[Footnote 10:  Coman, Industrial History of the United States, p. 238.  Bogart gives the figures as 1,976,000 bales in 1840, and 4,675,000 bales in 1860. Economic History of the United States, p. 256.]

[Footnote 11:  See The Anti-Slavery Crusade, by Jesse Macy (in The Chronicles of America), Chapter VIII.]

[Footnote 12:  See The Sequel of Appomattox, by Walter L. Fleming (in The Chronicles of America), Chapter IV.]

[Footnote 13:  See The New South by Holland Thompson (in The Chronicles of America), Chapters IV and VII.]

[Footnote 14:  Negroes in the United States, Census Bulletin No. 129, p. 37.]

CHAPTER IV

UTOPIAS IN AMERICA

America has long been a gigantic Utopia.  To every immigrant since the founding of Jamestown this coast has gleamed upon the horizon as a Promised Land.  America, too, has provided convenient plots of ground, as laboratories for all sorts of vagaries, where, unhampered by restrictions and unannoyed by inquisitive neighbors, enthusiastic dreamers could attempt to reconstruct society.  Whenever an eccentric in Europe conceived a social panacea no matter how absurd, he said, “Let’s go to America and try it out.”  There were so many of these enterprises that their exact number is unknown.  Many of them perished in so brief a time that no friendly chronicler has even saved their names from oblivion.  But others lived, some for a year, some for a decade, and few for more than a generation.  They are of interest today not only because they brought a considerable number of foreigners to America, but also because in their history may be observed many of the principles of communism, or socialism, at work under favorable conditions.  While the theory of Marxian socialism differs in certain details from these communistic experiments, the foreign-made nostrums so brazenly proclaimed today wherever malcontents are gathered together is in essence nothing new in America.  Communism was tried and found wanting by the Pilgrim Fathers; since then it has been tried and found wanting over and over again.  Some of the communistic colonies, it will appear, waxed fat out of the resources of their lands; but, in the end, even those which were most fortunate and successful withered away, and their remnants were absorbed by the great competitive life that surrounded them.

There were two general types of these communities, the sectarian and the economic.  Frequently they combined a peculiar religious belief with the economic practice of having everything in common.  The sectarians professed to be neither proselyters nor propagandists but religious devotees, accepting communism as a physical advantage as well as a spiritual balm, and seeking in seclusion and quiet merely to save their own souls.