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Updated: June 18, 2025
This was the second of the great and beneficent achievements which distinguished American inventors at that early period of our country's struggles. The cotton-gin, invented by Eli Whitney, was the first; an implement that could do the work of a thousand persons in cleaning cotton wool of the seeds. That machine has been one of the most important aids in the accumulation of our national wealth.
If there be patronage extended by the citizens of the United States to any one thing in preference to another, it is to the results of inventive genius. Surely Franklin, Rittenhouse, and Perkins, have been heard of by our author; and he must have heard something of that wonderful invention, the cotton-gin of Whitney, and of the machines for making cards to comb wool.
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.
We want all sorts of industries; we want a little hospital with a resident physician and two or three nurses; we want a cooperative store for buying supplies; we want a cotton-gin and saw-mill, and in the future other things. This land here, as I have said, is the richest around. We want to keep this hundred acres for the public good, and not sell it.
The door of his dingy little office was open, an' I could see the grave-rock man inside bendin' over old Welborne at his little table, pointin' at the pictures in his book and sweatin' like a nigger in a cotton-gin.
When this catastrophe was followed by his losing every dollar of his interest in the improved cotton-gin, because of his generosity to a brother inventor, her uneasiness had become the keenest anxiety. And now here was this new motor, in which he seemed more absorbed than in any other of his inventions. This was to plunge them into still greater difficulties and jeopardize even the farm.
In the North, where the slaves were less numerous, laws for gradual emancipation were early passed. But the rapid increase of slaves in the South, the growing demand for cotton, and the stimulus given to the production of it by the cotton-gin, made the prospect of emancipation by legislative action less probable as time advanced.
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.
THE eighteenth-century philosopher made great strides in his studies of the physical properties of matter and the application of these properties in mechanics, as the steam-engine, the balloon, the optic telegraph, the spinning-jenny, the cotton-gin, the chronometer, the perfected compass, the Leyden jar, the lightning-rod, and a host of minor inventions testify.
In February I discovered a movement of the force in my front towards General Rosecrans's Army and notified him in the following dispatch: CORINTH, MISS., February 10, 1863. Major-General Rosecrans: One of my scouts left Van Dorn Sunday night. He then had two regiments and one battery across the Tombigbee, at Cotton-Gin Port; was crossing slowly, and all his forces had not got to him.
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