Manufactures: The South's True Remedy [pp. 172-178]

MANUFACTURES.
Europe was embarrassed by the interruption of the supply of the
staple firom America. It was greatly disturbed in New England,
but neither in the United States nor in Europe was the manufacture arrested. Substitutes for our cotton were found in India,
Afiica and South America, and were utilized by mechanical skill
so as to maintain, with the help of what was got from us, through
breaches of tLe blockade, the suptly of the world's demand for
calicos, muslins and shirtings, restricted, to be sure, by the exceedingly high prices of the fabrics. An augmented consumption
of woolen and linen goods filled up in part the deficit in the production of cotton cloth, and so on the whole, the world adapted
itself to our war and our blockade, and the looms on both sides
of the Atlantic kept in motion. Our monopoly of cotton was not
perfect. Our cotton was not indispensably necessary to the nations, and it did not confer on us the power to dictate relations
and policy.
But our devotion to the agricultural theoryv brought upon us a
correction that follows and punishes error, at the very beginning of
the war. It found us destitute of the means to carry on protracted
hostilities independent of supplies firom abroad. We had no sutffi:
cient manufactures of arms, steel, iron, lead, cloth, leather, powvder, cutlery, paper, boots and shoes and salt. We were suddenly
brought to the necessity of obtaining these elements of successful war not only, but of absolute social existence, either throtugh
the costly and uncertain avenuie of blockade-running, or by going
to work without skilled industry, and without machinery to produce them. Necessity compelled us to resort to both sources of
supply, at what expense. at what waste, at what peril, at what
embarrassment, at what loss of opportunity we all do know too
well. The disability the Confederacy was placed in by the want
of an established diversified industry was so great that we do not
hesitate to measure it by declaring, that if the Southern States at
the commencement of the waar had the system of manufacturing
which even the Middle States had, the Confederate finances
would have maintained their credit, the contest would have been
brief and our independence would have been achieved. The resources of the Northern States, great as they were, were taxed
to the utmost by the magnitude of the operations they were coni.
pelled to maintain, and by military and administrative mismanagement. And yet currently with the enormous and unexampled
expenditure of men, money and materials which the Federal
States were subjected to for five years, every one of them increased its production and added to its wealth. And this increase
of wealth was permanent and visible. It is to be seen in new
furnaces, mills, factories, tanneries; in new mines of iron, coal,
copper, lead and zinc; in new railroads, countless oil wells; in the
multiplication of machinery and the establishment of new industries; in the vast numbers of new vessels on lakes, rivers and
canals; in the extraordinary increase of elegant and costly dwel
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