32. Plate 109, “Cotton. Product Per Square Mile of Total Area by Counties…,”
from Scribner’s Statistical Atlas of the United States
Fletcher Hewes and Henry Gannett, 1883
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Cotton grown and harvested in the southern United States was the primary source of cotton for New England textile mills in the 19th century. The origins of cotton cultivation began in coastal South Carolina during the colonial period. With the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, cotton cultivation spread rapidly across the piedmont regions of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi into Arkansas and Texas, and the heavy demand for cotton resulted in the expansion of slavery. Reflecting the need for fertile soils and a long growing season of 180 to 200 days, the geographic distribution of cotton that was established during the first half of the 19th century remained stable after the Civil War, as depicted on this statistical map based on 1880 census data.
During the Antebellum period, cotton was considered “king” of the southern economy, in part due to the demand of Northern industrialists and the textile industry. As the anti-slavery movement grew in Massachusetts in the 1840s and 1850s, the dependence of the New England textile mills on Southern cotton, and, by association, enslaved labor, grew increasingly controversial. To this end, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts observed in a speech that the textile industry was the result of an “unholy union…between the cotton planters and fleshmongers of Louisiana and Mississippi and the cotton spinners and traffickers of New England – between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.”
33. “A Cotton Plantation,” in Cornell’s First Steps in Geography
Sarah Sophia Cornell, 1858
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School geography textbook illustrations and early photographs provide imagery, whether stereotypical or posed, of life on mid-19th century cotton plantations. For example, Sarah Sophia Cornell, prominent author of geography texts in the 1850s and 1860s, included this illustration of a cotton plantation in an 1856 text. Her illustration shows enslaved men and women picking and hauling cotton, while a white overseer stands in their midst. In the background is the plantation owner’s large house overlooking a nearby river with a steamboat. This image is one of only two illustrations in the 24-pages of text devoted to the Southern States. With most of the accompanying text focusing on place names and locational geography, this solitary image suggests the cotton plantation was the predominant feature on the Southern landscape.
In the second example, the handwritten title on the bottom of the photograph denotes enslaved individuals sorting cotton on a South Carolina plantation. While it should provide rare documentation of mid-19th century plantation life, it appears that the photographer arranged the composition. It is one of a series of photographs taken by Henry P. Moore, a New Hampshire photographer who recorded the Civil War activities of the 3rd New Hampshire Regiment. Along with other Union troops, the New Hampshire soldiers occupied the South Carolina coastal islands following their victory at Port Royal on November 7, 1861. During this occupation, southern landowners abandoned their plantations, leaving the enslaved as contraband under the care of the northern troops. The photograph was taken at a Hilton Head plantation once owned by Thomas F. Drayton. It consisted of 700 acres where 52 enslaved persons were employed primarily in cotton production.
34. Hilton Head, Drayton’s Plantation, Sorting Cotton, 1862-1863 Albumen photograph (digital reproduction)
Henry P. Moore, 1863
Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Rare Books and Special Collections
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35. “Map of the Southern States Showing the Relative Proportion of Slaves in Different Localities”
from Harpers Weekly
[unknown author], 1863
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The first thematic maps published in the United States appeared during the Civil War, illustrating the distribution of enslaved peoples in the Confederacy. This visually striking example, published in Harper’s Weekly, plots the density of the enslaved black population in proportion to the free white population. Rather than showing a uniform distribution throughout the South, there were several major concentrations of enslaved laborers, particularly where commercial plantation agriculture was most profitable–tobacco in the coastal and piedmont regions of Virginia and Maryland; sugar in Louisiana along the lower Mississippi River; and cotton extending in a broad swath from coastal South Carolina, through the piedmont regions of Georgia, Alabama, and the Mississippi River Valley to coastal Texas. The lightest shading represents densities of less than three percent, while the areas with the darkest shading had densities of enslaved populations numbering fifty to sixty percent. A few counties along the South Carolina coast and the Mississippi River in Louisiana and Mississippi had densities of over ninety percent.
36. “Textile Mill Towns in the Southern States,”
from The Davison Textile Blue Book
Davison Publishing, 1930
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Following the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, large integrated textile mills began to relocate from New England to the Southern states. Previously, only a few small spinning mills were operating in the southern cotton growing regions. By 1930, the number of mills in both North and South Carolina (individually) outnumbered Massachusetts, the industry leader through the 19th century. Situated to take advantage of a milder climate, waterpower, availability of cotton, and cheaper white labor, these new mills were concentrated in the Piedmont and Appalachian regions of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, as depicted on this 1930 map.
37. Woodside Cotton Mills, Greenville, S. C., Color postcard (digital reproduction)
E.C. Kropp, undated
Courtesy of the Greenville County Library System, South Carolina Room Archives
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Greenville, South Carolina As the textile industry expanded in South Carolina, upstate cities such as Greenville, Spartanburg, and Rock Hill became textile manufacturing centers. By 1915, Greenville was known as the “Textile Center of the South,” hosting the Southern Textile Exposition until 2004. One of the landmarks of Greenville’s industrial landscape was the Woodside Cotton Mills, a four-story rectangular brick building constructed between 1902 to 1912. It was advertised as the “largest complete textile mill under one roof” in the United States. Today, it has been converted into loft-style apartments with a bistro pub restaurant.
38. Aiken Mills, Inc. “Aiken Plant” (Cotton), Bath, S.C. (#23016), surveyed August, 1930
Associated Mutual Insurance Co., 1930
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Textile Mill Plans for South Carolina One of the few fire insurance plans in the American Textile History Museum collection for South Carolina is the Aiken Mills in Bath (near Aiken, SC). Constructed in 1895, the mill remained in operation until 1985, with the main factory building destroyed in 1997. This site was the location of earlier industrial activity including a paper mill constructed around 1850. Its paper products reportedly were essential during the Civil War for printing Confederate currency and newspapers. The factory is situated on a Fall Line tributary of the Savannah River – Horse Creek which provided waterpower for several pre-Civil War textile mills located further upstream. In contrast to typical New England mills, this perspective view indicates the main mill building had a lower profile of three stories (as opposed to four or five). The second sheet maps a separate mill village, which provided free-standing houses consisting of two to four rooms. These houses were rented from the mill owners by worker families, who were generally white.
39. Aiken Mills, Inc. Tenements, Bath, S.C. (#23017), surveyed August, 1930
Associated Mutual Insurance Co., 1930
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