On January 27, 1938, in Marion, South Carolina, Josephine Bristow, a seventy-three-year-old Black woman, spoke with Works Progress Administration (WPA) field interviewer Annie Ruth Davis about her life as an ex-slave. Davis, thankfully, was employed to write down Bristow’s story.
I don’ know how long dey had to work, mam, but I hear dem say dat dey worked hard, cold or hot, rain or shine. Had to hoe cotton en’ pick cotton en’ all such as dat. I don’ know, mam, but de white folks, I guess dey took it dat dey had plenty colored people en’ dey Lord never meant for dem to do no work. You know, white folks in dem days, dey made de colored people do. De people used to spin en’ weave, my Lord! Like today, it cloudy en’ rainy, dey couldn’ work in de field en’ would have to spin dat day. Man, you would hear dat thing windin en’ I remember, I would stand dere en’ want to spin so bad, I never know what to do. Won’ long fore I got to where I could use de shuttle en’ weave, too. I had a grandmother en’ when she would get to dat wheel, she sho know what she been doin. White folks used to give de colored people task to spin en’ I mean she could do dat spinnin. Yes’um, I here to tell you, dey would make de prettiest cloth in dat day en’ time. Old time people used to have a kind of dye dey called indigo en’ dey would color de cloth just as pretty as you ever did see.1
Josephine Bristow, both in what she said and what she didn’t, depicted not only a post–Civil War south, but a post–Revolutionary War America, where the fault lines of wealth and power were shifting. By the time of the Constitutional Convention, in 1787, it was possible to speak of the “upper south” and the “deep south,” of “old money” and “new money.” Tobacco once reigned supreme in Virginia and the upper south. But by 1800, tobacco had been dethroned in the deep south, replaced by the cry of, “Cotton is King.” The upper south, indeed, the northern part of the nation, migrated away from labor-intensive agriculture. The indigo-dyed cloth, “just as pretty as you ever did see,” was primarily not for slave garments but for the profit of northern textile industries.
America is a country that prides itself on not looking to the past, instead always toward the future. With the exception of the mixed-race children of Thomas Jefferson, we hear little of the descendants of the “great planters” and Founders, though what wealth of theirs that remained was passed along, so even today we refer to it as old money. In Virginia, describing someone belonging to the FFV (First Families of Virginia) still lends them an aura of American aristocracy, even if that aristocracy no longer exists. For, once the country had severed its ties with Great Britain, there was new money to be made and “new power” to be had.
Many things once done exclusively in England now could be done at home. Though tobacco was waning, merchants were still needed for the international trade in southern products, such as cotton. New England answered that call. British shipping no longer exclusively transported colonial goods, so an American shipping industry needed to fill the void. New England stepped forward, again. And merchants and planters (now of cotton more so than tobacco) still needed credit to buy and sell land and slaves. Banking centers like New York City emerged to meet that need. There was also the rise of a “governing class” in America, no longer reliant on the politics of a British monarchy but the politics at home. Atop all of this, an Industrial Revolution was underway, bringing profound changes in the way raw materials were turned into finished goods.
Despite so much changing by the turn of the nineteenth century, one thing remained constant. Beneath these new American institutions of power and wealth, in fact fueling their rise, was the enduring presence of Black lives and Black labor, primarily slave labor.
* * *
A young man with an Ivy League education is destined to become a lawyer, when his life takes an unexpected turn. He finds himself in a basement, at work on a new technology, from which he emerges with a device in hand that revolutionizes the world. It’s a story with a familiar ring.
From Apple to Microsoft to Google to Facebook, we know these young men and women who disrupt the world with a revolutionary new technology. Only this young man we’re speaking of here was born in Massachusetts in 1765. He attended Yale University. He toiled in the basement of a Georgia plantation owned by Continental Army major general Nathanael Greene. He disrupted the world of southern agriculture and slavery. The year was 1793. The device he emerged with was the cotton gin. His name was Eli Whitney.
Prior to the gin (short for engine) cotton was easily as labor intensive as tobacco. Two different species of the plant occur naturally: long staple and short staple. Staple, or fiber length, is what gives cotton its texture and feel. The longer the staple, the silkier the feel. Egyptian and pima cotton, for example, are extra-long varieties of the long-staple-cotton species. But 95 percent of cotton produced in the United States is a short-staple variety known as upland cotton. It’s strong but soft, requires low maintenance, and is used in everything from jeans to flannel clothing. The name upland refers to an area inland from the coast and closer to the Piedmont Mountains in the west of Georgia and South Carolina—the upland—where this cotton was grown.
Not all cotton is white. Cotton bolls, those fluffy clumps from the plant, also appear in naturally occurring hues such as green or brown or yellow. In the nineteenth-century deep south, slaves were allowed to grow only a bit of this harder-to-deal-with “colored cotton” for making their own clothes and goods. Plantation owners prevented them from growing the upland, white cotton, afraid they might sell it.
One can just imagine Josephine Bristow sitting on her rickety porch in Marion, South Carolina, while in front of her a White woman, pencil in hand, asks questions and writes on a lined pad. Josephine leans back in her chair and presses her lips together, back and forth, as though chewing on invisible memories. A low “ummmmm” is heard in response to a question about whether she remembers picking cotton. Tired eyes look out beyond the White woman, past the porch; look back in time fifty or sixty years. Compressing all those “can see to can’t see” days laboring in the fields—sights of Black and brown bodies bending to caress fluffy bolls; the arthritic pain her fingers still harbored; the horrific sounds of leather tendrils teasing strips of skin off bloodied backs—Josephine, the memories flooding faster than her words, says softly, quietly, “Yes’um . . . Had to hoe cotton en’ pick cotton en’ all such as dat.” Rocking in her chair, another “ummmmm” punctuates her reply.
The White woman does not know how to render the silence, or the well of pain and pride and wisdom hidden in this ex-slave’s words, so she writes down simply, “En’ all such as dat,” trying, at least, to faithfully render the vernacular she hears.
What’s there, beyond the threads of “en’ all such as dat,” spun tight like cotton yarn, are recollections of endless years of Black lives withering, so row after row of green plants, and their fluffy debris, could grow. “En’ all such as dat” began sometime in late winter as the hard ground softened to admit penetration by a harrow and a plow. Each day the dreaded “Horn of Pain”2 sounded, calling slaves from their slumber before first light. Black men and women cleared the detritus of last year’s crop—cutting stalks by hand or plowing them under. Then, from behind a horse, harnessed to a harrow, the soil was worked, and worked, and worked again, into a fine loam. A horse or a mule pulled a man and a plow along the land; sometimes it was just a person with a shovel, digging deeper furrows, which were then fertilized with manure. After the danger of frost had passed, green seeds were carefully sprinkled into the trenches, like petals thrown before a bride, then covered over with dirt.
With rain and luck, and a successful wedding night, six weeks later the earth gave birth to thousands of small green shoots. Plants were thinned by hand and hoe, so a hoe would fit easily between them and now “En’ all such as dat” meant, in Josephine’s words, “hoe cotton” or “chopping time.” Using tools that resembled weapons at the end of long wooden handles, weeds such as pigweed were cut at the root and delivered as fodder to the hogs. Then, over and over again, Black men and women and children moved through fields with hoes chopping away at the earth to remove smaller weeds, then back again, chopping again, to keep them at bay. There’s a point at which the chopping stops and the field is declared “laid by.”
By mid June, Josephine, her family, and others around her were witness to the foot-high plants producing a tiny pinkish “fruit” known as a “square,” which opened into a white flower. Pollinated by wind or insects, the day after pollination the white flower turned pink, then red, then brown as it began to die. From the death of the flower, a green pod or boll formed on the plant. By now, Josephine would have seen daylight fading earlier and earlier each day, as the bolls popped open to reveal their fluffy white treasures.
Finally came the time for Josephine and the others to harvest or “pick cotton,” which meant gathering the fluffy white fibers laboriously by hand. With different fields planted and ripening at different times, picking cotton extended well into the fall. Even then, Josephine’s work was not over. For it came time to separate the cotton fibers from the cotton seed.
Josephine may have heard talk of “cotton-rollers,” slaves whose main job it was to tease out fibers from long-staple cotton, grown on Georgia and South Carolina Sea Islands by the Gullah people, African slaves brought there to work on cotton plantations. They used a tool called a cotton roller, originally created in India. Long-staple cotton sold at a premium price because there was so much less of it, and because it produced a finer, silkier feel.
Josephine, like most ex-slaves, had heard stories of distant ancestors cleaning cotton by hand. The upland cotton that grew on the plantation enslaving her was full of sticky seeds, making it a far more difficult variety to winnow. It took one man, most often a slave, nearly a full day to clean a single pound of cotton lint by hand.
Enter Eli Whitney in 1793 and his new machine that separated cotton lint from seed.
At this point, the question I’d put to Josephine would have been: “Mother, did you ever hear that the cotton gin was meant to reduce slavery?” I can imagine what she’d say.
“Chile, hush yo’ mouth! Reduce us numbers! Ain’t never heard dem Old time peoples talk ’bout such mess. Why, I was dere. I seen ’em. Colored folks en’ White folks all linin’ up at the ginnies wid dey cotton. Money in dey pocket fo’ White man. ’Nuther day’s hard work for de colored folk ’cause dey ain’t seein’ none a de White man’s money any time soon. Chile, I was dere. And I ain’t seen no’ heard nothing ’bout a ginny bringin’ us numbers down. Wish dey woulda’. Lord, Lord, don’ I wish dey woulda’. Near as I can figger it, ginny ain’t done nothin’ but bringin’ us numbers up. Mo’ colored folks under Massa’s whip. Mo’ colored folk in his fields. Mo’ colored folk hoein’ cotton en’ pickin’ cotton en’ all such as dat.”
Josephine would have been right. Despite all of the modern-day writers who claim, without attribution, that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin believing it would reduce slavery, nothing in his letters suggests that’s the case.
In a September 11, 1793, letter to his father, explaining the basic functioning of the cotton gin, and what he’d done with himself after graduating from Yale, Whitney says, “This machine may be turned by water or with a horse, with the greatest ease, and one man and a horse will do more than fifty men with the old machines. It makes the labor fifty times less, without throwing any class of People out of business.”3
In search of a patent for his device, in a November 24 letter of the same year, Whitney wrote to then secretary of state Thomas Jefferson, “It is the stated task of one negro to clean fifty Wt. (I mean fifty pounds after it is separated from the seed) of the green-seed cotton Per Day.”4
Mostly, Whitney’s correspondence shows his obsession with establishing a New England factory to make the machines that he and his business partner and former Yale colleague, Phineas Miller, would ship to the deep south, and his concern at the outpouring of money in fending off others who claimed to have invented the cotton gin before him.5
Whitney was in it for the money, not for social justice.
But, for a final moment, let us return to our dear sister Josephine talking to Annie Ruth Davis on that porch in Marion, South Carolina. “En’ all such as dat” concludes with the presentation of cotton to the intake tubes of a gin mill, which sucked it into the gin, then spit it out as bales of cotton, each weighing about five hundred pounds. Sometimes the bales were loaded onto ships or trains for transport to New England textile mills, or overseas to mills in Britain.
At other times, slave women like Josephine’s grandmother worked at “jennys,” whose wheels you can almost hear spinning in her granddaughter’s words. Josephine’s grandmother probably first spun cotton yarn from a portion of ginned cotton, then wove yard after yard of cloth sitting at a “spinning jenny,” pushing the shuttle back and forth. Josephine reminds us that “Old time people used to have a kind of dye dey called indigo en’ dey would color de cloth just as pretty as you ever did see.” The “Old time people” grew indigo on the same plantation as cotton for this purpose. The blue in blue jeans comes from the indigo first used by the “Old time people” to dye the denim cloth they wove.
If Josephine’s “Marster” followed Affleck’s Southern Rural Almanac, and Plantation and Garden Calendar, as many did, they would read the following under January’s “The Cotton Plantation” section: “And the negroes, being refreshed by their holidays, and ready to enter with new spirit upon another year’s labor, will press on briskly with the preparations for a new crop.”6
Another cotton cycle began for enslaved Black men and women and children. “Dey worked hard, cold or hot, rain or shine”; Josephine doubtlessly emphasized hard from the depths of the pain and suffering and sorrow she knew, drawing the word out in ways the White woman could never imagine how to record. “Had to hoe cotton en’ pick cotton en’ all such as dat.”
Whitney’s portrayal as an anti-slavery champion may have come from those who thought his gin would be the “kill shot” for slavery. Hand cultivation of cotton, as the “Old time people” did, was time-consuming and unprofitable. The upkeep of slaves nearly equal the profit from hand-processed cotton. But the cotton gin turned that equation upside down.
Josephine and “dem people” must have experienced the gin’s impact. With it, Whitney introduced yet another variable into the process of how Black labor creates White power and wealth—technology—and from 1793 onward, technology became a permanent fixture of the equation. With the cotton gin, Josephine’s “Marster” and many other White planters recognized the tremendous wealth awaiting them. But that wealth was predicated upon filling the belly of the hungry new mechanized beast. And filling the beast’s belly meant two things—acquiring more land and more slaves.
Even if they’d known, what could “dem people” have done? In many respects, the process resembled what had happened nearly two hundred years earlier with tobacco, only now with the force and the urgency of a new sovereign nation. Native Americans held the land that White men needed. So, in the first half of the nineteenth century, several treaties signed between the United States and Indian nations east of the Mississippi established Indian reservations west of the Mississippi, and forced Native Americans to migrate there. That, in turn, freed up land east of the Mississippi for White men and their cotton.
As far as slave labor, if the “Old time people” came to South Carolina before 1808, there’s a chance they came directly from Africa, through the Middle Passage, to a slave market in Charleston, where they were bought by Josephine’s “Marster” or some other plantation owner. After 1808, America banned the international slave trade but American ships still made runs to the West African coast for human cargo. Though a domestic market in breeding and selling human beings had begun to thrive, essentially Black men and women were treated not as human beings but as cattle, in a domestic slave trade some called the “Second Middle Passage.”
“Mother,” I want to ask Josephine. “Do you know what happened to that pretty dark blue cloth your grandmother wove, or the bales of white cotton your father wrestled into the back of a wagon?”
Would a crooked-tooth smile and a deep laugh signal the absurdity of my question?
“Chile, dat cotton’s gon’. Sure as spring leaves wintuh, dat cotton’s gon’. Afta’ dem bales come out de gin mill dey piled high in a wagon. Den Massa or some White man call for a colored man come sit by ’em on da wagon. En’ dey’s off to Charleston. May be two deys, may be even mo’ fo’ I see ’em again. Heard tell of big ships takin’ hundreds of dem cotton bales. All just like ours. Den pushin’ off, letting dere sails drop, and slipping out to sea. Yes’um. Heard dat’s a pretty sight. Ain’t never seen de ocean best as I can ’member. But heard dem peoples up north like our cotton for dey bi’ness. En’ dem peoples way ’cross the ocean in England likes it fo’ dey bi’ness, too.”
* * *
Resource rode her heavy lines at Gadsden’s Wharf as Robert Mackay paced the docks. East, beyond Fort Moultrie, a red-orange sun slithered up from an Atlantic horizon. Charleston’s wharfinger ordered vessels arranged by ports of origin and destination. Slave ships from Africa at the head of the wharf, closest to open water. Ships destined up the coast to New England next. Finally, ships calling at southern ports. Resource, tucked at the back of this line of ships, awaited a cargo from Montezuma, now in quarantine on Sullivan’s Island, just outside Charleston. After loading his cargo onto Resource, Mackay would ride her to Savannah, and unload the goods for his store.
He liked the dance animated before him. Waves tumbling into the harbor, slowed in passing the barrier islands, then touched each vessel in turn, causing the tall masts, dressed in off-white furled sails, to bow and curtsey to each other.
He did not like the stench. Yesterday’s horse manure, washed from the wharf into the ocean, lay trapped between ships’ hulls and the pier, raising a pungent aroma, even as horses were already busy dropping today’s. Dawn brought life to the wharf. Wagon wheels whined as negroes worked under watchful eyes, hauling sacks of rice from squat white waterfront warehouses in wagons up to waiting ships. Other negroes rolled hogsheads of tobacco to loading planks. Some drove wagons piled high with cotton, stacking the bales along the wharf’s edge.
Mackay had heard the Montezuma was due into port any day. And he’d also heard, with so many other vessels expected, her cargo and her sales would go fast. He needed to be here when she docked, or the best negroes would be sold first.
Mackay thought how much he loved the sea. He smiled. He also loved his wharf-side shop and his wife and daughter in Savannah. Then, he stiffened. Be that as it may, he left no opportunity unanswered to travel the southern coast, or to New England, or across the Atlantic to London, in search of the finest goods for sale by Meins & Mackay, Co. of Savannah, purveyors of “Woolens and other Fall Goods” from London and “Particular Madeira Wine” from Funchal, and, of course, slaves from the West African coast.
When last in England, he’d commiserated over a fine dinner with owners of the Lancashire textile mills. Prices for his cotton were low. Owners were concerned about the stability of a commodity based on slavery.
Mackay remembered picking up an embroidered napkin from the table, inspecting it closely, rubbing it between his fingers. “This napkin, I believe, comes from our fine cotton, gentlemen,” he said. “Georgia will go to war again, with anyone who should so ever try to harm our beloved institution of slavery. For without it, we would have no cotton. And without cotton, America would have no standing in the world.”
“But wasn’t slavery set to be outlawed in 1808?” the Lancashire merchants asked. “What then? Our mills will go hungry without the fluffy food. Our purses will go even hungrier.”
Mackay recalled laughing. “The international trade, dear friends, the international trade alone was banned. We raise and breed our slaves there, much as we do our cattle. Our domestic supply will only grow, and will last us well into the future. As our slavery goes, so goes our cotton. And so goes our nation.”
For the first time, Mackay heard the merchants talk about a grumbling they’d heard among their workers that some might not touch raw cotton picked by American slaves.
“Gentlemen.” He tapped his glass. “Gentlemen. Simply order them away from such thoughts.” The gentlemen stopped eating, looked up from their plates. “We treat our slaves as the mindless, simple children they are,” he remembered saying. “You should treat your workers the same.”
Wood rumbled over wood, calling Mackay back from his thoughts, as Black men rolled the wooden hogsheads down the docks. Mackay shook his head. Sidestepped a pile of horse manure and continued his pacing and pondering. He’d also dined with textile merchants in New England, and heard much the same as from their colleagues in Liverpool. With them he was not so polite.
Mackay remembered pounding his fist at dinner, startling the merchants. “My friends,” he said. “The success of Meins & Mackay, Co. has made me captain of the artillery, alderman, church warden, justice of the court, bank director, and I could go on. All in Savannah. I cannot imagine any privileged civic position to which I could not accede should I so desire. Are not each of you in similar positions within your towns and cities? Are not the bankers of Boston and the tontine your friends, as they are most certainly mine? Business, gentlemen, business is the key to all other success. My south will fight anyone denying you cotton or denying us slaves.”
A great commotion arose on the wharf, rousing Mackay again from his thoughts. He turned to see masts gliding in from the ocean. Montezuma had arrived. He walked with others swiftly toward the masts, toward the head of the wharf. There Mackay stopped to watch a waterborne ballet. Montezuma had been released from quarantine. In the middle of the fairway, her crew turned the ship within her length, dropped her lower sails while keeping her topsails set in opposite directions, effortlessly heaving-to, then waiting, leaning over the cap rails waving as though without a care, as the wind blew them slowly, steadily into a space just longer than their ship, between two other vessels on the wharf.
No sooner had Montezuma’s gangway been lowered, when merchants clambered around it, anxiously awaiting the ship’s cargo. But the master appeared first, with the vessel’s papers in hand, ready for the wharfinger. On the captain’s way down the gangway, Mackay called out, “Sir, Captain Anley.” Upon reaching the dock, the captain turned toward Mackay, who reached an outstretched hand through the mob. “Robert Mackay, sir, merchant from Georg—”
“Mr. Mackay,” the captain said, interrupting. He smiled, nodded. His legs buckled slightly beneath him as he stood but he returned the handshake nonetheless. Then, the captain made a sweeping gesture toward the ship. “Mr. Mackay, you’ll be pleased to know I have set aside, for your pleasure, a cargo of only the finest negroes obtained by me directly from Africa.”7
* * *
Between 1783 and 1808, when the transatlantic slave trade was officially banned, Gadsden’s Wharf in Charleston was the first stop in America for an estimated 100,000 West African slaves. Many were purchased by lowland rice planters. Upland cotton farmers bought others. And, for some, Gadsden’s Wharf was just a way station on a journey ending in slavery in the cotton and sugar plantations near New Orleans. What the “Old time people” sensed but could not have known was that in 1791, the US produced only two million pounds of cotton annually and the population of slaves was approximately 700,000. But by 1801, thanks to the Cotton Gin, cotton yield had jumped exponentially to 48.5 million pounds, and the number of slaves to over one million. South Carolina alone, that year, accounted for eight million pounds of cotton exported primarily to Liverpool textile miles. And by 1860, a country producing 1.6 billion pounds of cotton per year held over four million souls in perpetual bondage.8, 9, 10
Slavery grew cotton. Cotton grew slavery. And both grew White power and wealth.
James Henry Hammond married into the South Carolina planter class, through his wife, Catherine Elizabeth Fitzsimons, who delivered to him twenty-two square miles of land, multiple plantations, and more than three hundred slaves. An early member of the pro-states’ rights, pro-slavery, anti-federal-government Nullifier Party, Hammond possessed wealth, like that of merchant Robert Mackay, which fueled his rise through the ranks of South Carolina’s political class. He bounced between Washington and Columbia, first as a member of the House, then as governor, and finally as a US senator.11
Scandal did not halt Hammond’s rise. The politician Thomas Jefferson Withers, in two sexually explicit letters, described his 1826 homosexual affair with Hammond. Hammond, himself, in diaries he called “secret and sacred,” and not published until 125 years after his death, unabashedly described his “familiarities and dalliances” with four nieces. As was the prerogative of White slave owners, like Thomas Jefferson, Hammond repeatedly raped two of his female slaves, one of them possibly his daughter, who bore a number of his mixed-race children. After the public airing of many of these brutal transgressions, Hammond’s wife left him, only to return once he went to Washington as a senator.12
As governor, Hammond declared, “I firmly believe that American slavery is not only not a sin, but especially commanded by God through Moses, and approved by Christ through his apostles . . . Slavery is the corner-stone of our republican edifice,” he said. “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson that ‘all men are born equal.’”13
As senator, in March 1858, Hammond confronted his colleague from New York, Senator William Seward, with these words,
Without firing a gun, without drawing a sword, should they make war on us we could bring the whole world to our feet . . . What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? I will not stop to depict what every one can imagine, but this is certain: England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South. No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.14
Hammond, through his hubris, coined the phrase “Cotton is king.” When the south seceded, and America descended into civil war, southern international diplomacy coalesced around this notion that the world could not survive without cotton, and hence without slavery. Using this “King Cotton Diplomacy,” the Confederacy attempted to coerce England and France into alliances by withholding cotton. But the effort failed and a Union blockade on cotton succeeded. This disruption in raw cotton shipped to England, however, helped to plunge the Lancashire textile industry into what has been called the “Cotton Famine.”
Still, British textile workers stood with Black American slaves, often against their industrial masters. Writing to Abraham Lincoln on New Year’s Eve in 1862, the day before the Emancipation Proclamation was to go into effect, Mayor Abel Heywood of Manchester, then within the ancient county boundaries of Lancashire, expressed the views of several thousand working-class men, who unanimously approved his correspondence. The long letter reads, in part,
As citizens of Manchester, assembled at the Free-trade Hall, we beg to express our fraternal sentiments towards you and your country . . . One thing alone has, in the past, lessened our sympathy with your country and our confidence in it—we mean the ascendancy of politicians who not merely maintained negro slavery, but desired to extend and root it more firmly. Since we have discerned, however, that the victory of the free North, in the war which has so sorely distressed us as well as afflicted you, will strike off the fetters of the slave, you have attracted our warm and earnest sympathy . . . 15
In places like Lancashire, merchants and manufacturers rose to become the bankers and financiers of the industrialization begun with cotton.16 A similar arrangement took place in New England, where the mercantile houses marketing a cotton mill’s output were also the source of a mill’s credit. Both in England and New England, merchants depended on mills. Without textiles to sell there was no profit to make. Many of the large mercantile firms on both sides of the Atlantic did international business in more than just textile goods. But they depended on cotton to support their other trade in sugar, rice, and tobacco.
Francis Cabot Lowell, Samuel Slater, Eli Whitney, all good New England men, the first Captains of Industry, were at the helm of the Industrial Revolution, as it docked in America. Amoskeag, Naumkeag, Wamsutta, a few of the New England textile mills they fostered, household names in the nineteenth century, known then worldwide for quality cotton apparel, known now only to the whispers of history as mill names these good New England men, and their many brethren, stole from Native Americans along with the riverine land their sprawling campuses occupied. Both mills and tribes ultimately succumbed to powerful forces beyond their control before being catapulted into bankruptcy or compelled into extinction.
For millennia, Amoskeag Falls was a sacred place for the Amoskeag, who’d returned there each year to fish. They stopped returning in 1848. One writer recalled a visit toward the end of one of these annual pilgrimages when a native couple were married at the falls. While the White man described it as “a picturesque contrast to the more modern business of the mill,”17 one can imagine the Native Americans, their fish and their sacred river now polluted by the mill’s effluent, feeling it a grotesque contrast and affront to the ancient spirituality of their tribe.
Before the mills went bankrupt in the twentieth century, though, they generated wealth and power; power, of course, both politically and literally, as they were most often located at the bottom of falls so rushing water could drive the turbines creating cotton fibers on jennys, forcing the fibers to fit onto thousands of spindles, drawing them through shuttles and looms. These “power mills,” as they were called, manufactured dresses and shirts and pants to wear, sheets to sleep on, napkins to dab at the corners of one’s mouth, and thousands of cotton products New England merchants hawked worldwide as “made in the USA.”
Before the mills’ bankruptcy, and with his last heave-to, a captain, finally at home from the sea and not looking for a big-city job transcribing ship manifests, might find a fledgling mill just the right kind of vessel. After all, he’d made money bringing slaves from Africa to Charleston, then cotton from Charleston to Boston and on to Manchester, New Hampshire; or from Charleston to Liverpool, then on to Manchester, England. He understood trade, so, of course, he understood the value of investing in a mill that took cotton and turned it into textiles for sale worldwide.
So, too, a merchant who’d traded in cotton, slaves, tobacco, rice, and indigo might also find investing in a mill appealing. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries this is where the money to put up the brick walls of a textile mill came from. This is how the waterwheels dammed once sacred rivers. This is how jennys and looms and their spindles got running. This is how small community banks were begun in New England mill towns. This is how wealth made in the slave trade, or the products of slavery, was laundered, transferred, and passed from one generation of White Americans to the next.
Mills occupied rivers for more than just power. From the factory warehouse, textiles were delivered to barges, pulled by ox teams along smaller rivers or man-made canals, to waiting scows. Scows moved product along larger waterways to ships at docks up and down the New England coast, in towns like New Bedford. Ships moved product directly overseas to merchants and consumers, or to even larger seaports like Boston or New York, from where the products were then moved internationally.
The owner’s search for money followed the flow of the textiles. When local funds were exhausted or insufficient for their needs, New England owners, most of them in the northern parts of the region, went downstream to Boston, or even farther to budding banks and a stock market in New York City. Robert Mackay knew this. When in New York City, he stayed at the Tontine Coffee House, an elegant, exclusive Wall Street establishment founded by a group of stockbrokers in 1793 as a place to meet over trade—trade in commodities such as sugar, cotton, and tobacco, but also in enslaved human beings.18
Sitting on her porch, with a child in her lap, Josephine Bristow could not know this: that her sore, aching fingers, hands, and back, and the labor of the “Old time people,” built towns like Manchester, New Hampshire, and Lowell, Massachusetts, and Biddeford, Maine; an entire New England textile industry and other essential and supportive industries like shipping and merchandizing; and a banking and financial services industry that greased the gears of this vast trading empire. She did not know that without the cotton which she and the “Old time people” picked, it’s questionable whether those towns would have come into existence, those mills would have been built, and those banking and financial institutions created. Josephine spoke for a generation of “Old time people” whose lives and labor built White power and wealth.