Sellected Du Bois Essays by W. E. B. Du Bois

Author:W. E. B. Du Bois [Bois, W. E. B. Du]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781598537031
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2021-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

Notes To

The Economic Revolution in the South

Note 1

"The history of slavery and the slave trade after 1820 must be read in the light of the industrial revolution through which the civilized world passed in the first half of the nineteenth century. Between the years 1775 and 1825 occurred economic events and changes of the highest importance and widest influence. Though all branches of the industry felt the impulse of this new industrial life, yet, if we consider single industries, cotton manufacture has, during the nineteenth century, made the most magnificent and gigantic advances."

This fact is easily explained by the remarkable series of inventions that revolutionized this industry between 1738 and 1830, including Arkwright's, Watt's, Compton's, and Cartwright's epoch making contrivances. The effect which these inventions had on the manufacture of cotton goods is best illustrated by the fact that in England, the chief cotton market of the world, the consumption of raw cotton rose steadily from 13,000 bales in 1781, to 572,000 in 1820, to 871,000 in 1830, and to 3,366,000 in 1860. Very early, therefore, came the query whence the supply of raw cotton was to come. Tentative experiments on the rich, broad fields of the Southern United States, together with the indispensable invention of Whitney's cotton gin, soon answered this question. A new economic future was opened up to this land, and immediately the whole South began to extend its cotton culture, and more and more to throw its whole energy into this one staple.

Here it was that the fatal mistake of compromising with slavery in the beginning, and of the policy of laissez-faire pursued thereafter, became painfully manifest; for, instead now of a healthy, normal, economic development along proper industrial lines, we have the abnormal and fatal rise of a slave-labor, large-farming system, which, before it was realized, had so intertwined itself with and braced itself upon the economic forces of an industrial age, that a vast and terrible civil war was necessary to displace it. The tendencies to a patriarchal serfdom, recognized in the age of Washington and Jefferson, began slowly but surely to disappear; and in the second quarter of the century Southern slavery was irresistibly changing from a family institution to an industrial system.

DuBois, "Suppression of the Slave Trade," p. 151.

A list of the chief inventions most graphically illustrates the above:—

1738, John Jay, fly shuttle.

John Wyatt, spinning by rollers.

1748, Lewis Paul, carding machine.

1760, Robert Kay, drop box.

1769, Richard Arkwright, water-frame and throstle.

James Watt, steam-engine.

1772, James Lees, improvements on carding-machine.

1775, Richard Arkwright, series of combinations.

1779, Samuel Compton, mule.

1785, Edmund Cartwright, power-loom.

1803-4, Radcliffe and Johnson, dressing-machine.

1817, Roberts, fly-frame.

1818, William Eaton, self-acting frame.

1825-30, Roberts, improvements on mule.

Cf. Baines, "History of the Cotton Manufactures," pp. 116-23; "Encyclopædia Britannica," 9th ed., article "Cotton."

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