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Updated: May 18, 2025
Arkwright's invention quickly gave a great impetus to the cotton industry. Both the cultivation and the manufacture of cotton rapidly increased. Eli Whitney's timely invention of the cotton-gin in 1793 hastened the general introduction of the new manufacturing machinery. For more than a century the making of cotton goods has been one of the leading industries of the world.
That this gift fired the heart of Peter Cooper to do a similar work, and if possible a better work, there is no doubt. At the first World's Fair held in London in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-one, Peabody gave fifteen thousand dollars toward the exhibition of American inventions, the chief of which at this time were the McCormick Reaper, Eli Whitney's Cotton-Gin, and Colt's Revolver.
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 I wished to go a little deeper, and I soon found that one of the leading stores in this community was owned by a colored man; that a cotton-gin was owned by a colored man; that the sawmill was owned by another colored man. Colored men had mortgages on white men's crops, and vice versa, and colored people not only owned land, but in several cases were renting land to white men.
Miller, but found lacking in an important particular. Mrs. Greene exclaimed, "Why, Mr. Whitney, you want a brush," and with a stroke of her handkerchief removed the lint. Comprehending her idea at once, he replied, "Mrs. Greene, you have completed the cotton-gin."
I have said nothing of the establishment of hospitals, the first exemplar of which was the Invalides of Paris; nothing of the improved prisons, reformatories, penitentiaries, asylums, the treatment of lunatics, paupers, criminals; nothing of the construction of canals, of sanitary engineering, or of census reports; nothing of the invention of stereotyping, bleaching by chlorine, the cotton-gin, or of the marvelous contrivances with which cotton-mills are filled contrivances which have given us cheap clothing, and therefore added to cleanliness, comfort, health; nothing of the grand advancement of medicine and surgery, or of the discoveries in physiology, the cultivation of the fine arts, the improvement of agriculture and rural economy, the introduction of chemical manures and farm-machinery.
It will have been observed that this acquisition of the Colony of Louisiana and the contemporaneous inventions of the cotton-gin, improved cotton-spinning machinery, and the application to it of steam power, had already completely neutralized the wisdom of the Fathers in securing, as they thought, the gradual but certain extinction of Slavery in the United States, by that provision in the Constitution which enabled Congress, after an interval of twenty years, to prohibit the African Slave Trade; and which led the Congress, on March 22, 1794, to pass an Act prohibiting it; to supplement it in 1800 with another Act in the same direction; and on March 2, 1807, to pass another supplemental Act to take effect January 1, 1808 still more stringent, and covering any such illicit traffic, whether to the United States or with other countries.
At the rear of the house, among the barns, there arose the yelping of dogs cut down at the kennels, and screams rang out where the maddened blacks, no longer human, were stabbing horses and cattle and leaving them half dead. Then there arose a sudden flicker of flame. Some voice cried out that they had fired the cotton-gin. From other buildings closer at hand there also arose flames.
Beyond the cotton warehouse smoked the chimneys of the seed-mill and the cotton-gin; a red livery-stable faced them and all about three sides of the square ran stores; big stores and small wide-windowed, narrow stores. Some had old steps above the worn clay side-walks, and some were flush with the ground.
When he was approaching manhood, he went, in the intervals of toil, to an obscure and remote country-school; for, until the cotton-gin made negroes too valuable on the animal side for the human side to be allowed anything so perilous as education, there were to be found here and there in the South fountains whereat even negroes might slake their thirst for learning.
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