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The demand for negroes is so great, since the cotton-gin and the foreign markets have made cotton a great staple, and the direct importation of slaves from Africa has been stopped, that there is a great run for border-state negroes, and free colored people seldom are righted when they have been pulled across the line." "They never are righted, Judge Custis! I'm ashamed of my native state.
Elmer was much interested in all this, and mentally resolved that he would do all that lay in his power to revive the old-time prosperity of the place in which he had established his home. "What we most need here now," concluded Mr. Bevil, "is a bridge over the river and a mill. It ought to be a saw-mill, grist-mill, and cotton-gin all in one." The next morning Mr.
"No, boy, cotton is a plant, growin' like a raspberry on a bush, havin' pushed the blossoms off an' burst the pods below 'em, an' thar it is fur niggers to pick it. Thar's a Yankee in Georgey made a cotton-gin to gin it clean, an' now all the world wants some of it." "Some of the gin?" asked the irrelevant Wonnell. "No, some of the cotton, Doctor Green! They can't git enough of it.
Eli Whitney, an American, invented the cotton-gin, which separated the cotton from its seeds, a job which had previously been done by hand at the rate of only a pound a day. Finally Richard Arkwright and the Reverend Edmund Cartwright invented large weaving machines, which were driven by water power.
Lord Macaulay said of Eli Whitney: 'What Peter the Great did to make Russia dominant, Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton-gin has more than equaled in its relation to the power and progress of the United States. He has been the greatest benefactor of the South, but it never has, to my knowledge, acknowledged his benefaction in a public manner to the extent it deserves no monument has been erected to his memory, no town or city named after him, though the force of his genius has original invention.
But I had scarcely gone beyond the limits of the field when I came to a thick undergrowth of pines. Here we saw old pieces of timber and two posts. "This marks the old cotton-gin house," said Uncle Jim, my companion, and then his countenance grew sad; after a sigh, he said: "I have seen many a Negro whipped within an inch of his life at these posts.
But when the institution became profitable, all talk of its abolition ceased where it existed; and naturally, as human nature is constituted, arguments were adduced in its support. The cotton-gin probably had much to do with the justification of slavery. The winter of 1860-1 will be remembered by middle-aged people of to-day as one of great excitement.
At the ends of the rows are great baskets, into which the sacks are emptied, and then the cotton is loaded into wagons which carry it to the gin-house. If damp, the cotton is dried in the sun. The saw-teeth of the cotton-gin, as we have seen, separate the cotton fibre from the seeds.
And the first old cotton-gin and mower up to the finished machines of to-day. Outside this buildin', directly on the lagoon, wuz exhibits of gates, fences, and all sorts of wind-mills, from the picteresque old Dutch mills up to the ones of eighteen hundred and ninety-three. And engines, portable and traction ones.
Fust in debt heels over head then the house burns then he sells the plantation. Now he's tryin' to run a cotton-gin down about Natchez. The boys are growin' up no account. And she Jerusalem artichokes! What a shame it war for Margaret to throw herself away!"
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