The development of industry in South Carolina to 1860 is analyzed carefully, using information culled from manuscript census returns and the correspondence of businessmen. The failure of manufacturing to grow more rapidly is ascribed to a shortage of capital and skilled management, an unfortunate geography, competition for factors of production by local agriculture, and competition in the product markets by Northern industry.

Twenty-one years ago Baker Library, Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, acquired the early records of Pierson & Company, dealers in iron and makers of nails and screws, at Ramapo, New York. But only now has the organization and listing of these materials, dated from 1795 to 1865, been completed.

The Piersons began making cut nails in New York City in 1787 or 1788. In 1795 Josiah G. Pierson obtained a patent on a nail-making machine which is reported to have been the first such device “that produced satisfactory results and was generally used.” That same year Pierson established a plant at Ramapo, a village in Rockland County, New York, not far from the New Jersey line. The plant included a rolling and slitting mill; raw materials were received through Haverstraw, and finished goods were shipped by the same route to New York City, where an office and store were maintained at 107 Broad Street. Josiah Pierson died in 1798, and shortly Jeremiah H. and Isaac P. Pierson were carrying on the business under the firm name of Josiah G. Pierson & Brothers.

The earliest printers in Europe faced financial, storage, and marketing problems not unlike those of new industries today: how to attract operating capital for production and for carrying inventories, where to store a slow-moving and bulky stock, and how to overcome the prejudice against a new product, in order to create an extensive market. These were the three major difficulties that the first printers in Italy as well as elsewhere had to surmount.

In the Benedictine monastery, at Subiaco, south of Rome, in 1465, two German printers, Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, had set up a printing press, which two years later they moved to Rome. Other Germans introduced printing into Milan and Venice in 1469 and the following year into Foligno and Trevi. By 1472, Venice had over a half dozen competing printing offices established by German and by French printers. About fifteen other Italian cities had at least one printing office.

In the years after the Civil War, American industrial development was rapid. Mushrooming factory towns became, with the exploitation of timber and mineral resources, a characteristic feature even in frontier areas. The Saginaw Valley of Michigan mirrors this phenomenon. A lumberman's frontier, it grew to be a major center of lumber production for the nation.

An essential factor in this industrial expansion was the growth of the labor force. In 1850 a single mill of the Valley employed 12 or 14 men; by 1885 it required the services of 75 to 150 men and in some cases of 200. In 1885 over 4,000 men were employed in the mills of the Valley. Such growth of the industry and of the labor force introduced serious problems of labor relations.

This article is concerned with a description and analysis of labor relations in the sawmills of the Saginaw Valley from 1865 to 1885. Labor relations rest to a great extent upon attitudes; the attitudes of the employer, of the employee, and in some cases of the rest of the community. Presumably these attitudes have a basis in the conditions under which the industry is operated and under which the labor force works and lives.

The profits of and the amount of capital sunk in the Lauchhammer Iron Works are not revealed in the Festschrift, the history of that firm which has served as the main source of this article. (The omission is hardly surprising, since this company was owned by noblemen, one of whom was the most powerful official in the Kingdom of Saxony, and since its history was written by the general manager of the Works and was published in 1825.) But profits must have been considerable. Otherwise the Works' continuous improvement and expansion, described earlier in this article, would have been impossible. In 1818, the Lauchhammer Iron Works was even able to lend to the Gröditz plant the funds it needed to expand into an integrated iron enterprise. Whether the Works had any bank connection prior to 1825 is not known; none is mentioned in the history, but that fact is not conclusive. Cash holdings were probably rather large; this, however, was not the case in 1776 (see the inventory on page 233). It seems certain that both expansion and improvement in the eras of both Einsiedels were financed by ploughing back profits.

A good deal has been written about general commerce between Britain and China in the mid-nineteenth century. But little is available to illuminate the problems of trading as they confronted particular persons or commercial Houses. The surviving records of Rathbone, Worthington and Co. make possible a study of the question: what sort of calculation did rational men attempt in order to turn to profit these new and inchoate markets?

If one remembers Count Detlev von Einsiedel's character and achievements, as described in the first installment of this article, one will not be surprised that under his leadership a spirit of scientific enlightenment, of restless improvement, and of innovation came to permeate the Lauchhammer Works so that it became one of the leading German iron works. To be sure, genuine primary innovation was rare, as it is by necessity. Only in the case of casting figures and in that of enameling iron utensils was something brought into existence in the Lauchhammer plants that had never existed before. But on top of that, there were numerous derivative innovations, i.e., innovations as far as that particular part of Germany was concerned. Or to put it differently, the elder Count Einsiedel transferred to Saxony achievements made in the most advanced areas of eighteenth-century iron industry. It is from this point of view that the following presentation must be read, a presentation in which the Count's primary innovations, previously described, are not mentioned again.

Historians have properly considered the period of sectional strife to be a germinal source of major determinative forces in American history. Yet, preoccupation with the Civil War and Reconstruction, their causes and consequences, has so dominated the interests of historians of the South that they may well have neglected or misunderstood many of the basic economic developments of the region.

Let us be more skeptical of the plausible and widely held assumptions that the war was responsible for the economic institutions of the New South or that radical Reconstruction can be held accountable for many of the major economic problems of the post-Reconstruction era. The primary purpose of this article is to treat in summary fashion the broad developments in one southern industry, developments which in themselves suggest that the time has arrived to study southern economic development for its own sake.

The dedication of the Ford Motor Company Archives on May 7, 1953, marks a milestone in research in the history of business in the United States. As far as the Editor of the Bulletin knows, this is the first time a large American corporation has established a separate organization not only to preserve and handle its historical records but also to make them available to scholars for research. To one whose memory goes back to the days when it was nearly impossible to gain access even to old records of business concerns, this event has a very special significance.

Access by scholars to company records is, of course, not uncommon today Several companies have deposited their historical records in public depositories, a notable example being the records of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad in the Newberry Library in Chicago. Others have admitted scholars to their offices for research in their records. The Ford Motor Company has gone still further in that it has established a central depository, with a trained archival staff, which is open to accredited scholars.

In many small New England towns during the nineteenth century, and even into the twentieth, all the business activities, centered usually about the general store, would be carried on by members of one family. Such a situation may be studied by means of a collection, comprising the records of the W. G. Sargent Co., of Sargentville, Maine, recently received by the Manuscript Division, Baker Library. The village of Sargentville, a part of the town of Sedgwick, is on the coast, east of Bucksport, and separated by a channel (now spanned by a bridge) from Deer Isle. Once there was a flourishing wharf (now demolished), where bait, fish, lime, ice, and granite were shipped up and down the coast, in return for products handled by the country stores in the vicinity. The Sargents, who seem to have given their name to the community about 1879, were at the center of this activity, building ships, arranging for their loads, and distributing the return goods, either as wholesalers or through stores they controlled.

Where did the owners of early Illinois industries get the capital and the funds to start their factories? What was the background of these early manufacturers? The evidence that will be presented here suggests that the typical Illinois manufacturer of the nineteenth century was a self-financed man who was born and raised in Europe or on the eastern seaboard.

Let us begin with the basic thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner, Wisconsin and Harvard historian of the last generation, who reinterpreted the history of this country. Turner's thesis, enunciated at the Chicago meeting of the American Historical Association in 1893, was that society was reborn on every new frontier. Its character was influenced not only by heredity but even more by its new environment. Thus the American economy reflected not only European, especially Anglo-Saxon customs and institutions brought across the Atlantic, but it also reflected the pioneer's adaptation to primitive frontier conditions. By the second, third, and fourth generation, Americans had forgotten or abandoned certain European ways because these were not adapted to survival in the New World.