These pages represent a partial exploitation of materials gathered with a view to their ultimate use in more extended form. Many phases of the problem have been left entirely untreated, but the research upon these subjects has not been without indirect service in the present study. In the case of two chapters written midway of the investigation, in revision care has been taken to bring them into consonance with the indications which developed from subsequent discoveries. It is hoped, therefore,

THE BACKGROUND This opening chapter undertakes a broad survey in brief compass of the historical and economic background out of which the cotton manufacturing industry of the South, as a distinct development, emerged. Thus to begin the story of the rise of the mills with discussion of a period which commences a century in advance, is not unlike the production of a play hopeful in conception, robust in theme and rapid in action, but in which the curtain first rises on a stage which remains empty

THE BACKGROUND (Continued) So far from proclaiming cotton as king, there is evidence that some of the wisest Southerners saw that it was in many respects a curse. Said William Gregg in 1845: "Since the discovery that cotton would mature in South Carolina, she has reaped a golden harvest; but it is feared it has proved a curse rather than a blessing, and I believe that she would at this day be in a far better condition, had the discovery never been made. Cotton has been to South Carolina what the

CONDITIONS PRECEDENT TO THE ERECTION OF THE MILLS To understand the establishment of cotton mills in the South, it is necessary to grasp the deeper impulses which actuated every policy certainly from the year 1880 onward, continuing in only modified degree to the present. Every phase of the movement for the building of cotton mills was conditioned by motives at once tender and heroic, universal in their applicability and too intimate in appeal to admit of more than passing argument. In a study o

CAPITAL In the chapter on the conditions precedent to the erection of cotton mills in the South the attempt was made to show how the stage was set for the actual building of factories. The impulse for manufactures, and especially cotton mills was traced through its several more or less definite periods of development. The first of these was the recoil from the Hancock-Garfield election; the failure of the South's determined hopes for the success of the Democratic candidate, which would mean, it

FINANCING THE MILLS The preceding chapter dealt with the capital of the Southern cotton mills in the period of their establishment. It was first noticed that local capital was naturally drawn upon before any other, and the character of the appeals to local resources and the response to these appeals were brought out. The second division of the report dealt with the attitude of the Southern mill promoters toward outside, usually Northern capital, the nature of the appeals made to Northern capital

FINANCING THE MILLS (Continued) An eminently successful mill president in Augusta was full of pessimism toward all the problems broached to him, but three characteristic sentences as to the capacity of Southern cotton manufacturers for financial administration fit the case of too many mill officials, undoubtedly: "The people of the South have got no business sense; I am a Southern man, and I say that. Back yonder before the war what money they had was in land and niggers. They knew nothing about

Broadus Mitchell was born at Georgetown, Kentucky, December 27, 1892; he attended a primary school in Richmond, Virginia, and then, for four years until 1908, Richmond Academy; for one session, 1908-1909, attended the Hope Street High School, Providence, Rhode Island; in 1909 entered the University of South Carolina; in the summer of 1911 was a member of the reportorial staff of The Daily Record, Columbia, South Carolina; graduated from the University of South Carolina with A.B. degree in 1913;