Part 21 (1/2)

%207. Cotton Planting.%--The South, in 1790, was on the eve of a great industrial revolution. The products of the states south of Virginia had been tar, pitch, resin, lumber, rice, and indigo. But in the years following the peace the indigo plants had been destroyed year after year by an insect. As the plant was not a native of our country, but was brought from the West Indies, it became necessary either to import more seed plants, or to raise some other staple. Many chose the latter course, and about 1787 began to grow cotton.

[Ill.u.s.tration: %Farmers' Castle (Belpre) in 1791%]

%208. Whitney and the Cotton Gin.%--The experiment succeeded, but a serious difficulty arose. The cotton plant has pods which when ripe split open and show a white woolly substance attached to seeds. Before the cotton could be used, these seeds must be picked out, and as the labor of cleaning was very great, only a small quant.i.ty could be sent to market. It happened, however, that a young man from Ma.s.sachusetts, named Eli Whitney, was then living in Georgia, and he, seeing the need of a machine to clean cotton, invented the cotton gin.[1] Till then, a negro slave could not clean two pounds of cotton in a day. With the gin the same slave in the same time could remove the seeds from a hundred pounds. This solved the difficulty, and gave to the United States another staple even greater in value than tobacco. In 1792 one hundred and ninety-two thousand pounds of cotton were exported to Europe; in 1795, after the gin was invented, six million pounds were sent out of the country. In 1894 no less than 4275 million pounds were raised and either consumed or exported. Of all the marvelous inventions of our countrymen, this produced the very greatest consequences. It made cotton planting profitable; it brought immense wealth to the people of the South every year; it covered New England with cotton mills; and by making slave labor profitable it did more than anything else to fasten slavery on the United States for seventy years, and finally to bring on the Civil War, the most terrible struggle of modern times.

[Footnote 1: The word ”gin” is a contraction of ”engine.”]

[Ill.u.s.tration: %The cotton gin% _A_. Whitney's original gin. _B_. A later form.]

SUMMARY

1. When Was.h.i.+ngton was inaugurated, the United States consisted of eleven states, with a population of about 3,380,000.

2. These people lived not far from the Atlantic coast. Few cities existed; not one had 50,000 inhabitants. Even the largest was without many conveniences which we consider necessaries.

3. Travel was slow and difficult, and though a steamboat had been invented and used, it was too far ahead of the times to succeed.

4. West of the Alleghany Mountains a few settlements had been made between 1763 and 1783. But it was after 1783, when streams of emigrants poured over the mountains, that settlement really began.

6. In the South cotton was just beginning to be cultivated; there all labor was done by slaves. In the North slavery was dying out, and in five of the states had been abolished.

State of the Country in 1790

- _On the Seaboard._ The population. {Number.

{Distribution.

{Movement west.

The cities {Size.

{Absence of many conveniences known to us.

{Newspapers and magazines.

Communication between states. {Bad roads. Slow travel.

{The post offices.

{The stagecoaches. The inns.

{The early steamboat.

- _In the Ohio Valley._ {Population. Squatters.

{Pittsburg in 1790.

{A trip down the Ohio.

{Towns in the valley.

- _In the South._ {Slavery.

{Cotton planting.

{Whitney and the cotton gin.

CHAPTER XV