This author is to be accepted in his general dictum that "The official return of cotton manufactures in 1810 is too inaccurate either to measure the extent of the industry or to describe its location. Probably many census agents did not know what a textile mill was; and they classed as factories, plantation loom houses and the cottages or shops of village jenny-spinners. This explains the large number of establishments reported from the South and West. Advertising then to the mills just noticed and to water-driven spindles near Fayetteville, he continues: "Less study had been given to the industrial records of the South than to those of the North, and during the subsequent period of indifference or hostility to manufacturing in that section some annals of the earlier interest in those pursuits were doubtless lost. Small mills may have been started in the Carolinas and Georgia, and after a brief infancy have vanished and left no name; but, if so, the fact is curious rather than significant for it had no relation to the subsequent history of the industry."[20]
While it is thus seen that the textile industry in the South in the latter part of the eighteenth and earlier part of the nineteenth centuries was stamped with every hall-mark of domestic production, and while they were ephemeral in their operation, it is to be remembered that a century and a half ago the industry in England as well as in America bore more or less of the domestic character;[21] and Southern States showed instances of power-driven machinery before Samuel Slater built the first Arkwright mill in Rhode Island. The South had planter-manufacturers it is true, but this striking link with agriculture as contrasted with New England is easily explained in the more general fertility of the soil and the effect this of course had upon the occupation of the people. Furthermore, the very fact of this coupling indicates the inclination towards economic balance and the promise in these years of a rational development.[22] Bearing these things in mind and viewing the wastage which he conceived to have been wrought by slavery, Helper was probably within justified bounds when he declared:
"Had the Southern States, in accordance with the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, abolished slavery at the same time the Northern States abolished it, there would have been, long since, and most assuredly at this moment, a larger, wealthier, wiser, and more powerful population, south of Mason and Dixon's line, than there now is north of it."[23]