a more expert class of work-people than the
negroes could be expected to become, or whether they should rely upon the
less intelligent and more negligent services of slaves. They decided at
length upon banishing the labor of blacks from their mills. At
Graniteville, in South Carolina, about ten miles from the Savannah river,
a neat little manufacturing village has lately been built up, where the
families of the _crackers_, as they are called, reclaimed from their idle
lives in the woods, are settled, and white labor only is employed. The
enterprise is said to be in a most prosperous condition.

Only coarse cloths are made in these mills--strong, thick fabrics,
suitable for negro shirting--and the demand for this kind of goods, I am
told, is greater than the supply. Every yard made in this manufactory at
Augusta, is taken off as soon as it leaves the loom. I fell in with a
northern man in the course of the day, who told me that these mills had
driven the northern manufacturer of coarse cottons out of the southern
market.

"The buildings are erected here more cheaply," he continued, "there is far
less expense in fuel, and the wages of the workpeople are less. At first
the boys and girls of the cracker families were engaged for little more
than their board; their wages are now better, but they are still low. I am
about to go to the north, and I shall do my best to persuade some of my
friends, who have been almost ruined by this southern competition, to come
to Augusta and set up cotton mills."

There is water-power at Augusta sufficient to turn the machinery of many
large establishments. A canal from the Savannah river brings in a large
volume of water, which passes from level to level, and might be made to
turn the spindles and drive the looms of a populous manufacturing town.
Such it will become, if any faith is to be placed in present indications,
and a considerable manufacturing population will be settled at this place,
drawn from the half-wild inhabitants of the most barren parts of the
southern states. I look upon the introduction of manufactures at the south
as an event of the most favorable promise for that part of the country,
since it both condenses a class of population too thinly scattered to have
the benefit of the institutions of civilized life, of education and
religion--and restores one branch of labor, at least, to its proper
dignity, in a region where manual labor has been the badge of servitude
and dep