Beginning of Cotton Industry

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.

Continuing Enormous Growth of Cotton in America,
Today we begin the second part of the series with our selection from The Cotton Plant (a Dept. of Agriculture Bulletin, Volume 33) by Robert B. Handy published in 1896. The selection is presented in 5 easy 5 minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Enormous Growth of Cotton in America.

When cotton manufacture was introduced into England is not definitely settled. There is no mention of the manufacture or use of cotton in the celebrated poor-law of Elizabeth (1601), though hemp, flax, and wool are expressly named. The first authentic record is in Roberts’ Treasure of Traffic, published in 1641; but it is possible, and even probable, that the art was imported from Flanders by the artisans who fled from that country to England in the latter part of the sixteenth century, as it is probable that the manufacture had established itself more or less firmly before it attracted the attention of the author of the above-named pamphlet. We may presume, then, that it was well established in England by 1641, but after that date the spread was not rapid. The crudeness of the machinery for spinning was such that fine yarn could not be made. Both spinning and weaving were done by individuals and families in their own houses on clumsy and heavy machines. These implements were but little better than those in use two thousand years before. The distaff, the earliest of spinning-machines, was still in use, and the best to be had was the one-thread spinning-wheel. The loom used was scarcely an improvement on that which the East Indian had used centuries before, though it was constructed with greater firmness and compactness. Owing to imperfections in their machines, it was impossible for the Europeans to make cotton yarn combining strength and firmness. The yarn when spun was loose and flimsy; to make it strong it had to be heavy.

The finished web had often to be carried a long distance to market. It was only in 1760 that Manchester merchants began to furnish the weavers in the neighboring villages with linen yarn and raw cotton and to pay a fixed price for the perfected web, thus relieving the weavers of the necessity of providing themselves with material and seeking a market for their cloth, and enabling them to prosecute their employment with greater regularity.

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.”

Charles W. Dabney begins here.  Denison Olmsted begins here.

More information here and here, and below.

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