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 of the actual erection of factories, the hundreds of problems that arose and the mass of practical detail attendant upon their solving constitute, it seems to the writer, a hopeless or at best profitless puzzle, unless it is clearly understood that these minutiae point back to something elemental and primal which gave them character. On the other hand, if this fact is recognized, the circumstances which accompanied the setting of mills in operation, such as the securing of capital, the obtaining of adequate labor, the selection of sites for the location of buildings and the like, from the very coldness of the subjects, and their unsentimental aspect as commonly thought of, strike into peculiarly bold relief the purposes that lay behind them. When it came to money-getting, psychical factors must be crystallized into something very forceful and admitting of unquestioned faith. It is the aim of the present paper to be an introduction to the study of the problems involved in the setting up of cotton mills, by giving the antecedent action, as it were, and by showing the motive force as it developed, operated and concentrated.
This responsible cause, catching the phrase from a writer of the day, may be termed "real reconstruction". The impulse for it came over the South in 1880 like a great ground swell, translating itself into a thousand activities and ramifications. "Real reconstruction" was spectacularly the outcome of the defeat of Hancock by Garfield in the presidential election immediately, but its roots run deeper and have their hold in the slow but sure recuperation of the South from the devastation of the Civil War through the troubles of radical rule, assisted by a brief breathing space from the termination of carpet bag government in 1876, when the lesson of fifteen terrible years soaked in thoroughly. It is sufficient here to say that in 1880[137] the South suffered a change of heart, a revulsion of conscience that was fundamental. The people turned on their heel, and faced about to find a new future of the largest promise.