They have spent much time, MONEY and CREDIT, to avoid giving me a small compensation, for that which to them is worth millions."Meanwhile North Carolina had agreed to buy the rights for the State on terms that yielded Whitney about thirty thousand dollars, and it is estimated that he received about ten thousand dollars from Tennessee, making his receipts in all about ninety thousand dollars, before deducting costs of litigation and other losses.The cotton gin was not profitable to its inventor.And yet no invention in history ever so suddenly transformed an industry and created enormous wealth.Eight years before Whitney's invention, eight bales of cotton, landed at Liverpool, were seized on the ground that so large a quantity of cotton could not have been produced in the United States.The year before that invention the United States exported less than one hundred and forty thousand pounds of cotton; the year after it, nearly half a million pounds; the next year over a million and a half; a year later still, over six million; by 1800, nearly eighteen million pounds a year.And by 1845 the United States was producing producing seven-eighths of the world's cotton.Today the United States produces six to eight billion pounds of cotton annually, and ninety-nine per cent of this is the upland or green-seed cotton, which is cleaned on the Whitney type of gin and was first made commercially available by Whitney's invention.** Roe, "English and American Tool Builders", pp.150-51.
More than half of this enormous crop is still exported in spite of the great demand at home.Cotton became and has continued to be the greatest single export of the United States.In ordinary years its value is greater than the combined value of the three next largest exports.It is on cotton that the United States has depended for the payment of its trade balance to Europe.
Other momentous results followed on the invention of the cotton gin.In 1793 slavery seemed a dying institution, North and South.
Conditions of soil and climate made slavery unprofitable in the North.On many of the indigo, rice, and tobacco plantations in the South there were more slaves than could be profitably employed, and many planters were thinking of emancipating their slaves, when along came this simple but wonderful machine and with it the vision of great riches in cotton; for while slaves could not earn their keep separating the cotton from its seeds by hand, they could earn enormous profits in the fields, once the difficulty of extracting the seeds was solved.Slaves were no longer a liability but an asset.The price of "field hands" rose, and continued to rise.If the worn-out lands of the seaboard no longer afforded opportunity for profitable employment, the rich new lands of the Southwest called for laborers, and yet more laborers.Taking slaves with them, younger sons pushed out into the wilderness, became possessed of great tracts of fertile land, and built up larger plantations than those upon which they had been born.Cotton became King of the South.
The supposed economic necessity of slave labor led great men to defend slavery, and politics in the South became largely the defense of slavery against the aggression, real or fancied, of the free North.The rift between the sections became a chasm.
Then came the War of Secession.
Though Miller was dead, Whitney carried on the fight for his rights in Georgia.His difficulties were increased by a patent which the Government at Philadelphia issued in May, 1796, to Hogden Holmes, a mechanic of Augusta, for an improvement in the cotton gin.The Holmes machines were soon in common use, and it was against the users of these that many of the suits for infringement were brought.Suit after suit ran its course in the Georgia courts, without a single decision in the inventor's favor.At length, however, in December, 1806, the validity of Whitney's patent was finally determined by decision of the United States Circuit Court in Georgia.Whitney asked for a perpetual injunction against the Holmes machine, and the court, finding that his invention was basic, granted him all that he asked.
By this time, however, the life of the patent had nearly run its course.Whitney applied to Congress for a renewal, but, in spite of all his arguments and a favorable committee report, the opposition from the cotton States proved too strong, and his application was denied.Whitney now had other interests.He was a great manufacturer of firearms, at New Haven, and as such we shall meet him again in a later chapter.
