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Updated: June 18, 2025
The inventor studied and thought and dreamed, and in a very short time his quick genius saw how the work could be done. And he no sooner saw it than he set to work to do it. The idea of the cotton-gin was fully formed in his mind before he had lifted his hand towards making one. It was not easy, in fact.
"... I send you a photograph taken from a portrait of my father, painted about the year 1821, by King, of Washington, when my father, the inventor of the cotton-gin, was fifty- five years old. He died January 25, 1825.
You know how prolific the American mind has been in invention; how much civilization has been advanced by the steamboat, the cotton-gin, the sewing-machine, the reaping-machine, the typewriter, the electric light, the telephone, the phonograph. Do you know, have you had occasion to learn, that there is no hospitality for invention nowadays?
They have been owners or superintendents of large coal mines in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, of large iron plants and vast oil interests in Pennsylvania, and of silver mines in Nevada. There is scarcely any great American industry that has not had one of this family among its chief promoters. Eli Whitney of cotton-gin fame married a granddaughter of Jonathan Edwards.
Whitney, the Connecticut mechanical genius, by the invention of the cotton-gin, made the production of cotton a highly lucrative industry. The price of negroes to work the cotton fields at once went up, and yet the supply was inadequate. Northernly slave States could not produce cotton, but they could produce negroes. They shared in the golden harvest.
What innumerable millions has the invention of the cotton-gin, by Whitney, added, and will continue to add, to the wealth of the world! a part of which is already realized, but vastly the greater part of which is yet to be received, as each successive day draws for an installment which would exhaust the treasury of a nation.
We couldn't no mo' git erlong 'dout Miss Lady now, 'n we could 'dout me, er the Cunnel. But, law! it don't make no diff'ence to Cunnel Blount who's heah or who ain't heah, he jest gotter hunt b'ah. You come 'long wid me, I could show you b'ah hides up stairs, b'ah hides on de roof, b'ah hides on de sheds, b'ah hides on de barn, and a tame b'ah hitched to the cotton-gin ovah thah."
In the years immediately succeeding the Revolution there was put forth the first effective effort toward racial organization, this being represented by the work of such men as Richard Allen and Prince Hall; but, in spite of a new racial consciousness, the great mass of the Negro people remained in much the same situation as before, the increase in numbers incident to the invention of the cotton-gin only intensifying the ultimate problem.
Horton saw that here was a romance in slave-life that the man and woman were in love with each other. "Well, if you can't pick cotton," he said to Alston, "what can you do?" "Mos' anything else, moster. I kin do ev'rything 'bout cawn; I kin split rails; I kin plough; I kin drive carriage." "Could you run a cotton-gin?" "Reckon so, moster: the black folks says it's tolerbul easy."
Whitney invented the Cotton-gin now in use, by which the labor of at least one thousand hands under the old system, is performed by one, in preparing the crop for market. Seven years after the invention 35,000,000 pounds were raised, and 17,800,000 exported. In 1834, 460,000,000 were raised 384,750,000 exported. Such was the effect of Mr. Whitney's invention.
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