Part 12 (2/2)

[Footnote 12: Letter of Phineas Miller to the Comptroller of South Carolina, in the _American Historical Review_, III, 115.]

[Footnote 13: M.B. Hammond, _The Cotton Industry_ (New York, 1807), p. 23.]

[Footnote 14: Denison Olmstead, _Memoir of Eli Whitney, Esq_. (New Haven, 1846), reprinted in J.A. Turner, ed., _Cotton Planter's Manual_, pp.

297-320. M.B. Hammond, _The Cotton Industry_, pp. 25, 26.]

Miller, who now married Mrs. Greene, promptly entered into partners.h.i.+p with Whitney not only to manufacture gins but also to monopolize the business of operating them, charging one-third of the cotton as toll. They even ventured into the buying and selling of the staple on a large scale. Miller wrote Whitney in 1797, for example, that he was trying to raise money for the purchase of thirty or forty thousand pounds of seed cotton at the prevailing price of three cents, and was projecting a trade in the lint to far-off Tennessee.[15] By this time the partners had as many as thirty gins in operation at various points in Georgia; but misfortune had already begun to pursue them. Their shop on the Greene plantation had been forced by a mob even before their patent was procured in 1793, and Jesse Bull, Charles M. Lin and Edward Lyons, collaborating near Wrightsboro, soon put forth an improved gin in which saw-toothed iron discs replaced the wire points of the Whitney model.[16] Whitney had now returned to New Haven to establish a gin factory, and Miller wrote him in 1794 urging prompt s.h.i.+pments and saying: ”The people of the country are running mad for them, and much can be said to justify their importunity. When the present crop is harvested there will be a real property of at least fifty thousand dollars lying useless unless we can enable the holders to bring it to market,” But an epidemic prostrated Whitney's workmen that year, and a fire destroyed his factory in 1795. Meanwhile rival machines were appearing in the market, and Whitney and Miller were beginning their long involvement in lawsuits. Their overreaching policy of monopolizing the operation of their gins turned public sentiment against them and inclined the juries, particularly in Georgia, to decide in favor of their opponents. Not until 1807, when their patent was on the point of expiring did they procure a vindication in the Georgia courts. Meanwhile a grant of $50,000 from the legislature of South Carolina to extinguish the patent right in that state, and smaller grants from North Carolina and Tennessee did little more than counterbalance expenses.[17] A pet.i.tion which Whitney presented to Congress in 1812 for a renewal of his expired patent was denied, and Whitney turned his talents to the manufacture of muskets.

[Footnote 15: _American Historical Review_. Ill, 104.]

[Footnote 16: J.A. Turner, ed., _Cotton Planter's Manual_, pp. 289, 290, 293-295.]

[Footnote 17: M.B. Hammond, ”Correspondence of Eli Whitney relating to the Invention of the Cotton Gin,” in the _American Historical Review_, III, 90-127.]

In Georgia the contest of lawyers in the courts was paralleled by a battle of advertisers in the newspapers. Thomas Spaulding offered to supply Joseph Eve's gins from the Bahama Islands at fifty guineas each;[18] and Eve himself shortly immigrated to Augusta to contend for his patent rights on roller-gins, for some of his workmen had changed his model in such a way as to increase the speed, and had put their rival gins upon the market.[19]

Among these may have been John Currie, who offered exclusive county rights at $100 each for the making, using and vending of his type of gins,[20]

also William Longstreet of Augusta who offered to sell gins of his own devising at $150 each,[21] and Robert Watkins of the short-lived town of Petersburg, Georgia, who denounced Longstreet as an infringer of his patent and advertised local non-exclusive rights for making and using his own style of gins at the bargain rate of sixty dollars.[22] All of these were described as roller gins; but all were warranted to gin upland as well as sea-island cotton.[23] By the year 1800 Miller and Whitney had also adopted the practice of selling licenses in Georgia, as is indicated by an advertis.e.m.e.nt from their agent at Augusta. Meanwhile ginners were calling for negro boys and girls ten or twelve years old on hire to help at the machines;[24] and were offering to gin for a toll of one-fifth of the cotton.[25] As years pa.s.sed the rates were still further lowered. At Augusta in 1809, for example, cotton was ginned and packed in square bales of 350 pounds at a cost of $1.50 per hundredweight.[26]

[Footnote 18: _Columbian Museum_ (Savannah, Ga.), April 26, 1796.]

[Footnote 19: J.A. Turner, ed., _Cotton Planter's Manual_, p. 281.]

[Footnote 20: Augusta, Ga., _Chronicle_, Dec. 10, 1796.]

[Footnote 21: _Southern Sentinel_ (Augusta, Ga.), July 14, 1796.]

[Footnote 22: _Ibid_., Feb. 7, 1797; Augusta _Chronicle_, June 10, 1797.]

[Footnote 23: Augusta _Chronicle_, Dec. 13, 1800.]

[Footnote 24: _Southern Sentinel_, April 23, 1795.]

[Footnote 25: Augusta _Chronicle_, Jan. 16, 1796.]

[Footnote 26: _Ibid_., Sept. 9, 1809.]

The upland people of Georgia and the two Carolinas made prompt response to the new opportunity. By 1800 even Tennessee had joined the movement, and a gin of such excellence was erected near Nashville that the proprietors exacted fees from visitors wis.h.i.+ng to view it;[27] and by 1802 not only were consignments being s.h.i.+pped to New Orleans for the European market, but part of the crop was beginning to be peddled in wagons to Kentucky and in pole-boats on the Ohio as far as Pittsburg, for the domestic making of homespun.[28] In 1805 John Baird advertised at Nashville that, having received a commission from correspondents at Baltimore, he was ready to buy as much as one hundred thousand pounds of lint at fifteen cents a pound.[29] In the settlements about Vicksburg in the Mississippi Territory, cotton was not only the staple product by 1809, but was also for the time being the medium of exchange, while in Arkansas the squatters were debarred from the new venture only by the poverty which precluded them from getting gins.[30] In Virginia also, in such of the southerly counties as had summers long enough for the crop to ripen in moderate security, cotton growing became popular. But for the time being these were merely an out-lying fringe of cotton's princ.i.p.ality. The great rush to cotton growing prior to the war of 1812 occurred in the Carolina-Georgia Piedmont, with its trend of intensity soon pointing south-westward.

[Footnote 27: _Tennessee Gazette_ (Nashville, Tenn.), April 9, 1800.]

[Footnote 28: F.A. Michaux in Thwaites, ed., _Early Western Travels_, III, 252.]

[Footnote 29: _Tennessee Gazette_, March 27, 1805.]

[Footnote 30: F. c.u.ming, _Tour to the Western Country_ (Pittsburg, 1810), in Thwaites, ed., _Early Western Travels_, IV, 272, 280, 298.]

A shrewd contemporary observer found special reason to rejoice that the new staple required no large capital and involved no exposure to disease. Rice and indigo, said he, had offered the poorer whites, except the few employed as overseers, no livelihood ”without the degradation of working with slaves”; but cotton, stimulating and elevating these people into the rank of substantial farmers, tended ”to fill the country with an independent industrious yeomanry.”[31] True as this was, it did not mean that producers on a plantation scale were at a disadvantage. Settlers of every type, in fact, adopted the crop as rapidly as they could get seed and ginning facilities, and newcomers poured in apace to share the prosperity.

[Footnote 31: David Ramsay, _History of South Carolina_ (Charleston, 1808), II, 448-9.]

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