South Carolina.  To complete its works and begin operations this company procured a loan of some $92,000 in 1837 from the Bank of the State of South Carolina on the security of the land and buildings and a hundred slaves owned by the company.  After several years of operation during which the purchase of additional slaves raised the number to 194, twenty-seven of whom were mechanics, the company admitted its insolvency.  When the mortgage was foreclosed in 1845 the bank bought in virtually the whole property to save its investment, and operated the works for several years until a new company, with a manager imported from Sweden, was floated to take the concern off its hands.[41]

[Footnote 40:  New Orleans Delta, Mch. 10, 1849.]

[Footnote 41:  Report of the Special Joint Committee appointed to examine the Bank of the State of South Carolina (Charleston, 1849); Report of the President and Directors of the Bank of the State of South Carolina, November, 1850 (Columbia, 1850).]

Most of the cotton mills depended wholly upon white labor, though a few made experiments with slave staffs.  One of these was in operation in Maury County, Tennessee, in 1827,[42] and another near Pensacola, Florida, twenty years afterward.  Except for their foremen, each of these was run by slave operatives exclusively; and in the latter case, at least, all the slaves were owned by the company.  These comprised in 1847 some forty boys and girls, who were all fed, and apparently well fed, at the company’s table.[43] The career of these enterprises is not ascertainable.  A better known case is that of the Saluda Factory, near Columbia, South Carolina.  When J. Graves came from New England in 1848 to assume the management of this mill he found several negroes among the operatives, all of whom were on hire.  His first impulse was to replace all the negroes with whites; but before this was accomplished the newcomer was quite converted by their “activity and promptness,” and he recommended that the number of black operatives be increased instead of diminished.  “They are easily trained to habits of industry and patient endurance,” he said, “and by the concentration of all their faculties ... their imitative faculties become cultivated to a very high degree, their muscles become trained and obedient to the will, so that whatever they see done they are quick in learning to do."[44] The company was impelled by Graves’ enthusiasm to resort to slave labor exclusively, partly on hire from their owners and partly by purchase.  At the height of this regime, in 1851, the slave operatives numbered 158.[45] But whether from the incapacity of the negroes as mill hands or from the accumulation of debt through the purchase of slaves, the company was forced into liquidation at the close of the following year.[46]

[Footnote 42:  Georgia Courier (Augusta, Ga.), Apr. 24, 1828, reprinted in Plantation and Frontier, II, 258.]