Child Labor In North Carolina's Textile Mills

CHILD LABOR IN NORTH CAROLINA'S TEXTILE MILLS

From the University of North Carolina Libraries: “Labor” was not a new concept to children who went to work in the mills. Many spent their earliest years on their family’s farm, helping their parents with chores and working in the fields. Making a living on a family farm was difficult, especially when the family was renting the land from a large landowner. Everyone on the farm worked hard at raising enough crops and livestock to support the family, but farm families rarely made a profit. Some went into deep debt during years with poor crops.

Mill owners looking for employees capitalized on the frustrations of farm families. They sent recruiters to rural and mountain farm areas to hand out pamphlets singing the praises of mill life. For families struggling to grow enough food to feed themselves and make a small profit, the prospect of a regular paycheck was appealing. Ethel Shockley and her husband moved off the farm they were renting in Virginia to work in the cotton mills of Burlington, NC in 1921. They made about 75 cents a day working on the farm and could make 2 dollars a day working in the mills. Like the Shockleys, thousands of farmers across the South made the decision to trade in their self-sufficient farm life for life in the mill village, and they brought their children with them.

During the late 19th and early 20th century, the few laws prohibiting child labor were moderate and rarely enforced. In North Carolina, the age limit was 13 for employment in factories such as mills, and children under 18 were allowed to work up to a shocking 66 hours per week! Mill owners had to “knowingly and willfully” break these laws before they could be convicted. Even more lenient laws were in place in South Carolina, where the age limit for factory workers was 12 years old. However, orphans and children with “dependent” parents (those too sick to work) could work at any age and any amount of hours. These laws were rarely, if ever, enforced. Former child workers remember scrambling to hide in closets on the few occasions when factory inspectors would visit to check on working conditions in the mill.

The system of “helpers” was another way mill owners got around child labor laws. Very small children as young as 6 or 7 years old would visit the mill to bring meals to their parents or older siblings during the work day or simply to play amidst the machinery. These young “helpers” would begin to learn the jobs that older workers performed and try their hand at various tasks. The presence of tiny children in the mill could be explained to inspectors by saying the children were only “helping” and not on the payroll. As they got older, they spent more and more time helping until they began working full-time in the mills, usually between ages 10 to 14.

Many young mill laborers worked in the spinning room because mill owners felt their small hands were well-suited to this work. Work in the spinning room was not especially skilled or difficult, but required a watchful eye. Spinners were usually preteen or teen girls, who had to constantly attend to the cotton being spun on machines. These were the workers who “put up ends”, or repaired breaks in the thread. Doffers, often small boys, walked back and forth in the spinning room, replacing the full bobbins of thread with empty ones. Sweepers, also small boys, swept up the cotton fiber and lint from the floor and machinery to keep things running smoothly. Spinners and doffers were usually required to keep up with a certain number of machines on a side, and many workers remember“running sides” or being paid by the number of sides they worked.

Many former child workers speak of their eagerness to earn money, which pushed them to drop out of school and begin working in the mill. Some even began working against their parents’ wishes. It was difficult for some to see the advantage in continuing their schooling when recruitment ads claimed they could make as much as adult mill workers. Workers under 16 usually began working for 25 to 50 cents per day during the early 20th century, and could increase to $1.50 per day or more as they became more experienced.

CHARLIE AND OLLIE ALLEN. Charlie and Ollie Allen had been working at the Harriet Cotton Mills when this photograph was taken. Ollie was then about ten years old. Hine wrote that “the sanitary conditions are frightful.” Note that the front porch is held up by a slab of rock.

Lewis Wickes Hine, photographer. From the records of the United States National Child Labor Committee.

For the child workers, working in the mills wasn’t always uninterrupted drudgery. Children were allowed to take breaks when their work was caught up, and some of the less strict supervisors let them go outside to play during breaks. The child workers were also allowed to talk to one another in the mill across the openings in the machinery. Sometimes, the workers learned how to read lips because the machines were so loud they couldn’t understand each other otherwise!

Workers in the mills also played pranks on each other. Frank Durham remembered workers teasing new employees who had just moved from the farm and didn't know much about mill work. “There was something like that going all the time, some little old tricks and then playing pranks,” said Durham. “A new hand would come in down there sometime to work, and they’d send him after a left-handed monkey wrench, or go down there and get the key to the elevator, or the bobbin stretcher and all that stuff. Somebody that didn't know there was no such thing.” (source: Learn North Carolina)

In a Southern Cotton Mill By Elbert Hubbard

In a Southern Cotton Mill: By Elbert Hubbard

I THOUGHT to lift one of the little toilers to ascertain his weight. Through his thirty-five pounds of skin and bone there ran a tremor of fear, and he struggled forward to tie a broken thread. I attracted his attention by a touch, and offered him a silver dime. He looked at me dumbly through a face that might have belonged to a man of sixty, so furrowed, tightly drawn, and full of pain it was. He did not reach for the money—he did not know what it was.

There were dozens of such children, in this particular mill. A physician who was with me said that they would all be dead probably in two years, and their places filled by others—there were plenty more. Pneumonia carries off most of them. Their systems are ripe for disease, and when it comes there is no rebound—no response. Medicine simply does not act—nature is whipped, beaten, discouraged, and the child sinks into a stupor and dies. [By Elbert Hubbard (American author and lecturer, 1859-1915)]

Chapter Four: The Lash and the Loom

From the Hartford Courant, Chapter Four: "The Lash and the Loom: The Road To Fortune Was Lined With Cotton. What Matter If It Was Picked By Slaves?" by Liz Petry, September 29, 2002.

Past the heavy glass doors of the world's most famous jewelry store, two glimmering rings sit waiting to be selected for the proper marriage. One is a diamond-inlaid platinum band selling for $11,700, the other a matching engagement ring priced at $37,900.

Though it's not required, a bride and groom might find it easier to afford such luxury if they come from the "right" families. Such was the case with the man who, with a partner, started the world's most famous jewelry store.

Charles L. Tiffany originally sold goods in the company store to workers in his father's cotton mills in the hills of 19th century Connecticut, in a town named Killingly. He and the son of another mill owner bet a $1,000 stake they could make it in New York City.

They made it. Today Tiffany & Co. is an international business worth $3.3 billion, and a symbol of opulence and success.

That $1,000 investment - about $15,000 in today's dollars - is the start of just one of many strands of wealth created by the booming New England textile industry in the 19th century, an explosion that helped turn Connecticut from a colonial outpost of farms and villages into a center of manufacturing and international trade. Behind this transition were men of ingenuity and vision who invented the machinery, built the mills and developed revolutionary industrial processes.

What kept the mills humming were thousands of immigrant men, women and children who worked under often-dreadful conditions.

And what made it all possible were hundreds of thousands of slaves who, toiling for free under even worse conditions but at a convenient distance hundreds of miles away, provided the raw material: Cotton.

Before 1820, Connecticut's main export was food and drink. Most clothing, made from wool or linen, was woven at home.

Within 20 years, wool and cotton were the state's top products, and by 1850, tiny Connecticut ranked fifth in the nation in the number of cotton mills. By the Civil War, the state was producing wool and cotton goods worth nearly $14 million a year, not including the mills making thread, yarn and other cotton products.

The fortunes of Charles Tiffany and John Young and countless others who made names for themselves in Connecticut as merchants, manufacturers and traders have their roots in what Charles Sumner, abolitionist and later a senator from Massachusetts, called an "unhallowed union ... between the cotton planters and fleshmongers of Louisiana and Mississippi and the cotton spinners and traffickers of New England - between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom."

"The first industrial spy"

Samuel Slater grew up in a small mill town near Manchester, England. At 14, he went to work in a factory and for six years learned every aspect of cotton manufacture, including how to build and operate the spinning loom introduced by Richard Arkwright in 1768. Arkwright's innovation helped produce the first sturdy cotton yarn. Though Slater eventually became a mill manager, he soon decided he could find better opportunities in America.

In the years after the American Revolution, Britain strictly protected its textile industries, banning the export of any related technology and the emigration of anyone with expertise in the field. So Slater knew he was breaking the law when, in 1789, he disguised himself as a farmer and slipped past British agents to sail for New York. He had the plans for the Arkwright loom in his head.

Slater, whom Putnam town historian Robert Miller calls "the first industrial spy," arrived in Rhode Island and created America's first Arkwright-style mill in a small shop in Pawtucket. "Slater system" operations soon sprang up on streams all over the state. He moved into eastern Connecticut in 1804, buying 2,000 acres and the right to use power along the Quinebaug River in Putnam. His father-in-law, Oziel Wilkinson, followed the next year, buying the Pomfret Manufacturing Co.

Slater created more than an industry; he created a way of life in southern New England. Each mill and its surrounding village, built around small, fast-moving streams, operated under a single extended family, and ownership and management were based on blood and marriage ties, says Barbara Tucker, a Slater biographer and history professor at Eastern Connecticut State University. Families who lived in the mill villages supplied the labor, including children as young as 7, and often shopped in a company store and attended company schools and churches.

By and large, the mill owners saw no conflict between reliance on slave labor for their raw materials and a morality that had begun to condemn the ownership of one human being by another.

"They separated their conscience from profit," says Myron Stachiw, an archaeologist, college professor and expert on Rhode Island's textile industry. And those profits were large. When Slater died in 1835, his estate was worth $9 million - more than $153 million today.

Some Rhode Island textile manufacturers who were abolitionists had family ties to the slave trade. One of Slater's original partners, Moses Brown, whose family helped endow Brown University, lobbied for the emancipation of slaves while his brother, John, continued the family business of slave trading.

Though moral sentiment in New England turned increasingly against slavery in the 1800s, outright opponents of the system who were willing to live out their beliefs were rare. They were akin to the modern consumer who declines to buy shoes made by child labor or a blouse sewn in a sweatshop. Jesse Garrettson Baldwin, a native of Meriden, was one: He became a peddler in the South and returned to his home state committed to the abolitionist cause.

"He was obsessive about his anti-slavery views," says historian Elizabeth Ann Warner, author of "A Pictorial History of Middletown." "He would not use cane sugar because it was produced by slave labor. There were stories about him carrying his own lump sugar with him when he traveled. And he refused to wear spun clothing." Baldwin's webbing business in Middletown used cotton grown on a settlement where all the workers were free. He also made certain that the canvas for the sails of his schooner was produced by free labor.

"Apply to Mr. Whitney"

Many historians cast Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, as the man who crowned "King Cotton." But an exasperated William Brown, director of the Eli Whitney Museum in Hamden, insists the story is not that simple.

The cotton gin "made short-staple cotton more profitable, but it did not revive slavery by itself," Brown says. "It made cotton fiber less expensive. ... It's a bit like saying net stockings led to prostitution."

What's indisputable is that Whitney's timing was perfect. His gin came six years after the Constitutional Convention, which had postponed any federal regulation of the slave trade until 1808. At the time of the convention in 1787, cotton was largely a coastal crop, and many Southern plantations were struggling to survive.

Whitney's invention in 1793 revolutionized cotton product

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continue reading Liz Petry's "Chapter Four: The Lash and the Loom: The Road To Fortune Was Lined With Cotton. What Matter If It Was Picked By Slaves?" here