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Updated: May 18, 2025
The printer's roller, the printing-press, were invented by farmers' wives. Who invented the cotton-gin of the South that enriched our country so amazingly? Mrs. General Greene invented the cotton-gin and showed the idea to Mr. Whitney, and he, like a man, seized it. Who was it that invented the sewing-machine? If I would go to school to-morrow and ask your children they would say, "Elias Howe."
In this case the steps in the course of events which had rendered the formation of an anti-slavery party inevitable were: The pro-slavery provisions of the Constitution, the foreign slave trade, the acquisition of the Territory of Louisiana, the invention of the cotton-gin and its effects, the Missouri Compromise, the nullification schemes of South Carolina, the colonization and annexation of Texas, the Mexican War, the contest over the admission of California, the Compromise Measure of 1850, and finally the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854.
The expansion of the Southwest depended on the labor of the Negro, whose history became inextricably bound up with that of the cotton-gin; and the question or the excuse of fugitives was the real key to the Seminole Wars.
It was stated by Chief Justice Marshall, about thirty years ago, that Whitney's cotton-gin had saved five hundred millions of dollars to the country; and the saving, upon the same basis, cannot now be less than one thousand millions of dollars, a sum too great for the human imagination to conceive.
At this juncture, Whitney invented the cotton-gin, and the growth of cotton as a marketable crop commenced upon a more extended scale. In a few years it became general each farmer growing more or less, according to his means. Some one man, most able to do so, erected a gin-house, first in a county, then in each neighborhood.
There were none of the men on our plantation who craved it. Some of the mischievous boys would watch their opportunity to steal into the lint-room, where they greatly enjoyed rolling upon the soft cotton. Their amusement was only stopped by the use of a small whip. The machinery of a cotton-gin is driven by steam or horse power; generally the former.
The philosopher, confident in his newly discovered principle, waited for the coming of more intelligent generations, willing that men should laugh at the lightning-rod and cotton-gin and steam-boat waiting for long years through the scoffing of philosophical schools, in grand and magnificent silence.
He would have told them that slavery, as known in the Southern States, demands virgin lands, must have, every few years, its cotton-gin, its Louisiana, its Cherokee country, its something, to give new value to its products or new scope for its operations.
The invention of the cotton-gin, taken in connection with the sudden and prodigious development of manufactures in England, greatly stimulated the growth of cotton in the ever-enlarging area of the Gulf states, and created an immense demand for slave-labour, just at the time when the importation of negroes from Africa came to an end.
Even the Pennsylvania society showed signs of faintheartedness, and in 1806 the Convention decided upon triennial rather than annual meetings. It did not again become really vigorous until after the War of 1812. The Cotton-Gin, the New Southwest, and the First Fugitive Slave Law
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