The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

It was also about that time that England began to export her cotton goods, for until then her weavers had not been able to do more than supply the home demand. This foreign trade at once increased the demand for cotton goods, and the increased demand presented a problem which the manufacturers at first found difficult of solution. The procuring of supplies of linen yarn needed for the warp of these textiles was not difficult, but where was the cotton yarn to come from? The spinners were producing already as much as their rude machines would permit, and additional spinners were not to be had. The demand for cotton thread exceeded the supply; the price of yarn rose with the demands of trade and the extension of the manufacture and operated as a check to the further increase of the exports. The trade had reached the point where hand carders, single-thread spinning-wheels, and the hand-loom, requiring a man to each machine, were clearly inadequate to the service, and the cotton trade of Great Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century seemed to have reached its limit. About this time Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, Cartwright, and Watt, men either directly or indirectly engaged in and familiar with the needs of the cotton manufacture, invented machines which raised the trade from an experimental or at least a struggling industry into the most important manufacture of the world. The carding-engine, the spinning-jenny, the spinning-frame, the stocking-frame, the power-loom, and the adaptation of the steam-engine to the propulsion of these machines, at once supplied the means of producing an immense amount of yarn and cloth. These inventions, it is true, were not in themselves perfect, but the principles on which they were built are those on which the most complicated textile machines of this day are based.

The supply of raw material to meet the demands of the trade was limited. The West Indies, the Levant, and India were the countries from which this supply was drawn, but they were unable to furnish enough raw cotton to keep the new machines in operation, and it was necessary to look elsewhere.

America was the only hope of the cotton manufacturer; but as at that time the United States produced little or no cotton, for a few years all the increased supply came from Brazil.

As Great Britain was the last of the European countries to take up cotton manufacture, and has carried it to its fullest development, so the United States was the last to enter the list of cotton-producing countries, and has been for nearly a hundred years the foremost of them all. The powerful influence that the production of cotton has had upon the commerce, industrial development, and civil institutions of the United States can scarcely be realized by one unfamiliar with the subject.

It is doubtful whether cotton is indigenous to any part of this country, as we have no authentic record of the precise time of its introduction. Cotton seed was brought in from all quarters of the globe, and the American plant, the result of innumerable crossings, remains, as to its origin, a puzzle to botanists.

The beginning of the culture of cotton in the United States occurred about one hundred seventy-five years before the industry became at all important. The first effort to produce cotton on the North American continent was probably made at Jamestown the year of the arrival of the colonists. In a pamphlet entitled Nova Britannica; Offering Most Excellent Fruits of Planting in Virginia, published in London in 1609, it is stated that cotton would grow as well in that province as in Italy. In another pamphlet, called A Declaration of the State of Virginia, published in London in 1620, the author mentions cotton, wool, and sugar-cane among the "naturall commodities dispersed up and downe the divers parts of the world; all of which may also be had in abundance in Virginia."

According to Bancroft, the first experiment in cotton culture in the colonies was made in Virginia during Wyatt's administration of the government. Writing of that period he says: "The first culture of cotton in the United States deserves commemoration. In this year (1621) the seeds were planted as an experiment, and their 'plentiful coming up' was at that early day a subject of interest in America and England."

Cotton-wool was listed in that year at eightpence a pound, which shows that it may have been grown earlier, for it is scarcely possible that it could have been grown, cleaned, and received in market in the same year. Seabrook states that the "green-seed," or upland, variety was certainly grown in Virginia to a limited extent at least one hundred thirty years before the Revolution. Some of the early governors of that colony were especially energetic in their efforts to encourage its cultivation. Among these were Sir William Berkeley; Francis Morrison, his deputy, and Sir Edmund Andros. The latter, says one authority, "gave particular marks of his favor toward the propagation of cotton, which since his time has been much neglected."

The exports of the Virginia colony during the first thirty years of its existence were confined almost exclusively to tobacco, but there is evidence that in the latter half of the seventeenth century cotton was cultivated and manufactured among the planters for domestic consumption. Burk states that "after the Restoration (1660) their attention was strongly attracted to home manufactures as well by the necessities of their position as by the encouragement of the assembly and the bounty offered by the King. But the zeal displayed in the outset for these products gradually cooled, and if we except the manufacture of coarse cloths and unpainted cotton, nothing remained of the sounding list prepared with so much labor by the King and recommended by legislation, premium, and royal bounty."