Fibrilia: A Practical and Economical Substitute for Cotton. Embracing a Full Description of the Process of Cottoning Flax, Hemp, Jute, China Grass, and Other Fibre, So That The Same May be Spun or Woven Upon Either Cotton or Woolen Machinery.

[ALLEN, Stephen Merrill].

Item Number: 137422

Boston: L. Burnett and Company, 1861.

First edition of Merrill Allen’s work on the early American cotton industry. Octavo, original publisher’s cloth with gilt titles to the spine, peach endpapers, illustrated with 10 plates from microscopical illustrations. In very good condition.

In the United States, growing Southern cotton generated significant wealth and capital for the antebellum South, as well as raw material for Northern textile industries. Before 1865 the cotton was largely produced through the labor of enslaved African Americans. It enriched both the Southern landowners and the new textile industries of the Northeastern United States and northwestern Europe. In 1860 the slogan "Cotton is king" characterized the attitude of Southern leaders toward this monocrop in that Europe would support an independent Confederate States of America in 1861 in order to protect the supply of cotton it needed for its very large textile industry. In the present volume, Allen makes the argument, "The agricultural interests of any country become the more important when the questions of life become narrowed down to a bare individual subsistence: the manufacturing interest comes next, and then the mercantile. All three of these seem inseparably connected; and no one of them should be so overstrained as to lose its balance for such causes as have produced the recent distress in the public mind. The soil of every State in the Union is equal to the production of sufficient bread and meat for the support of its inhabitants, if properly cultivated and the mechanical advantages and appliances of each are sufficient to manufacture for all of its requirements: these interests, united, will create a commerce adequate to the support of the others."