THE

MERCHANTS' MAGAZINE

AND

COMMERCIAL REVIEW.

DECEMBER, 1861.

COTTON AND ITS CULTURE.

IMPORTANCE Of a Machine and a process to Cottonize FLAX INTO FIBRILIA, in aid of the DeMAND FOR COTTON, BY A YEARLY INCREASE OF 6,000,000 of Spindles, requiring 800,000 Bales OF COTTON, AND, IN TEN YEARS, a supply of 13,500,000 BALES TO CLOTHE THE WORLD.-THE CHANGE OF COMMERCE EFFECTted in the Linen Trade, on tHE DISCOVERY OF WHITNEY'S GIN, 1795, AND THE PECULIAR STAPLE OF AMERICAN COTTON TO MAKE MACHINE GOODS.- PHYSICAL CAUSES OF THE SEA AND TRADE-WINDS GIVING EXTRA HEAT AND MOISTURE OUTSIDE OF THE TROPIC OF CANCER.-THE TRUE CAUSE OF OUR UNIQUE CLASS OF COTTON.-A TABLE FROM BLODGET'S CLIMATOLOGY OF HEAT AND MOISTURE IN THE COTTON STATES.

WE commend the editors of the MERCHANTS' MAGAZINE and the Chamber of Commerce of New-York for discussing, and for your endeavors to cottonize, flax, by discovering a machine and a cheap process for this important object. It is a great necessity for genius to accomplish, and worth a premium from the government of $100,000, and even a larger sum.

WHITNEY, by his invention of the cotton gin, 1795, enabled one laborer to do the work of 350 in a day. Judge JOHNSON, in his charge in a suit brought in Savannah, 1807, to make good his patent, says: "The whole of the interior was languishing, and its inhabitants were emigrating for want of some object to engage their attention and employ their industry, when the invention of this machine at once opened views to them which set the whole country in active motion. From childhood to age it has presented us a lucrative employment. Individuals who were depressed with poverty and sunk in idleness, have suddenly risen to wealth and respectability. Our debts have been paid off, our capitals have increased and our lands trebled in value. We cannot express the weight of obliga

tion which the country owes to this invention. The extent of it cannot now be seen."

This invention, with the adaptation of the climate of the Southern States, with heat and moisture outside of the Tropic of Cancer to raise our peculiar Upland cotton, warp and weft being combined in the same sample grown from perennial, acclimatized seed, procured by us from Egypt, Mexico and Nanking, China, and made an annual plant by quick growth, in what may be called a natural hot-bed, extending from Cape Hatteras to East Texas, has done wonders for commerce, to clothe and Christianize the world, and to pay balances of productive industry.

We have still a great field, to introduce cheap covering to the savages of Africa, Asia and the Polynesian Islands, by cottonizing flax and increasing the growth of cotton over the world. Let us all work together for this object, and "be thankful for the good the gods give us," to use the language of the Latins. Let us continue to produce our unique cottons, not grown in such perfection in any parts of the tropics from the want of rains during the summer months-a class of cotton so indispensable to Europe, with its peculiar staple, easily manufactured into machine goods, and thus continue to lay Europe under contribution to us, in an exchange of productive industry for theirs, with the balance in our favor.

It is within the memory of the writer, who entered an East India counting-house in Philadelphia, 1804, that at that period our intercourse was brisk with Ireland. Cargoes on cargoes of flax-seed were shipped to that country to supply the deficit in seed, caused by their pulling up flax in its unripe state, to manufacture into fine linens of the higher numbers, and also in the lower numbers from the mature flax, both classes being used in those days by the rich and the poor. There were few so poor to use, for shirting, the cotton cloths, the guwahs, the baftas, the mamordies, &c., we then imported from India through the port of Calcutta, where we yearly sent a ship and the hard Spanish dollars to buy them; with three or four other ships from Philadelphia for mixed cargoes, principally of sugar, indigo, rice, saltpetre, and a small assortment of muslins. At this period, not to exceed two ships sailed from New-York, and three or four to Canton, and not one from Baltimore. Salem took the lead of Boston and New-York, in the East India trade. The cotton cloths of India were spun and woven by hand, and of a much inferior quality to our machine-made cotton cloths and prints of the present day, yet we sold them for double and treble prices. We also received at that time fine jaconets, mullmulls, dacca, shear and fine book-muslins, produced by the hand labor of the natives, with their patient industry expended on fine short, woolly staple cotton, but costing very high prices. Yellow nankeens from the Nanking cotton of China, a strong article, were imported in large quantities.

During the war of the Revolution the daughters of our farmers and wealthy citizens learned to spin, and many to weave. It was a matter of pride and necessity to be independent on their marriage, and to take their husbands their linens, sheeting, towelling, napkins, &c., as their trousseau. We well recollect in those days custom made it necessary that our females, except of the poorer class, (and they were employed to spin with foot-power on the small wheel,) had to spin and weave their marriage outfit, their dower or trousseau.

After commerce re-opened with Ireland, we had very extensive stores of

linen in all our sea-board cities, established mainly by persons with large capitals, who sold linen alone, and at such low prices, comparatively, that they soon broke down our domestic manufactures of flax. We can also recollect when the linen trade, in part participated in by Germany, was a great branch of our commerce; when German redemptionists, male and female, came to Philadelphia in considerable numbers, and indentured themselves for a term of years to pay their passage money, on the decline of the linen trade. They made a very useful and industrious class of inhabitants in Pennsylvania and New-Jersey, and we are now profiting by them and the Celt.

History is silent as to the name of the person who first introduced the exotic cotton plant into America. We find, in 1736, it was introduced into Talbot county, on the Eastern shore of Maryland, "as a pretty plant, bearing a beautiful flower;" and although it may have been raised in squares and patches in neighboring provinces, no particular attention was bestowed upon it as a profitable crop. At the close of the Revolution great financial distress prevailed. At a meeting of the celebrated convention of 1786, the subject of cotton came up. The late President MADISON, who had given much attention to the subject of the cotton culture, expressed it as his decided opinion, that, from the results of the garden culture in Talbot county, and numerous other similar proofs furnished South, there was no reason to doubt "that the United States would one day become a great cotton country.”

In the year 1764, W. RATHBONE, an American merchant in Liverpool, received a consignment of eight bales of cotton from Charleston. This cotton, on its arrival in Liverpool, was seized by the custom-house officers as not the growth of the country from which it purported to be shipped; being, as they said, outside of the Tropic of Cancer, it could not be grown there. The small supplies of cotton previously received and manufactured in England by hand, as in India, were imported from Calcutta and the West Indies. It was of a short, woolly staple, spun in private families; and manufactured, at that time, into velvets, velvetines, corduroys, fustians and satinets. It would not make strong yarns.

The importation of our strong, long, silky staple cotton before the close of the last century, when it had reached 35,000 bales, cleaned by WHITNEY'S gin, superseded, in great measure, the India cottons, particularly when BOLTON & WATT perfected their steam engines to turn machinery, and HARGREAVES, ARKWRIGHT & CROMPTON invented the spinning jenny and the spinning mule. The effect of these inventions was, that whereas, previously, one man could clean one pound of cotton in a day, another card it, and another work one spindle, one man might (in 1800) clean 350 pounds, another card it, and the third work 2,200 spindles instead of one, thus making "machine cotton goods." These goods, in a very short period, superseded the Irish and German linens, except a small supply for shirt bosoms, that the proud need not appear to wear cotton shirtings, a mark of poverty in olden times, and since continued.

The success of Manchester in manufacturing cotton yarns and cloths of fine and uniform quality, at very low prices, (a pound of cotton, costing ten to twelve cents, making eight yards of cloth, worth eight times its cost,) compared with linens, broke down this trade. It caused the yearly emigration of thousands of operatives from Ireland, who became useful to us in building our houses, digging our canals and constructing our

railways, and finally aiding us to settle our abundant wild lands. It has been estimated that during the last fifty years there have emigrated from Ireland to the United States two millions of souls, who have settled mainly in our northern and western States-a great source of national wealth, by their productive industry.

If Sea Island is spun into the finest yarn or thread, it is worth five guineas or $25 for a pound; if woven into muslin and tamboured, $75; constructed into a piece of lace, worth $500. (Report of Secretary of the Treasury, 1836.) Sea Island cotton is generally worth three times as much as the common quality.

Great Britain, it would appear, can afford to import four-fifths of our cotton crop to make "machine goods," and then to send these goods round the Cape of Good Hope, with a voyage of upwards of 10,000 miles, to Calcutta and back, and yet compete, successfully, with the native manufacturers of Hindostan, although they can hire their labor at three cents per day to plant and pick their cotton bolls, and they can spin and manufacture it, by hand, at the same rate as they do in their hand looms. They sell their raw cotton at from five to six cents per pound; yet it will not pay, at this price, to export to Liverpool, unless there is a deficit in our crop, and the price with us advances so as to exceed eight cents per pound, and in Liverpool is at a medium price of ten to twelve cents per pound.

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Mr. J. B. SMITH, the member for Stockport, England, read a paper before the Society of Arts, Manchester, treating of the three great divisions of cotton, "the long staple, the medium and the short staple," which he describes. He then says: "It will be seen, therefore, that while we require, for the purposes of our manufacture, a limited supply of the first and third qualities of raw cotton, we need, and can consume, an almost unlimited supply of the second quality-American Uplands. In this fact lies our real difficulty, for, while several quarters of the world supply the first sort, and India could supply enormous quantities of the third sort, the United States of America alone have hitherto produced the second and most necessary kind." (Uplands of Georgia, Alabama, &c.)

"The finest cotton in the world is called the 'Sea Island.' The quantity is small and the price very high, mainly from the Sea Islands of Georgia and south of Cape Hatteras.

"Our great consumption and demand is for the soft, white, silky, moderately long cotton of America; the quality usually called Uplands, Georgia and New-Orleans.' It can be consumed in any quantity; for it is available not only for weft but for warp, except for the higher numbers. We need and consume nine bales of this cotton for one bag of all other qualities put together." * * *

He closes: "The point we have to bear in mind, then, is this: our desideratum is not simply more cotton, but more cotton of the same character and price as that now imported from the States. If India were to send us two millions of bales of Surat cotton per annum, the desideratum would not be supplied, and our perilous problem would still be unsolved. We should be as dependent on America as ever." This is a candid confession.

We have given this exordium and these extracts, in connection with the unique quality of our cotton, and the acknowledged necessity of it

by Great Britain, to repeat the cause of our exotic perennial plant becoming an annual, to wit, by quick growth in a humid, hot climate, with the same average heat of 80 to 82 degrees in the summer months, the same as in the dry Bahama Islands, of latitude 25°. (See BLODGET'S Climatology and table herewith.)

This extra tropical heat, in part caused by the Gulf Stream, also with the fall of twenty inches of rain during the three summer months, when little or none falls in other tropical cotton regions, maturing the bolls in four to five months, is the cause of our white, soft, silky, moderately long, strong cottons, usually called "Uplands," of which, Mr. SMITH says "Great Britain can consume an almost unlimited quantity;" while "the dry, fuzz, woolly cotton of Surat," and from other tropical regions, for want of rains, will not serve for warp to make strong machine-spun cotton goods, and is only used by manufacturers in limited quantities for weft for an inferior class of "machine goods," and then only in cases of the utmost necessity, like the present. She last year imported 600,000 bales of Surat cotton from Calcutta, and exported 410,000 bales of it to the cotton manufacturers of the north of Europe, leaving the inconsiderable quantity of 190,000 bales to be used in Great Britain. The weight of the raw cotton exported from India was less than that of the manufactured goods exported. The United States is the only country to which Great Britain exports in weight less cotton goods than she imports raw cotton.

The May number (Vol. 44, No. 5) of the MERCHANTS' MAGAZINE AND COMMERCIAL REVIEW presents important facts, showing the extraordinary increase of the manufacture of cotton goods in Great Britain and on the continent, as well as the United States, and the sources of supply of raw cotton from all parts of the world, and, let us add, the importance of a machine to cottonize flax.

It is there stated, and it cannot be repeated too often, "that in sixty years the manufacture of cotton goods had grown up to employ, in the United States and western Europe, 40,000,000 spindles in the production of yarns." * * * To supply raw material for those spindles there were last year produced in the United States 4,600,000 bales, and there was derived from India, in round numbers, 600,000; from other parts of the world, 300,000 bales, or equal to 5,500,000 bales. Of this quantity 87 per cent. was from the United States. Of that value, $300,000,000, the United States stood for 90 per cent.

It was recently stated before the Manchester Supply Association, that the number of spindles increased in Europe and America at the rate of 6,000,000 per annum, requiring, to supply these spindles, 810,000 bales per annum, a quantity equal to the whole United States cotton crop of 1828. There are then these prominent facts: First, that in the present century the demand for cotton has increased, from comparatively nothing, to, in round numbers, 5,500,000 bales per annum. Second, that it now increases at the rate of 800,000 bales per annum, which would, in ten years, give a demand for 13,500,000 bales. Third, up to this time nearly the whole increase in quantity has been supplied by the United States; also the only advance in quality. "These facts have been growing in importance before the eyes of manufacturers and statesmen during the last twenty-five years, and the most earnest attention has been directed to the means of insuring a future sufficient supply, but late events have given a new interest to the subject."