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VALUE OF THE COTTON-GIN.

in December, 1807, Mr. Whitney obtained a verdict against the pirates on his invention; his patent being now in the last year of its existence. Judge Johnson, in entering judgment for the plaintiff, said:

"With regard to the utility of this discovery, the court would deem it a waste of time to dwell long upon this topic. Is there a man who hears us, who has not experienced its utility? The whole interior of the Southern States was languishing, and its inhabitants emigrating for want of some object to engage their attention, and employ their industry, when the invention of this machine at once opened views to them which set the whole country in active motion. From childhood to age, it has presented to us a lucrative employment. Individuals who were depressed with poverty, and sunk in idleness, have suddenly risen to wealth and respectability. Our debts have been paid off. Our capitals have increased,

and our lands trebled themselves in value.

We cannot express the weight of the obligation which the country owes to this inven

tion. The extent of it cannot now be seen.

Some faint presentiment may be formed from the reflection that Cotton is rapidly supplanting Wool, Flax, Silk, and even Furs, in manufactures, and may one day profitably supply the use of specie in our East India trade. Our sister States also participate in the benefits of this invention; for, beside affording the raw material for their manufacturers, the bulkiness and quantity of the article afford a valuable employment for their shipping."

Mr. Whitney's patent expired in 1808, leaving him a poorer man, doubtless, than though he had never listened to the suggestions of his friend Mrs. Greene, and undertaken the invention of a machine, by means of which the annual production of cotton in the Southern States has been augmented from some five or ten thousand bales in 1793 to over five millions of bales, or one million tons, in 1859; this amount being at least three-fourths in weight, and seven-eighths in value, of all the cotton produced on the globe. To say that this invention was worth one

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thousand millions of dollars to the Slave States of this country, is to place a very moderate estimate on its value. Mr. Whitney petitioned Congress, in 1812, for a renewal of his patent, setting forth the costly and embarrassing struggles he had been forced to make in defense of his right, and observing that he had been unable to obtain any decision on the merits of his claim until he had been eleven years in the law, and until thirteen of the fourteen years' lifetime of his patent had expired. But the immense value of his invention stood directly in the way of any such acknowledgment of its merits and his righteous claims as the renewal he sought would have involved. Some liberal members from the cotton-growing region favored his petition, but a majority of the Southrons fiercely opposed it, and it was lost.

Mr. Whitney, in the course of a correspondence with Robert Fulton, inventor of the first successful steamboat, remarks:

:

"The difficulties with which I have had to contend have originated, principally, in the want of a disposition in mankind to do justice. My invention was new and distinct

from every other: it stood alone. It was not interwoven with anything before known; and it can seldom happen that an invention or improvement is so strongly marked, and can be so clearly and specifically identified; and I have always believed that I should have had no difficulty in causing my rights to be respected, if it had been less valuable, and been used only by a small portion of the community. But the use of this machine being immensely profitable to almost every planter in the cotton districts, all were interested in trespassing upon the patent right, and each kept the other in countenance. Demagogues made themselves popular by misrepresentation and unfounded clamors, both against the right and the law made for its protection. Hence there arose associations and combinations to oppose both. At one time, but few men in Georgia dared to come into court and testify to the most sim

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In 1798, Mr. Whitney, despairing of ever achieving a competence from the proceeds of his cottongin, engaged in the manufacture of arms, near New Haven; and his rare capacity for this or any similar undertaking, joined with his invincible perseverance and energy, was finally rewarded with success. He was a most indefatigable worker; one of the first in his manufactory in the morning, and the last to leave it at night; able to make any implement or machine he required, or to invent a new one when that might be needed; and he ultimately achieved a competency. He made great improvements in the manufacture of firearms-improvements that have since been continued and perfected, until the American rifled musket of our day, made at the National Armory in Springfield, Massachusetts, is doubtless the most effective and perfect weapon known to mankind. In 1817, Mr. Whitney, now fifty-two years old, found himself fully relieved from pecuniary embarrassments and the harassing anxieties resulting therefrom.

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| He was now married to Miss Henrietta F. Edwards, daughter of the Hon. Pierpont Edwards, United States District Judge for Connecticut; and four children, a son and three daughters, were born to him in the next five years. In September, 1822, he was attacked by a dangerous and painful disease, which, with alternations of terrible suffering and comparative ease, preyed upon him until January 8, 1826, when he died, not quite sixty years of age."

The African Slave-Trade, so far as it had any legal or tolerated existence, was peremptorily closed, as we have seen, on the 1st day of January, 1808.

This was the period from which, according to the fond anticipations of optimists and quietists, Slavery in our country should have commenced its decadence, and thence gone steadily and surely forward to its ultimate and early extinction. And these sanguine hopes were measurably justified by the teachings of history. In all former ages, in all other countries, Slavery, so long as it existed and flourished, was kept alive by a constant or frequent enslavement of captives, or by importations of bondmen. Whenever that enslavement, that importation, ceased, Slavery began to decline. The gratitude of masters to faithful, devoted servants, who had nursed them in ill

the operation of cleaning is easily and successThis mafully accomplished, been invented. chine was invented in 1795, by Mr. Eli Whitney, of Massachusetts. There are two qualities of this cotton, the one termed Upland Georgia, grown in the States of Georgia and South Carolina, and the other of superior quality, raised upon the banks of the Mississippi, and distinguished in the market by the name of New Orleans cotton," &c., &c.-Encyclopædia Britannica, Eighth (last) Edition, vol. vii., p. 447 .

Truly, the world knows little of its greatest men.

THE RENAISSANCE OF SLAVERY.

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masters; but when children who had grown up together-sprung, indeed, from different castes, but still members of the same household-familiar from infancy, and to some extent playmates, came to hold the relation, respectively, of master and slave, it was inevitable that kindly feelings should frequently be reciprocated between them, leading often to devotion on the one hand and emancipation on the other. It was not without reason, therefore, that the founders of our Republic and the framers of our Constitution supposed they had provided for the gradual but certain disappearance of Slavery, by limiting its area on the one hand, and providing for an early inhibition of the SlaveTrade on the other.

ness, or adhered to them in times of peril or calamity, or who had simply given the best years of their lives to the enlargement of their wealth, had been effectual in reducing, by manumission, the aggregate number of slaves much faster than it was increased by the preponderance of births over deaths. The chances of war, of invasion, and still more of insurrection and civil convulsion, had operated from time to time still further to reduce the number of slaves. Even the licentious and immoral connections between masters and their bondwomen, so inseparable from the existence of Slavery, tended strongly toward a like result; since it was seldom or never reputable, save in slaveholding America-if even there for a master to send his own children to the auction-block and consign them to eternal bondage among strangers. Quite often, the slave-mother, as well as her child or children, owed her | emancipation to the affection, the remorse, or the shame, of her master and paramour. So long as slaves So long as slaves were mainly foreigners and barbarians, often public enemies, of fierce, strange aspect and unintelligible speech, there would naturally be lit-ple far more remunerative to its protle sympathy betwixt them and their

7

It was

But the unexpected results of the purchase of Louisiana and the invention of the Cotton-Gin were such as to set at naught all these calculations. The former opened to slaveholding settlement and culture a vast domain of the richest soil on earth, in a region peculiarly adapted to the now rapidly and profitably expanding production of Cotton; for Whitney's invention had rendered this sta

ducer than any rival which the South

their great Lawgiver, 'shall surely be put to death."-Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. xx., p.

319.

The above passage seems scarcely just to the Law given by Moses. The true object and purpose of that Law, so far as bondage is concerned, was rather a mitigation of the harsher features of an existing institution than the creation of a new one. Moses, for the hard

7 "That the practice of buying and selling servants, thus early begun amongst the patriarchs, descended to their posterity, is known to every attentive reader of the Bible. expressly authorized by the Jewish law, in which were many directions how such servants were to be treated. They were to be bought only of the heathen; for, if an Israelite grew poor and sold himself, either to discharge a debt or to procure the means of subsistence, he was to be treated, not as a slave, but as a hired servant, and restored to freedom at the year ofness of your hearts,' says Jesus, allowed or Jubilee. Unlimited as the power thus given to the Hebrews over their bondservants of heathen extraction appears to have been, they were strictly prohibited from acquiring such property by any other means than fair purchase. 'He that stealeth a man and selleth him,' said

tolerated some things which 'from the beginning were not so.' How any one can quote the Law of Moses as a warrant for Slavery, yet not admit it as a justification of free-and-easy Divorce, is not apparent.

had ever, or has ever yet, attempted | afforded such constant and nearly

to grow; while the nearly simultaneous inventions of Hargreaves, Arkwright, and others, whereby steam was applied to the propulsion of machinery admirably adapted to the fabrication of Cotton, secured the cultivators against all reasonable apprehension of a permanently glutted market. As the production was doubled, and even quadrupled, every few years, it would sometimes seem that the demand had been exceeded; and two or three great commercial convulsions gave warning that even the capacity of the world's steadily expanding markets could be over-estimated and surpassed by the producers of Cotton and its various fabrics. But two years at most sufficed to clear off the surplus and enlarge this steadily growing demand up to the full measure of the momentarily checked production. The five millions of bales, produced by the United States in 1859-60, were sold as readily and quickly as the one million bales produced in 1830-31, and at considerably higher prices per pound.

But the relatively frigid climate and superficially exhausted soil of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina-wherein the greater number of slaves were originally held-were poorly, or not at all, adapted to the production of cotton, whereof slavelabor early claimed, and succeeded in substantially maintaining, a monopoly. No other out-door work

8 James Hargreaves had invented the Spinning-Jenny in 1764; this was supplanted by the invention by Sir Richard Arkwright, in 1768, of a superior machine for spinning cotton thread. James Watt patented his Steam Engine in 1769, and his improvement, whereby a rotary motion was produced, in 1782; and its first application

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uniform employment for this description of labor. Throughout the greater part of the South-West, plowing for the cotton-crop may be commenced in January; to be followed directly by planting; this by weeding; and hardly has the cultivation of the crop been completed when the picking of the more advanced bolls may be com menced; and this, with ginning, often employs the whole force of the plantation nearly or quite up to the commencement of the Christmas holidays. These being over, the preparation of the fields for plowing is again commenced; so that there is no season when the hands need stand idle; and, though long spring and summer rains, impeding tillage while impelling the growth of weeds and of grass, sometimes induce weeks of necessary hurry and unusual effort, there is absolutely no day of the year wherein the experienced planter or competent overseer cannot find full employment for his hands in some detail of the cultivation of Cotton.

The forest-covered and unhealthy, but facile and marvelously fertile, South-West hungered for slaves, as we have seen evinced in the case of Indiana Territory. Impoverished, but salubrious and corn-growing Maryland, Virginia, etc., were ready to supply them. Enterprising, adventurous whites, avaricious men from the North and from Europe, but still more from the older Slave States, hied to the South-West, in hot pur

to cotton-spinning occurred in 1787, but it was many years in winning its way into general use. John Fitch's first success in steam navigation was achieved in 1786. Fulton's patents were granted in 1809-11, and claimed the simple means of adapting paddle-wheels to the axle of the crank of Watt's engine.

THE NEGRO-TRADERS AS POLITICIANS.

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suit of wealth by means of cotton- | sipated, easy-going Virginians looked planting and subsidiary callings; and for extrication, at the last gasp, from each became a purchaser of slaves to their constantly recurring pecuniary the full extent of his means. To clear embarrassments; while, on the other more land and grow more cotton, hand, a majority of the South-Westwherewith to buy more negroes, was ern planters were eager to buy of him, the general and absorbing aspiration at large prices, provided he would -the more negroes to be employed sell on one or two years' credit. He in clearing still more land and grow- patronized hotels and railroads; he ing still more cotton. Under this often chartered vessels for the transdispensation, the price of slaves ne- portation of his human merchandise; cessarily and rapidly advanced, until he was necessarily shrewd, keen, and it was roughly computed that each intelligent, and frequently acquired, average field-hand was worth so many or at least wielded, so much wealth hundred dollars as cotton commanded and influence as to become almost cents per pound: That is, when cot- respectable. Quite usually, he was ton was worth ten cents per pound, an active politician, almost uniformly field-hands were worth a thousand of the most ultra Pro-Slavery type, dollars each; with cotton at twelve and naturally attached to the Democents, they were worth twelve hun- cratic party. Traveling extensively dred; and when it rose, as it some- and almost constantly, his informatimes did even in later days, to fifteen tion and volubility rendered him cents per pound for a fair article of mail and telegraph, newspaper and middling Orleans, a stout negro, from stump orator, to those comparatively seventeen to thirty years old, with no ignorant and secluded planters whom particular skill but that necessarily he visited twice or more per year, as acquired in the rude experience of buyer or seller, or collector of his farm labor anywhere, would often dues for slaves already sold; while bring fifteen hundred dollars on a his power as profitable customer on New Orleans auction-block. Hence the one hand, or lenient creditor on the business of negro-trading, or the the other, was by no means inconsidsystematic buying of slaves to sell erable. It was this power, in conagain, though never quite reputable, nection with that of the strongly and, down to the last thirty or forty sympathizing and closely affiliated years, very generally regarded with class of gamblers and blacklegs, by abhorrence--became a highly impor- which Van Buren's renomination for tant and influential, as well as gain- the Presidency was defeated in the ful, occupation. The negro-trader, Baltimore Convention of 1844, and often picking up bargains at execu- the Democratic party committed, tors' or assignees' sales in the older through the nomination of Polk and States, or when a sudden shift must its accessories, to the policy of anbe made to save a merchant from nexing Texas, thus securing a fresh bankruptcy or a farm from the sher- and boundless expansion to Slavery. iff, controlled large sums of money, When that Annexation was suddenly, often in good part his own. He was and to most unexpectedly, achieved, the Providence to whom indolent, dis- at the close of John Tyler's adminis

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