage to which the
manufacturing states have reduced the planting states and that which
formerly bound the Anglo-American colonies to the British empire....
England said to her American colonies: 'You shall not trade with the
rest of the world for such manufactures as are produced in the mother
country.' The manufacturing states say to their Southern colonies: 'You
shall not trade with the rest of the world for such manufactures as we
produce.'" The conclusion was inexorable: either the South must control
the national government and its economic measures, or it must declare,
as America had done four score years before, its political and economic
independence. As Northern mills multiplied, as railways spun their
mighty web over the face of the North, and as accumulated capital rose
into the hundreds of millions, the conviction of the planters and their
statesmen deepened into desperation.
Efforts to Start Southern Industries Fail
A few of them, seeing the
predominance of the North, made determined efforts to introduce
manufactures into the South. To the leaders who were averse to secession
and nullification this seemed the only remedy for the growing disparity
in the power of the two sections. Societies for the encouragement of
mechanical industries were formed, the investment of capital was sought,
and indeed a few mills were built on Southern soil. The results were
meager. The natural resources, coal and water power, were abundant; but
the enterprise for direction and the skilled labor were wanting. The
stream of European immigration flowed North and West, not South. The
Irish or German laborer, even if he finally made his home in a city, had
before him, while in the North, the alternative of a homestead on
Western land. To him slavery was a strange, if not a repelling,
institution. He did not take to it kindly nor care to fix his home where
it flourished. While slavery lasted, the economy of the South was
inevitably agricultural. While agriculture predominated, leadership with
equal necessity fell to the planting interest. While the planting
interest ruled, political opposition to Northern economy was destined to
grow in strength.
The Southern Theory of Sectionalism
In the opinion of the statesmen
who frankly represented the planting interest, the industrial system was
its deadly enemy. Their entire philosophy of American politics was
summed up in a single paragraph by McDuffie, a spokesman for South
Carolina: "Owing to the federative character of our government, the
great geographical extent of our territory, and the diversity of the
pursuits of our citizens in different parts of the union, it has so
happened that two great interests have sprung up, standing directly
opposed to each other. One of these consists of those manufactures which
the Northern and Middle states are capable of producing but which, owing
to the high price of labor and the high profits of capital in those
states, cannot hold competition with foreign manufactures without the
aid of bounties, directly or indirectly given, either by the general
government or by the state governments. The other of these interests
consists of the great agricultural staples of the Southern states which
can find a market only in foreign countries and which can be
advantageously sold only in exchange for foreign manufactures which come
in competition with those of the Northern and Middle states.... These
interests then stand diametrically and irreconcilably opposed to each
other. The interest, the pecuniary interest of the Northern
manufacturer, is directly promoted by every increase of the taxes
imposed upon Southern commerce; and it is unnecessary to add that the
interest of the Southern planter is promoted by every diminution of
taxes imposed upon the productions of their industry. If, under these
circumstances, the manufacturers were clothed with the power of imposing
taxes, at their pleasure, upon the foreign imports of the planter, no
doubt would exist in the mind of any man that it would have all the
characteristics of an absolute and unqualified despotism." The economic
soundness of this reasoning, a subject of interesting speculation for
the economist, is of little concern to the historian. The historical
point is that this opinion was widely held in the South and with the
progress of time became the prevailing doctrine of the planting
statesmen.
Their antagonism was deepened because they also became convinced, on
what grounds it is not necessary to inquire, that the leaders of the
industrial interest thus opposed to planting formed a consolidated
"aristocracy of wealth," bent upon the pursuit and attainment of
political power at Washington. "By the aid of various associated
interests," continued McDuffie, "the manufacturing capitalists have
obtained a complete and permanent control over the legislation of
Congress on this subject [the tariff].... Men confederated together upon
selfish and interested principles, whether in pursuit of the offices or
the bounties of the government, are ever more active and vigilant than
the great majority who act from disinterested and patriotic impulses.
Have we not witnessed it on this floor, sir? Who ever knew the tariff
men to divide on any question affecting their confederated interests?...
The watchword is, stick together, right or wrong upon every question
affecting the common cause. Such, sir, is the concert and vigilance and
such the combinations by which the manufacturing party, acting upon the
interests of some and the prejudices of others, have obtained a decided
and permanent control over public opinion in all the tariff states."
Thus, as the Southern statesman would have it, the North, in matters
affecting national policies, was ruled by a "confederated interest"
which menaced the planting interest. As the former grew in magnitude and
attached to itself the free farmers of the West through channels of
trade and credit, it followed as night the day that in time the planters
would be overshadowed and at length overborne in the struggle of giants.
Whether the theory was sound or not, Southern statesmen believed it and
acted upon it.