They Decided At Length Upon Banishing The Labor Of Blacks From Their Mills.

At Graniteville, in South Carolina, about ten miles from the Savannah river, a neat little manufacturing village has lately been built up, where the families of the _crackers_, as they are called, reclaimed from their idle lives in the woods, are settled, and white labor only is employed.

The enterprise is said to be in a most prosperous condition.

Only coarse cloths are made in these mills - strong, thick fabrics, suitable for negro shirting - and the demand for this kind of goods, I am told, is greater than the supply. Every yard made in this manufactory at Augusta, is taken off as soon as it leaves the loom. I fell in with a northern man in the course of the day, who told me that these mills had driven the northern manufacturer of coarse cottons out of the southern market.

"The buildings are erected here more cheaply," he continued, "there is far less expense in fuel, and the wages of the workpeople are less. At first the boys and girls of the cracker families were engaged for little more than their board; their wages are now better, but they are still low. I am about to go to the north, and I shall do my best to persuade some of my friends, who have been almost ruined by this southern competition, to come to Augusta and set up cotton mills."

There is water-power at Augusta sufficient to turn the machinery of many large establishments.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 308 of 396
Words from 83132 to 83389 of 107287