Introduction
There is a historical marker at the main intersection in Prattville, Alabama, where Prattville’s Main Street crosses U S Highway 31, with the title “Pratt Gin Factory”. The last sentence on the marker states, “Pratt’s many industries were of great aid to Confederacy during Northern blockade”. Daniel Pratt was indeed, besides being one of the foremost industrialists in the South, one of the foremost supporters of the Confederate States of America.
Pratt’s Early Life
Daniel Pratt was born in 1799 and grew up in Temple, New Hampshire. He received only a grade school education but was, according to his father, a “mechanical genius”. For this reason, when Pratt was 16 years old his father apprenticed him to Aaron Putnam, a house carpenter in the nearby town of Wilton. Apparently Pratt was the genius his father estimated him to be, because after four years as a carpenter apprentice, he came south to Savannah, Georgia, at the age of 20 in 1819, and became a well-known and sought-after builder of houses there. Some of the homes he built can still be seen today.
Gin Manufacturer
While in Georgia, Pratt met and was employed by cotton gin manufacturer Samuel Griswold, became his partner, and then undertook the manufacture of gins on his own. Just as he had done as a builder of homes, Pratt achieved both fame and fortune as a manufacturer of cotton gins. By the 1850s, he had moved to Alabama, to the present site of Prattville, and had the largest gin factory in the world, shipping gins to all the industrialized areas of the world, from Europe to Latin America, in addition to large sales within the United States. Then came the War Between The States.
Pratt’s Views On Important Topics Of His Time
Like Jefferson Davis, Pratt was not in favor of immediate secession, though he had no doubt it was permissible under the Constitution. In fact, if we look at the principal leaders within the Confederate government we see that most were moderates who did not believe immediate secession was wise and in fact could lead to disaster for the South. Pratt thought the South should spend a decade building up its industrial infrastructure before asserting its constitutional right to secede. In his view, the South would be fighting the only kind of war sanctioned by Christianity: a war of self-defense. But it required preparation…
Pratt’s plan for the South before the War, as he described it in a letter to the American Cotton Planter in 1859, was that "the South ought to maintain her rights at all hazards", but that "I would pursue a somewhat different course from that of our politicians". He believed that the South should spend ten years building up her manufacturing and other commercial enterprises, stop making "flaming fiery speeches and threats" and instead "to go quietly and peaceably to work, and make ourselves less dependent on those who abuse and would gladly ruin us".
In September 1863, while a state legislator trying to encourage his fellow citizens following the losses at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Pratt wrote a letter in the Autauga Citizen, asking Alabamians, "Are you willing to live under a government you can have no control over, and be taxed to the last dollar to pay for the loss of all that was near and dear to you?" This is what surrender meant, and Pratt knew it.
Regarding slavery, Pratt believed that there were three reasons for slavery--two practical and on religious. 1) The South's economy would have collapsed without slavery to gather and ship cotton, a joint enterprise between the North which provided the slaves and the South which used them. 2) Slavery improved the lives of black people, from a primitive one to a more civilized one. He believed this is why the American Colonization Society, which Abraham Lincoln supported, did not achieve its goal of repatriating the Africans; the slaves saw the benefits they had received and did not wish to return to their native lands. 3) Slavery was not prohibited by God's law, in Pratt’s view. He saw slavery as God's way of Christianizing Africans and bettering their lot in life. He asserted that the Bible tells the servant to be faithful to his master, and nowhere does it condemn slavery neither in the Old Testament nor the New.
Pratt understood too that originally slavery was legal in all states, including his home state of New Hampshire; it was only those states that found it unprofitable that eventually outlawed it. Regarding Reconstruction, Pratt was entirely opposed to it, to the end of his days. Before all else, he was a practical man. To give the vote to ex-slaves, many of whom were unable to read and write, while at the same time disenfranchising all men who had served in the Confederacy in any capacity, which would mean almost all white men in the defeated states, was simply not a practical or just thing to do, in his view.
Political Life
Pratt did not care for politics, but once he realized that he was recognized as a leader in industrial and political matters and was urged by men he respected to do so, he ran for office at the local and state level. He was elected by a large majority to serve as representative for Autauga County in the Alabama Legislature from 1861 to 1863. He was also proposed as candidate for governor in 1870 but lost to a younger candidate (Lindsay). He was elected Intendant (mayor) of Prattville in 1866 and held that office until his death in 1873. Aside from his political life, Pratt has also been credited with providing the design for the Alabama State Capitol Building constructed in 1850-1851, the central building of the Capitol we see in Montgomery today.
War Between the States
When secession was voted on and approved by the people of the State of Alabama, Pratt joined the effort wholeheartedly, helping to recruit and outfit the first Confederate unit to leave Autauga County, the Prattville Dragoons. He spoke at meetings around Autauga County, offering all support possible to men who volunteered to fight for the Confederacy. His help in outfitting the Prattville Dragoons included providing them horses, equipment, and fine black uniforms that sometimes caused Dragoons to be mistaken for officers. Pratt also provided funds for outfitting other Autauga County units, and his wife Esther was president of the Ladies’ Aid Society in Prattville, which made clothing for soldiers.
With respect to his business, the departure of working men to fight the war was a setback. He lost twelve employees when the Dragoons mustered and rode away to war, and fifteen more when his nephew Merrill formed Company K of the 1st Alabama Regiment and went away to defend the Confederate States. A year later, he managed to get some of these men transferred back home by sending a request to Governor John Gill Shorter. Governor Shorter requested that General Braxton Bragg transfer some of Pratt’s workers back to Prattville, stating that the Prattville Manufacturing Company (Pratt's cotton mill) was "worth a regiment of men to the Confederacy" due to its production of fabric for uniforms at a low price. Pratt’s other industries also produced knapsacks, skillets, wooden buttons, and horse brushes for the Confederacy.
During and after the War, Pratt actively sought in various ways to relieve the suffering of the poor in Autauga County, providing jobs to workers or charity in those cases where it was needed. Col J H Livingston, a eulogist, said the following: "Born and reared in poverty, (Daniel Pratt) well knew how to appreciate the wants of the needy. Strangers he clothed and fed, and to the sick he administered comfort. He considered the poor of every creed, and bestowed his charities with a lavish hand". While serving as a state representative in 1862, Pratt sponsored a bill to authorize an Autauga county tax to support families of soldiers away at war; it was enacted into law and this relieved some of the suffering of families in Autauga County.
After the War, Pratt gave a lot and two-story building to the black people of Prattville, to use as a church and school. This became known as Ward's Chapel, and to this day there is a black church with that name on Fourth Street in Prattville.
Pratt’s Final Days
The War Between The States ended badly for Pratt, though with his Northern connections he was able to obtain a pardon rather soon and get back to recovering his losses, which were calculated by his business associate and Autauga County historian Shadrach Mims at more than half a million dollars in the money of the time. Notwithstanding that loss, by the end of his life in 1873, Daniel Pratt had recovered enough wealth to leave a respectable inheritance to his nephew Merrill and his daughter Ellen. Ellen's husband, Henry Fairchild DeBardeleben, took her inheritance and became a principal figure in the coal and iron industry in Birmingham. One of his undertakings was one that Pratt had begun during the War, the Red Mountain Company, which built the Oxmoor furnaces.
A month after his death, the citizens of Prattville, in an official town meeting assembled "to pay public tribute to the memory of our belated friend and fellow-citizen, the Honorable Daniel Pratt, deceased." Five of Prattville's leading men came to the podium and honored Pratt with their words.
Shadrach Mims, the aforementioned Autauga County historian and Pratt’s business partner, wrote this about Pratt, which describes his life and philosophy fairly well: "(Daniel Pratt) seemed to think that really money had no other value than to subserve a valuable purpose. He regarded himself only as a steward."
- Tyrone Crowley
Sources
1. Evans, Curt. The Conquest of Labor. Louisiana State University
Press, 2001.
2. Tarrant, S.F.H., ed. The Honorable Daniel Pratt: A Biography, with
Eulogies on His Life and Character. Richmond, Va.: Whittet &
Shepperson, 1904.
3. Prattville Progress, 8 September 1983, pp. 1 and 11, “Pratt’s design was Capitol idea”.
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