William Gregg
William Gregg (1800-1867) was born on February 2nd, 1800, in Monongahela county, Virginia. He was the son of William and Elizabeth Gregg. His ancestry can be traced to Scotland, with his great grandfather arriving in the Americas with William Penn in 1682. William was largely bought up by his uncle Jacob Gregg, who was a watchmaker and manufacturer in Alexandria, Virginia. This early association with manufacturing work likely influenced Gregg’s later economic views. Gregg would move further South in 1810, with his uncle Jacob, who established a cotton mill in Georgia. Gregg would later relocate to Lexington, Kentucky, where he learnt the trade of silversmithing and watchmaking. Gregg would eventually return to the South in 1821, now residing in South Carolina. There he would purchase a stake in a cotton mill in Vaucluse but would abandon the venture due to ill health. Gregg would then move to Charleston in 1838, and would purchase a stake in a jewelry and watchmaking business, which became Hayden, Gregg, and Company. Gregg acquired considerable wealth through this venture, and this allowed him to establish his own manufacturing business, known as the Graniteville Manufacturing Company, which was a manufacturer of fine cotton clothing. He was regarded as one of the pioneers of manufacturing in the State of Carolina. Whilst a Southerner, politically, William Gregg was also affiliated with the Whig Party, and was, at one point, the chairmen of the South Carolinian branch of the Whigs.
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It is not clear exactly when Gregg converted to protectionism, but his thinking was clearly informed by a tour of several manufacturing districts which he undertook during a visit to the Northern States. Gregg observed that the United States was destined to become a manufacturing power but thought that the South was at risk of being left behind by the North. Unlike the other Southerner within the School, Nathanial A. Ware, who published his writings anonymously, Gregg would ascribe his own name to his works. Gregg’s main work was Essays on Domestic Industry: or, An Enquiry into the Expediency of Establishing Cotton Manufactures in South Carolina. This was published in Charleston in 1845. Gregg would also publish other articles on manufacturing, including a series of articles in Hunt’s Merchant Magazine entitled “The Condition and Prospects of American Cotton Manufactures in 1849.” Typical of most Southerners of the time, Gregg accepted the institution of slavery, but was more or less critical of the South’s plantation system. Gregg, for instance, argues that so much of the South’s capital and enterprise is tied up in the direction of slave-labor, that white workers, as a result, suffer from idleness and their talents lay dormant and unutilized. By fostering a diversity of employments through protective tariffs, in addition to altering the South’s attitude towards manufacturing, this will “set in motion” the means through which “our miserably poor white population [will] at once rise from their ignorance and degradation.” On September 12, 1867, Gregg would pass away in Kalmia, South Carolina, near Graniteville