Though all branches of 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."[1] 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.[2] 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.[3] 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.
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