Chapter LXIX: Appendix: D

In the year 1793 there were but 5,000,000 pounds of cotton produced in the United States, and but 500,000 exported. Cotton never could have become an article of much commercial importance under the old method of preparing it for market. By hand-picking, or by a process strictly _manual_, a cultivator could not prepare for market, during the year, more than from 200 to 300 pounds; being only about one-tenth of what he could cultivate to maturity in the field. In '93 Mr. 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 (1800) 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. It gave, at once, extraordinary value to the _land_ in that part of the country where alone cotton could be raised; and to _slaves_, because it was the general, the almost universal, impression that the cultivation of the South could be carried on only by slaves. There being no _free_ state in the South, competition between free and slave labor never could exist on a scale sufficiently extensive to prove the superiority of the former in the production of cotton, and in the preparation of it for market.

Thus, it has happened that Mr. Whitney has been the innocent occasion of giving to slavery in this country its present importance--of magnifying it into the great interest to which all others must yield. How he was rewarded by the South--especially by the planters of Georgia--the reader may see by consulting Silliman's Journal for January, 1832, and the Encyclopedia Americana, article, WHITNEY.

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