The State of Georgia earned the nickname "Empire State of the South" before the Civil War, largely because of its textile industry. From 1840 to 1890, the state consistently dominated the South in textile production. Antebellum towns, including Macon, Milledgeville, Madison, and Greensboro, experimented with steam-powered cotton mills, with varying degrees of success. The steam plants in Madison and Greensboro went bankrupt in the 1850s, while those in Milledgeville and Macon survived to serve the Confederacy. Macon Cotton Factory was the primary manufacturing sector of the United States in the years before the Civil War. Georgia entrepreneurs began experimenting with industrial manufacturing between 1809 and 1820, but failed in their first three attempts: the Bolton Mill in Wilkes County, the Schley Mill in Jefferson County, and the Jacob Gregg plant in Morgan County. Although the details of these failures remain unclear, it may be that the small populations of these counties near the Indian border proved too thin a market for profitable industrialization. Only after 1820 did the Georgians push this frontier far enough west to develop suitable waterworks sites along the fall line in Georgia. The late 1820s saw the Nullification Crisis, in which southerners opposed a protective tariff that subsidized northern industry at the expense of southerners. , pushed Georgian entrepreneurs to seriously industrialize textile production. In the late 1820s, Augustin Smith Clayton of Athens built a cotton mill near his hometown, hoping to prove that the protective tariffs that subsidized northern industry at the expense of locals of the South were useless. Augustin Smith ClaytonTwo of the important political sector of Georgia......industrial paper manufacturing environment. Others created auxiliary industries to ongoing textile industrialization, such as bobbin spinning mills and foundries. The thirty-year boom-and-bust cycle of the prewar Georgian textile industry proved that the success of southern textile mills was inversely related to long-term trends in textile prices. cotton. When agriculture suffered, mill building flourished. When agricultural profits increased, Georgia's textile industry collapsed. Georgians rationally pursued profits in agriculture and industry, but were aware of market forces and historical risks in each area. Nevertheless, despite the setbacks of the late antebellum period, the industrial facilities and expertise developed by the Georgians before the war contributed to the Confederacy's logistical capacity to wage a truly modern war for four years against the industrial giant of the North..