The Transformation of Cotton Marketing in the Late Nineteenth Century: Alexander Sprunt and Son of Wilmington, N. C., 1884–1956

Historians of the New South will find in Professor Killick's essay, based on the business archives of an important fin-de-siécle and early-twentieth-century cotton marketing enterprise, further powerful proof that the real story can only come from informed, sympathetic studies of what private men of affairs were accomplishing behind the dust storm of political demagogy that marked most public utterances, North and South, on southern problems in this era. Real entrepreneurship sprang up to give the marketing of the cotton crop a directness and an efficiency that ineffectual antebellum southern leaders had only dreamed of. This torch of enterprise was successfully passed, moreover, from a dying family firm to a more modern corporate organization, headed by even more skilled marketers who had learned well the lessons of their predecessors and were well prepared to flourish in the vastly changed post-1929 world. The stereotype of the prolonged backwardness of the South after 1877 is further discredited in this essay, which, significantly, is written from the far side of the Atlantic, where marketing of the cotton crop was always the most important aspect of its history.