William Gregg was an American cotton manufacturer.
Background
William Gregg was a descendant in the fifth generation of William Gregg who is believed to have come over to Penn’s “lower counties” with the Proprietor in 1682. A later William born in Delaware, became a frontiersman in Virginia and South Carolina, fought in the Revolutionary War, and married Elizabeth Webb of Philadelphia. Their son William was born on September 13, 1867 near Carmichaels, Monongalia County, in what is now West Virginia. His parents were Quakers, and though he did not unite with the Society of Friends, its principles showed in his character. His mother died when he was four years old and he was brought up to the age of ten or eleven by a kind woman neighbor. He was then taken in charge by his uncle, Jacob Gregg, a prosperous watchmaker and manufacturer of cotton-spinning machinery at Alexandria, Virginia.
Education
The boy began to learn the watchmaker’s craft, but Jacob Gregg soon moved to a waterpower on Little River, Georgia, midway between Monticello and Madison, where, under the stimulus to home manufactures afforded by the War of 1812, he established a small cotton factory. Here William got his first taste of an industry for which he later did more than any other ante-bellum Southerner. When the little mill was ruined by the peace, which brought a flood of English goods into America, Jacob Gregg placed his nephew with an old friend and fellow-craftsman at Lexington, Kentucky, under whom the youth resumed his apprenticeship in watchmaking and silversmithing. In 1821 he went to Petersburg, Virginia, to complete his training with one Blanchard. “His education was thus a practical one of manual dexterity. It is not known that he ever went to school a day in his life. ” It is reasonable to believe “that his trade gave him a sense of precision and a love of the beautiful which were characteristics throughout his life”.
Career
In 1824 he established himself in business in Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, where within a decade he accumulated a comfortable fortune, but was forced to retire on account of ill health.
Upon his retirement he moved to Edgefield, and, partly as an amusement, bought an interest in the small and poorly conducted Vaucluse cotton factory near-by. In a short time he had reorganized it and put it on a paying basis, and in 1843, in partnership with his brother-in-law, James Jones, acquired full possession of it. In 1838 Gregg took up his residence in Charleston and became a silent partner in the successful jewelry firm of Hayden, Gregg & Company. It was now that his public life began. Charleston was a focus of the state and of the South - cultural, political, financial.
He used his leisure to look about him and reflect upon what he saw. He became convinced that exclusive devotion to a staple agriculture was economically unwise, and that what South Carolina and the whole section needed was to embark in cotton manufacturing. Industrial communities, he believed, by furnishing markets, making up home products, and giving employment to unpropertied whites who were rendered superfluous by negro slavery, would enrich agriculture and be enriched in return. It seems certain that Gregg was influenced in his thought by Henry C. Carey of Philadelphia, who, in books, magazines, and newspapers, and in the personal contacts in which Gregg doubtless shared, was preaching American economic development through diversification of occupations and a protective tariff.
In 1844 Gregg visited the textile districts of the Middle States and New England, and began writing a series of articles, Essays on Domestic Industry, published in the Charleston Courier, and appearing in 1845 in pamphlet form. These essays boldly reproached the South for obsession with partisan politics and neglect of native resources. The industrial progress of the North, he contended, should be patterned after rather than disparaged, and he insisted that if the South clung to its old creed of cotton culture, it was inviting ever swifter decline through action of the law of diminishing returns. Though severe in its criticism, Gregg’s argument was so clear and persuasive that he gained an active audience, and a subscription was immediately begun to erect a cotton factory in Charleston.
He himself, however, undertook to establish a mill in the interior. Forming the nucleus of a company, almost entirely of Charleston capitalists, in 1845, he applied to the legislatures of South Carolina and Georgia for a charter of incorporation. Limited liability was unpopular in the South at this time, being associated in the public mind with speculation bordering on dis honesty. Accordingly Gregg published a pamphlet, An Inquiry into the Expediency of Granting Charters of Incorporation for Manufacturing Purposes in South Carolina, which he placed in the hands of legislators. In it he sought to remove fears by showing the difference between industries on the one hand, and ambitious projects of internal improvement and banks on the other.
He pointed out, furthermore, that only the cooperation of many investors could bring manufactures into existence in the South. Georgia refused a charter, but South Carolina granted one by a single vote, and in 1846 Gregg began erecting the plant of the Graniteville Manufacturing Company in Edgefield District, near Aiken, on the same Horse Creek which operated the Vaucluse factory. This mill, of nearly 9, 000 spindles and 300 looms, was to be an object-lesson. Though lacking formal technical training, he was conspicuously successful in directing all the engineering operations.
He used native materials and labor in building a granite factory and upwards of a hundred cottages for operatives, thus bringing into existence the first typical Southern cotton-mill village. He took great care to provide comfortable homes for the workers, believing that only through such communities could the “poor whites” be returned to a decent standard of living. As soon as the plant was completed, country people poured in to seek employment and living quarters, and soon the mill had its 300 operatives and the village 900 inhabitants. Only the first superintendent and a few overseers were brought from the North. The company began actual operation in 1848 with $300, 000 capital. Gregg acted as president, and operated the plant. The mill had scarcely gotten under way before it encountered the depression of 1850-51, and though in these years it was not able to pay dividends, it held its own. Once over this difficulty, the company amply justified Gregg’s optimism.
Other cotton-mills, driven by steam where water-power was not available, now sprang up in the South under the influence of Graniteville, and Gregg acquired a wide reputation as the leading Southern cotton manufacturer. His constant advice was that a Southern mill should specialize in a small range of coarse cloths, and endeavor to sell its product in a national or world market, rather than try to turn out a variety of goods to meet all the demands of local consumption.
Factories should not be started without ample working capital, for they should seek to sell their product direct from the mill without the intermediation of commission agencies, which could not be relied upon, he thought, to consult the best interests of the manufacturing company. He wanted the Southern mills to be self-sufficient, and his few differences with his own directors were occasioned by this desire.
In 1858 Gregg declared in favor of a protective tariff, particularly for Southern industries - an extraordinary step for a South Carolinian of that day. He represented Edgefield District in the state House of Representatives in 1856 and 1857. His principal speech in the first session was directed against further subsidy by the state of the Blue Ridge Railroad intended to connect Anderson, South Carolina, and ultimately Charleston, with Cincinnati, Ohio.
He believed the whole scheme was promoted by self-seeking Charleston merchants who were not regarding the good of the commonwealth. By the time of Gregg’s second term in the legislature, the depression of 1857 had caused almost all South Carolina banks to suspend specie payments. Declaring that the banks were solvent if given time to recover, pointing out that the panic was made in New York, and believing that sudden liquidation would ruin the cotton farmers, Gregg stood out against collection by the state of a high tax on note issues of suspended banks.
In the main he won his case, though ably opposed by C. G. Memminger. Gregg’s speech was interpreted in some quarters as favoring the suspended banks, but in reality he was taking the only means of protecting the community as a whole. In general he was opposed to banks and bank investors, preferring to see money go directly into industrial enterprises. He was an unsuccessful candidate for the state Senate in 1858, after a bitter campaign in which he was unfairly charged with exploiting the workpeople of Graniteville. As a matter of fact, his solicitude for the operatives was one of his chief claims to remembrance.
He instituted the first carefully organized welfare work in a Southern factory community, giving affectionate attention to the school (where attendance was compulsory for the children), the library, and the health, recreation, and housing of the villagers.
After 1854 he lived near the mill and was the personal friend of everybody. He was a leader in the organization of the South Carolina Institute for the encouragement of the mechanical arts, and made its third annual address (1851). He was a delegate from Edgefield to the con- vention which considered the relation of the people of South Carolina to the government of the United States, and on December 17, 1860, signed the ordinance of secession. That year he had published a series of articles in De Bow’s Review urging Southerners to put themselves in an economic position of defense. During the Civil War he managed to keep his plant in operation in spite of enormous impressments by Confederate and state governments. As soon as possible after the war he went to the North and to Europe to secure equipment for refitting the mill. He had scarcely set things to rights, however, when the mill-dam broke. As a result of standing waist deep in water, without food or rest, while repairing it, he was taken ill and died within a few days.
Achievements
Personality
He was a benevolent despot, but was the pioneer in opening the door of social betterment to the poor whites through industrial employment.
Connections
In 1829 he married Marina Jones, of Edgefield District, whom he met in his commercial journeys over the state.