It can not rightly be said that the traditional antipathy to manufactures in the South was "opposed to the obvious interests of a region where idle white labor, abundant raw materials, and ever-present water-power seemed to unite conditions so favorable to textile industries", if Southern consciousness and purpose is meant. This applies particularly to the labor factor. It will be shown later in this study that in the period before the war the mills often employed slaves as the exclusive operatives in the factory, either when belonging to the management or hired from their owners; in some cases slaves or free negroes were employed as operatives in the same mills with whites; and finally, and more importantly, through the reconstruction years and at the very outset of the cotton mill era the thought of the establishers of mills nor infrequently groped out in the inclination again to engage negro hands and to induce white operatives to come from the North and even from England and the Continent--overlooking the native Anglo-Saxon population as a useful supply of workers as though it had not been there. Before the war the presence of raw cotton was certainly looked upon more usually rather as a guarantee of economic independence than as a stimulus to produce within the section those products of manufacturing which the staple was potent to purchase. It is not implied that conspicuous promulgators and exemplars of the need for a change in economic activity, such as William Gregg and others, and more still of lesser consequence of whom we have fewer evidences, were not products of a reaction that showed itself from the long continuance of slavery, but they stand out, impotent as they are striking, against a dull and motionless background of prevalent system.