WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST

An oral presentation made 2/26/2011

Without attributions or references
At the Charlestowne Landing Archaeology Conference

By Lonnie W. Franklin, MA, RPA

Hundreds of books and articles have been written that either praise or condemn the dramatic
postbellum transformation of southern society and culture as being caused not by the civil war, but
by the textile mill industry. The question arises, could this be true?

Was the “old south” really transformed? Or saved? Or destroyed? Why? What did the mills have
to do with it? I believe that this is an important question, after all, the old south is the foundation
for our current culture and society and if things changed that radically, then perhaps those things
that have cultural roots with an antebellum origin could be obsolete. Perhaps we can simply learn
a lesson from the past applicable to us now.

What changed? While historians generally agree that the old south wasn’t anything like the
images portrayed in “Gone with the Wind” they don’t agree on what it was like, and I must
therefore start with the assumption that society and culture were indeed changed.

My first approach – to see if the mills had any attributes that might be responsible for the
change, was the study of the remaining mills. Standing Buildings studies form an important
yet distinctive field in modern archaeology. Not all archaeology happens in a square hole.

That’s a deliberate seque to allow me to address the focus of this conference -the development
of archaeology as a scientific discipline in our state and where it stands today, while I explain the
scope and methodology of my study.

As archaeologists we are often reminded that we are anthropologists or we are nothing.

The American Anthropological Association has dropped the word “science” from the organization's
mission statement. The AAA has explained the omission as follows:

”To understand the full sweep and complexity of cultures across all of human history,
anthropology draws and builds upon knowledge from the social and biological sciences as well
as the humanities and physical sciences. A central concern of anthropologists is the application
of knowledge to the solution of human problems. Historically, anthropologists in the United
States have been trained in one of four areas and Anthropologists often integrate the
perspectives of several of these areas into their research, teaching, and professional lives."

Many of us here have translated hieroglyphics or Mayan glyphs, reading between the lines doesn’t give
us much of a problem. They’re saying – subjectivity – considered nonscientific - cannot be eliminated,
should be recognized, and in fact may be a good thing.
To quote one of my old anthropology professors: “Sometimes Binford isn’t the best way to get where
you’re going. Sometimes you just got to saddle up old deductive reasoning and go for a ride.”

My personal perspective is that archaeology is the Swiss-army-knife of anthropology so this should

not prove too difficult to assimilate.

For example:

This particular paper started out as a standing buildings project but will transition into
landscape archaeology, and then into historical archaeology, and ethno-archaeology. I grew
up surrounded by the mills. My grandfather was a supervisor at Newberry Mills; his
maternal grandfather was the superintendent.

I will thus approach the mills as an post-processualist archaeologist/anthropologist of the most

recent AAA vintage and ask the question - How far can the study of surviving buildings and the
artifacts associated with them indicate how they might have influenced cultural or societal change.

Asked another way, could the existing culture be manipulated and changed to suit an authority, and
be reflected in remaining structures? I will have to recognize that the selection of the research
question is subjective and that experimenter bias is ever-present. So, what did we dig up?

The Mill

The chairman of British Leyland, an English motorcar company – coincidentally the country where
the industrial revolution began - once stated that they were not in the business to make
automobiles, they were in business to make money. This tool, the mill, was designed to make
money. The design of the factory – right down to having no indoor toilets - concentrates on the
manufacturing process with the labor force being viewed –before automation – as simply being
necessary to the functioning of the process. While it clearly is built to contain and control whatever
it chooses to contain and control within – much like a prison, it is nothing more than an industrial
structure and doesn’t appear to have any features designed to transform a society, or influence
cultural beliefs. In fact, the industrial revolution was a world-wide event that began in 1760 and a
textile mill was advertised in South Carolina in 1790. A mill in Graniteville had 9,245 spindles and a
capital base in today’s money of $6.4 million dollars which enabled it to compete effectively with the
north. The first of 70 mills in NC began in 1815 and in Georgia in 1829

By the outbreak of the civil war, Textile Mills were nothing new! If we are to find the mechanism that
“transformed” the postbellum culture and society of the south, we need to look further.
 The Mill Village
The mills were built where land was cheap, and water power was handy. They had to have cheap
labor. Several had attempted using slave labor; but, as difficult as it is to comprehend, slave labor
was too expensive.

Because of the central role of agriculture in the economy, people usually lived on widely separated
farms. Labor had to be brought to the mill and had to have a place nearby to stay. As early as 1820 mill
workers had been provided with housing.

The first mill villages were usually a “sun-baked collection of hovels on a hill, where families
lived with flies, dirt, and foul odors.” Workers had to adjust from farm life where they were
accustomed to work as a family, according to the sun, the weather, and the seasons; and had to
adjust to the pace of machinery. Most worked ten or twelve hours straight, enduring heat,
unaccustomed supervisory authority, machine noise, humidity, and choking cotton lint. It isn’t
difficult to see why the population was not interested in factory work and did not reliably show up
on the factory floor. The factories had to devise a way to create a reliable workforce from what they
had available.

The mill village, already found necessary as minimal habitation to concentrate a workforce near the
mill was developed as a tool, one where construction and design can be clearly established as having
been developed to attract and to control the population.

In the factory building, primary concern had to be to the manufacturing process, with the people
involved being viewed as a necessary part of the process – controlled just as a piece of machinery;
but no so in the village – the entire concept was to maintain and even create what the mill considered
to be a proper labor force.

Every aspect of the village was planned, the ultimate goal of which was to create a system whereby
management could control almost every aspect of the worker’s lives, creating a loyal obedient and
dependable workforce.

The residences became an integral part of the system. The mill village in Granby – which was typical
of the south, included a supervisor’s home at the end of both streets leading into or out of the village,
with smaller homes for workers in between. Supervisors had a two story house with a front porch,
emphasizing and symbolizing their superior position and authority; and giving them a place from
which to oversee what went on in the village. Off-duty supervisors often acted as policemen and a
lights out at 10 P.M. rule was enforced, so that everyone would be rested for the next day’s shift.

Mills paid poorly but houses were subsidized and cheap. They were assigned on the basis of one
worker for each room – encouraging every available family member to work, and discouraging
anyone from leaving – without risking the family being thrown out of their home.

The mill-sponsored church was located on the top of the hill, so that everyone could see it looking
over them, and notified the residents of changing shifts by tolling the church bell, a particularly
Orwellian specter. The mill developed a company store system to provide for their needs, and
secondarily perhaps to keep the employees indebted and dependent upon the mill for their needs.
Wages were often paid in the form of company store credits.
Children were indoctrinated from birth. They grew up in mill homes regulated by mill schedules,
went to mill sponsored schools, and mill sponsored churches, hearing mill approved lessons and
sermons. Between 1880 and 1910 about one-fourth of all cotton mill workers in the South were
below the age of sixteen.

It has been estimated that at the turn of the century 92% of the men, women, and children that
worked in textile mills lived in a mill-village built and controlled by their employer. It has been
said that in the 60’s the entire piedmont was a continuous mill village. Perhaps for these
people, more than any group other than slaves, this village constituted the boundaries of their
existence. It was often where they met their future spouses; married, raised their children, retired,
and were buried. This is the nursery where the image of the new south was created, where an isolated
agricultural heritage was adapted into the new industrial society.

Conclusion
Before the Civil War:

The south was a highly stratified, agriculture-based society. Status and political representation was
defined by land ownership. The highest tier in the society was occupied by entrepreneur –planters
with aristocratic pretentions. They considered themselves to be independent and self sufficient,
considering anyone who performed services for someone else to be one step removed from being a
slave.

In general they had an egocentric wealth-acquiring cultural perspective that originated in England but
was developed in the Barbados. They owned slaves, and controlled the government. There was little
interaction with the classes beneath them and they expected deference. Although the fewest in
number, they have received the greatest representation in the historical record.

The middle tier –common whites- was composed all tradesmen, yeoman farmers originally growing
subsistence crops but eventually being dominated by cotton, and all other whites. In general, they
did not own slaves, or owned few. The cultural perspective –for the purpose of this study- will be
viewed here as that of the piedmont-Presbyterian-Scots-Irish since they would become the principle
group from which Mill labor will be drawn. The strata was more or less homogeneous. Farmers
were considered somewhat higher in status than tradesmen – but wealth was beginning to play the
role that we would recognize today. In general there was an anti-business climate in SC. The south
was uneasy with working-class whites in a slave owning society, and the yeoman farmers viewed the
planters as role models.

The bottom tier, that eventually became the majority, consisted of all blacks. Even free blacks that
themselves owned slaves, could not rise to the level of the lowest white.

Following the War:

There is a common myth that the plantations collapsed with the fall of slavery and that northern
industrialists came south to profit from the situation and began the mills. Actually, most plantation
owners returned to their old way of life with only a change in the legal status of their labor. There
was a cotton boom immediately after the war, and most planters were able to benefit from this to the
extent that the impetus and controlling capital for the new mills came from southern sources, notably
plantation owners – and the mills were begun and operated with the cultural bias of the pre-war
paternalistic planter role model.

Planters still owned most of the land, but without slavery it was now divided into smaller plots that
were farmed by tenants on a percentage basis –share cropping/tenant farming. This was secured by a
“lien system” whereby individual farmers were provided supplies secured by a lien on the eventual
crop at a high interest rate. To insure that payments were received, the business men required that the
farmers plant cash crops such as cotton and tobacco, not food. Yeoman farmers that once were self-
sufficient in a direct exchange of goods within a community were lured into the cotton boom and
became participants in a commercial cash-economy dominated by merchants - making them
vulnerable to market conditions. When cotton fell in the 1870’s, and crashed to 5 cents a pound in
the 1890’s, farmers found themselves deeply in debt and with a crop they could neither sell nor eat.
No matter how unpalatable the factory seemed, it offered a way out. Many sent their wives or
children first – just to get back on their feet; and many farmers, no doubt, probably intended to earn a
little money and return to farming some day – when things got better.

The lowest black tier was legally freed of the threat of being bought or sold and became more
mobile, but their status would be little changed before the civil-rights movements of the 20th century
and they play no further part in this study. The mills did not hire them.

“Men and women who sell their labor to an employer bring more to a work situation than
just their physical presence. What they bring depends on their culture of origin, and how
they behave is shaped by the interaction between that culture and the particular society in
which they enter.”

As the “common-white” class migrated to the mills, they took their culture with them. Always more
in numbers but dispersed, now concentrated in mill villages, history became aware of them.

The planter class, now the mill operator, used the existing scots-Irish culture as a tool to attract and
mold them into what they considered to be dependable employees, not to change the culture or
society, but to make them dependable cogs in the wheels of industry. The efforts to do so can be
clearly seen in the remaining villages, but also recorded in numerous records kept by the mills, the
developers and owners. They felt that what they were doing was a public service, and often said so.

A white working class arose, unthinkable in the slave-owning antebellum south where working class
whites were considered only one step removed from slavery, and a threat to society – meaning the
upper class. They were right. The aristocratic presuming planter class fell when challenged by the
working class over child labor, working conditions, and labor unions. When deference ended,
paternalism ended.

The change was profound, but mills were not the instrument of change, nor was the civil-war
destruction of slavery. Slavery was not economically viable, and was already on its last legs. The
instrument of change was the failure of individual farming due to an emphasis on and over-reliance
on cotton, with the lien system creating a trap door that the agricultural economy fell through.
Cotton was never really king; the pursuit of wealth was king. The collapse of the cotton market
created a white working class, which created the modern south. Long live the king.