The Battle of Principles | Page 6

single individual," wrote Jefferson, "would have
prevented this abominable crime. But Heaven will not always be silent.
The friends to the rights of human nature will in the end prevail."
Indeed, in the Southern States up to the very beginning of the Civil War
there was a strong anti-slavery sentiment. When the first meeting was
held in Baltimore to organize the Abolition Society, eighty-five
abolition societies in various counties of Southern States sent delegates
to the convention. It is a striking fact that the South can claim as much
credit for the organization of the Abolition Society as William Lloyd
Garrison and his friends in the North. For the real responsibility for
slavery does not rest upon Virginia, the Carolinas or Georgia, but upon
the mother-land, upon the avarice of the throne, the cupidity of English
merchants and the power of English guns and cannon.
By the year 1790, therefore, slavery in the North had either died of
inanition, or had been rendered illegal by the action of State legislatures,
and the chapter was closed. There are the best of reasons also for
believing that in the South slavery was waning, while the influence of
planters who believed free labour more economical was waxing.
Suddenly an unexpected event changed the whole situation. The
commerce of the world rests upon food and clothing. The food of the
world is in wheat and corn, the clothing in cotton and wool. But wool
was so expensive that for the millions in Europe cotton garments were
a necessity. England had the looms and the spindles, but she could not
secure the cotton, and the Southern planters could not grow it. The
cotton pod, as large as a hen's egg, bursts when ripe and the cotton

gushes out in a white mass. Unfortunately, each pod holds eight or ten
seeds, each as large as an orange seed. To clean a single pound of
cotton required a long day's work by a slave. The production of cotton
was slow and costly, the acreage therefore small, and the profits slender.
The South was burdened with debt, the plantations were mortgaged,
and in 1792 the outlook for the cotton planters was very dark, and all
hearts were filled with foreboding and fear. One winter's night Mrs.
General Greene, wife of the Revolutionary soldier, was entertaining at
dinner a company of planters. In those days the planters had but one
thought--how to rid their plantations of their mortgages. It happened
that the conversation turned upon some possible mechanism for
cleaning the cotton. Mrs. Greene turned to her guests, and, reminding
Eli Whitney, a young New Englander who was in her home teaching
her children, that he had invented two or three playthings for her
children, suggested that he turn his attention to the problem.
Young Whitney had no tools, but he soon made them; had no wire, but
he drew his own wire, and within a few months he perfected the cotton
gin. When the cat climbs upon the crate filled with chickens, it thrusts
its paw between the laths and pulls off the feathers, leaving the chicken
behind the laths. Young Whitney substituted wires for laths, and a
toothed wheel for the cat's paw, and soon pulled all the cotton out at the
top, leaving the seeds to drop through a hole in the bottom of the gin.
Within a year every great planter had a carpenter manufacturing gins
for the fields. With Whitney's machine one man in a single day could
clean more cotton than ten negroes could clean in an entire winter.
Planters annexed wild land, a hundred acres at a time. For the first time
the South was able to supply all the cotton that England's
manufacturers desired. The cities in England awakened to redoubled
industry. Southern cotton lands jumped from $5 to $50 an acre.
Whitney found the South producing 10,000 bales in 1793. Sixty years
later it produced 4,000,000 bales. Historians affirm that this single
invention added $1,000,000,000 as a free gift to the planters of the
South.
Although Eli Whitney took out patents, every planter infringed them.
Whole States organized movements to fight Whitney before the courts.

In 1808, when his patent expired, he was poorer than when he began.
Feeling that the Southern planters had robbed him of the legitimate
reward of his invention, Whitney came North and gave himself to the
study of firearms. He invented what is now known as the Colt's
revolver, the Remington rifle and the modern machine gun. Beginning
with the feeling that he had been robbed of his just rights by Southern
planters, Whitney ended by inventing the very weapons that deprived
the planters of their slaves and preserved the Union.
But the new prosperity and the increased acreage for cotton in the
South created an enormous