Free Bound for Canaan by Fergus Bordewich Page A

Deere, Cyrus McCormick, Samuel F. B. Morse, and Thomas Edison, who fusednative mechanical aptitude with the entrepreneurial instincts of the dawning industrial age. It was said that as a boy in Massachusetts during the Revolution, Whitney had set up his own small forge and made nails to sell to his neighbors, and then converted them to hairpins after the war. After graduating from Yale, he went south to take a position as a tutor. As a guest in the home of the widow of General Nathaniel Greene, in Georgia, Whitney overheard several of her neighbors discussing the problems of cotton cultivation.
    Planters were well aware that a potentially vast market for American cotton was developing in England, where textile manufacture had been revolutionized by the factory system; thanks to new machinery operated by steam or water-powered engines, Britain’s cotton imports had more than tripled, from nine million pounds to twenty-eight million pounds, between 1783 and 1790. American planters initially experimented with varieties of cotton imported from the Bahamas, which flourished on islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, but they grew almost nowhere else. This so-called upland or short-staple cotton provided a much greater per-acre yield, but the seeds clung hard to the fiber and had to be pulled out by hand, a labor-intensive job that took one worker a full day to clean a single pound of seeds.
    Whitney later wrote, “There were a number of very respectable gentlemen at Mrs. Greene’s who all agreed that if a machine could be invented which would clean cotton with expedition, it would be a great thing both to the inventor and to the country. I involuntarily happened to be thinking on the subject and struck out a plan of a machine in my mind.” It was the cotton gin, which would ultimately transform American slavery, project it into its boom time, and transform it into a pillar of the nineteenth-century American economy. Within ten days, Whitney had made a model, and soon after that a full-size machine, “with which one man will clean ten times as much cotton as he can in any other way before known,” Whitney exulted. “It makes the labor fifty times less, without throwing any class of People out of business.” The machine he created had an elegant simplicity. The cotton was picked up on a roller studded with metal teeth that carried it around to a metal grill; when the cotton was scraped off, the seeds dropped away. Simply by turning a hand crank, one slave could now do the work of a dozen. On large plantations, a water wheel could be used instead and the gin could do the work of hundreds.On June 20, 1793, Whitney addressed his letter of application, along with a fee of thirty dollars, to Thomas Jefferson, then secretary of state, whose office was charged with issuing patents. “Mr. Jefferson,” Whitney wrote to his father, “agreed to send the patent as soon as it could be made out.” He established a factory in New Haven, and was soon shipping gins southward, where they would lead to a spectacular burgeoning of cotton cultivation, which would soon be matched by an exploding demand for slaves.
    American cotton exports grew from almost nothing in the early 1790s to six million pounds in 1796, to twenty million pounds by 1801, and they would only continue to grow. Cotton was an ideal crop for the lands that were now being opened up in the Southeast, once the Indian inhabitants were removed, by either persuasion or force. It required only about two hundred frostless days, and twenty-four annual inches of rainfall, and was so simple to cultivate that even men and women fresh from Africa could quickly be taught the monotonous techniques of hoeing, planting, and picking. It was also a very efficient crop, in terms of the economics of slavery. Cotton kept slaves at work almost continuously, tilling fields, cleaning the crop, and preparing new land for the next year’s planting.