American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

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[Footnote 2: MS. in the Library of Congress, Washington letter-books, XVII,
90.]

The problem of the time had two possible solutions; the invention of a
machine for cleaning the lint from the seed of the sort already at hand,
or the introduction of some different variety whose lint was more lightly
attached. Both solutions were applied, and the latter first in point of
time though not in point of importance.

About 1786 seed of several strains was imported from as many quarters
by planters on the Georgia-Carolina coast. Experiments with the Bourbon
variety, which yielded the finest lint then in the market, showed that
the growing season was too short for the ripening of its pods; but seed
procured from the Bahama Islands, of the sort which has ever since been
known as sea-island, not only made crops but yielded a finer fiber than
they had in their previous home. This introduction was accomplished by
the simultaneous experiments of several planters on the Georgia coast. Of
these, Thomas Spaulding and Alexander Bissett planted the seed in 1786 but
saw their plants fail to ripen any pods that year. But the ensuing winter
happened to be so mild that, although the cotton is not commonly a
perennial outside the tropics, new shoots grew from the old roots in the
following spring and yielded their crop in the fall.[3] Among those who
promptly adopted the staple was Richard Leake, who wrote from Savannah at
the end of 1788 to Tench Coxe: "I have been this year an adventurer, and
the first that has attempted on a large scale, in the article of cotton.
Several here as well as in Carolina have followed me and tried the
experiment. I shall raise about 5000 pounds in the seed from about eight
acres of land, and the next year I expect to plant from fifty to one
hundred acres."[4]

[Footnote 3: Letter of Thomas Spaulding, Sapelo Island, Georgia, Jan. 20,
1844, to W.B. Scabrook, in J.A. Turner, ed., _The Cotton Planter's Manual_
(New York, 1857), pp. 280-286.]

[Footnote 4: E.J. Donnell, _Chronological and Statistical History of
Cotton_ (New York, 1872), p. 45.]

The first success in South Carolina appears to have been attained by
William Elliott, on Hilton Head near Beaufort, in 1790. He bought five and
a half bushels of seed in Charleston at 14s per bushel, and sold his crop
at 10-1/2d per pound. In the next year John Screven of St. Luke's parish
planted thirty or forty acres, and sold his yield at from 1s. 2d. to 1s.
6d. sterling per pound. Many other planters on the islands and the adjacent
mainland now joined the movement. Some of them encountered failure, among
them General Moultrie of Revolutionary fame who planted one hundred and
fifty acres in St. John's Berkeley in 1793 and reaped virtually nothing.[5]

[Footnote 5: Whitemarsh B. Seabrook, _Memoir on the Origin, Cultivation and
Uses of Cotton_ (Charleston, 1844), pp. 19, 20.]

The English market came promptly to esteem the long, strong, silky
sea-island fiber as the finest of all cottons; and the prices at Liverpool
rose before the end of the century to as high as five shillings a pound.
This brought fortunes in South Carolina. Captain James Sinkler from a crop
of three hundred acres on his plantation, "Belvedere," in 1794 gathered
216 pounds to the acre, which at prices ranging from fifty to seventy-five
cents a pound brought him a gross return of $509 per laborer employed.[6]
Peter Gaillard of St. John's Berkeley received for his crop of the same
year an average of $340 per hand; and William Brisbane of St. Paul's earned
so much in the three years from 1796 to 1798 that he found himself rich
enough to retire from work and spend several years in travel at the North
and abroad. He sold his plantation to William Seabrook at a price which the
neighbors thought ruinously high, but Seabrook recouped the whole of it
from the proceeds of two years' crops.[7]

[Footnote 6: Samuel DuBose, _Address delivered before the Black Oak
Agricultural Society, April 28, 1858_, in T.G. Thomas, _The Huguenots of
South Carolina_ (New York, 1887).]

[Footnote 7: W.B. Seabrook, _Memoir on Cotton_, p. 20.]

The methods of tillage were quickly systematized. Instead of being planted,
as at first, in separate holes, the seed came to be drilled and plants
grown at intervals of one or two feet on ridges five or six feet apart;
and the number of hoeings was increased. But the thinner fruiting of this
variety prevented the planters from attaining generally more than about
half the output per acre which their upland colleagues came to reap from
their crops of the shorter staple. A hundred and fifty pounds to the acre
and three or four acres to the hand was esteemed a reasonable crop on the
seaboard.[8] The exports of the sea-island staple rose by 1805 to nearly
nine million pounds, but no further expansion occurred until 1819 when an
increase carried the exports for a decade to about eleven million pounds a
year. In the course of the twenties Kinsey Burden and Hugh Wilson, both of
St. John's Colleton, began breeding superfine fiber through seed selection,
with such success that the latter sold two of his bales in 1828 at the
unequaled price of two dollars a pound. The practice of raising fancy
grades became fairly common after 1830, with the result, however, that for
the following decade the exports fell again to about eight million pounds a
year.[9]

[Footnote 8: John Drayton, _View of South Carolina_ (Charleston, 1802), p.
132; J.A. Turner, ed., _Cotton Planter's Manual_, pp. 129, 131.]

[Footnote 9: Seabrook, pp. 35-37, 53.]

Sea-island cotton, with its fibers often measuring more than two inches in
length, had the advantages of easy detachment from its glossy black seed by
squeezing it between a pair of simple rollers, and of a price for even its
common grades ranging usually more than twice that of the upland staple.
The disadvantages were the slowness of the harvesting, caused by the
failure of the bolls to open wide; the smallness of the yield; and the
necessity of careful handling at all stages in preparing the lint for
market. Climatic requirements, furthermore, confined its culture within
a strip thirty or forty miles wide along the coast of South Carolina and
Georgia. In the first flush of the movement some of the rice fields were
converted to cotton;[10] but experience taught the community ere long that
the labor expense in the new industry absorbed too much of the gross return
for it to displace rice from its primacy in the district.

[Footnote 10: F.A. Michaux, _Travels_, in R.G. Thwaites, ed., _Early
Western Travels_, III, 303.]

In the Carolina-Georgia uplands the industrial and social developments
of the eighteenth century had been in marked contrast with those on the
seaboard. These uplands, locally known as the Piedmont, were separated from
the tide-water tract by a flat and sandy region, the "pine barrens," a
hundred miles or more in breadth, where the soil was generally too light
for prosperous agriculture before the time when commercial fertilizers came
into use. The Piedmont itself is a rolling country, extending without a
break from Virginia to Alabama and from the mountains of the Blue Ridge to
the line of the lowest falls on the rivers. The soil of mingled clay
and sand was originally covered with rich forest mold. The climate was
moderately suited to a great variety of crops; but nothing was found for
which it had a marked superiority until short-staple cotton was made
available.

In the second half of the eighteenth century this region had come to
be occupied in scattered homesteads by migrants moving overland from
Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, extending their regime of frontier
farms until the stubborn Creek and Cherokee Indian tribes barred further
progress. Later comers from the same northeastward sources, some of them
bringing a few slaves, had gradually thickened the settlement without
changing materially its primitive system of life. Not many recruits had
entered from the rice coast in colonial times, for the regime there was not
such as to produce pioneers for the interior. The planters, unlike those of
Maryland and Virginia, had never imported appreciable numbers of indentured
servants to become in after years yeomen and fathers of yeomen; the slaves
begat slaves alone to continue at their masters' bidding; and the planters
themselves had for the time being little inducement to forsake the
lowlands. The coast and the Piedmont were unassociated except by a trickle
of trade by wagon and primitive river-boat across the barrens. The capture
of Savannah and Charleston by the British during the War for Independence,
however, doubtless caused a number of the nearby inhabitants to move into
the Piedmont as refugees, carrying their slaves with them.

The commercial demands of the early settlers embraced hardly anything
beyond salt, ammunition and a little hardware. The forest and their
half-cleared fields furnished meat and bread; workers in the households
provided rude furniture and homespun; and luxuries, except home-made
liquors, were unknown. But the time soon came when zealous industry yielded
more grain and cattle than each family needed for its own supply. The
surplus required a market, which the seaboard was glad to furnish. The road
and river traffic increased, and the procurement of miscellaneous goods
from the ports removed the need of extreme diversity in each family's work.
This treeing of energy led in turn to a search for more profitable market
crops. Flax and hemp were tried, and tobacco with some success. Several new
villages were founded, indeed, on the upper courses of the rivers to serve
as stations for the inspection and shipment of tobacco; but their budding
hopes of prosperity from that staple were promptly blighted. The product
was of inferior grade, the price was low, and the cost of freightage high.
The export from Charleston rose from 2680 hogsheads in 1784 to 9646 in
1799, but rapidly declined thereafter. Tobacco, never more than a makeshift
staple, was gladly abandoned for cotton at the first opportunity.[11]

[Footnote 11: U.B. Phillips, _History of Transportation in the Eastern
Cotton Belt to 1860_ (New York, 1908), pp. 46-55.]

At the time of the federal census of 1790 there were in the main group of
upland counties of South Carolina, comprised then in the two "districts" of
Camden and Ninety-six, a total of 91,704 white inhabitants, divided into
15,652 families. Of these 3787 held slaves to the number of 19,934--an
average of 5-1/4 slaves in each holding. No more than five of these parcels
comprised as many as one hundred slaves each, and only 156 masters, about
four per cent, of the whole, had as many as twenty each. These larger
holdings, along with the 335 other parcels ranging from ten to nineteen
slaves each, were of course grouped mainly in the river counties in the
lower part of the Piedmont, while the smallest holdings were scattered far
and wide. That is to say, there was already discoverable a tendency toward
a plantation regime in the localities most accessible to market, while
among the farmers about one in four had one or more slaves to aid in the
family's work. The Georgia Piedmont, for which the returns of the early
censuses have been lost, probably had a somewhat smaller proportion of
slaves by reason of its closer proximity to the Indian frontier.

A sprinkling of slaves was enough to whet the community's appetite for
opportunities to employ them with effect and to buy more slaves with the
proceeds. It is said that in 1792 some two or three million pounds
of short-staple cotton was gathered in the Piedmont,[12] perhaps in
anticipation of a practicable gin, and that the state of Georgia had
appointed a commission to promote the desired invention.[13] It is certain
that many of the citizens were discussing the problem when in the spring of
1793 young Eli Whitney, after graduating at Yale College, left his home in
Massachusetts intending to teach school in the South. While making a visit
at the home of General Greene's widow, near Savannah, he listened to a
conversation on the subject by visitors from upland Georgia, and he was
urged by Phineas Miller, the manager of the Greene estate, to apply his
Yankee ingenuity to the solution. When Miller offered to bear the expenses
of the project, Whitney set to work, and within ten days made a model which
met the essential requirements. This comprised a box with a slatted side
against which a wooden cylinder studded with wire points was made to play.
When seed cotton was fed into the box and the cylinder was revolved, the
sharp wires passing between the slats would engage the lint and pull it
through as they passed out in the further revolution of the cylinder. The
seed, which were too large to pass through the grating, would stay within
the hopper until virtually all the wool was torn off, whereupon they would
fall through a crevice on the further side. The minor problem which now
remained of freeing the cylinder's teeth from their congestion of lint
found a solution in Mrs. Greene's stroke with a hearth-broom. Whitney,
seizing the principle, equipped his machine with a second cylinder studded
with brushes, set parallel to the first but revolving in an opposite
direction and at a greater speed. This would sweep the teeth clean as fast
as they emerged lint-laden from the hopper. Thus was the famous cotton-gin
devised.[14]

[Footnote 12: Letter of Phineas Miller to the Comptroller of South
Carolina, in the _American Historical Review_, III, 115.]

[Footnote 13: M.B. Hammond, _The Cotton Industry_ (New York, 1807), p. 23.]

[Footnote 14: Denison Olmstead, _Memoir of Eli Whitney, Esq_. (New Haven,
1846), reprinted in J.A. Turner, ed., _Cotton Planter's Manual_, pp.
297-320. M.B. Hammond, _The Cotton Industry_, pp. 25, 26.]

Miller, who now married Mrs. Greene, promptly entered into partnership with
Whitney not only to manufacture gins but also to monopolize the business
of operating them, charging one-third of the cotton as toll. They even
ventured into the buying and selling of the staple on a large scale. Miller
wrote Whitney in 1797, for example, that he was trying to raise money for
the purchase of thirty or forty thousand pounds of seed cotton at the
prevailing price of three cents, and was projecting a trade in the lint to
far-off Tennessee.[15] By this time the partners had as many as thirty gins
in operation at various points in Georgia; but misfortune had already begun
to pursue them. Their shop on the Greene plantation had been forced by a
mob even before their patent was procured in 1793, and Jesse Bull, Charles
M. Lin and Edward Lyons, collaborating near Wrightsboro, soon put forth an
improved gin in which saw-toothed iron discs replaced the wire points of
the Whitney model.[16] Whitney had now returned to New Haven to establish
a gin factory, and Miller wrote him in 1794 urging prompt shipments and
saying: "The people of the country are running mad for them, and much can
be said to justify their importunity. When the present crop is harvested
there will be a real property of at least fifty thousand dollars lying
useless unless we can enable the holders to bring it to market," But an
epidemic prostrated Whitney's workmen that year, and a fire destroyed his
factory in 1795. Meanwhile rival machines were appearing in the market, and
Whitney and Miller were beginning their long involvement in lawsuits. Their
overreaching policy of monopolizing the operation of their gins turned
public sentiment against them and inclined the juries, particularly in
Georgia, to decide in favor of their opponents. Not until 1807, when their
patent was on the point of expiring did they procure a vindication in the
Georgia courts. Meanwhile a grant of $50,000 from the legislature of South
Carolina to extinguish the patent right in that state, and smaller grants
from North Carolina and Tennessee did little more than counterbalance
expenses.[17] A petition which Whitney presented to Congress in 1812 for a
renewal of his expired patent was denied, and Whitney turned his talents to
the manufacture of muskets.

[Footnote 15: _American Historical Review_. Ill, 104.]

[Footnote 16: J.A. Turner, ed., _Cotton Planter's Manual_, pp. 289, 290,
293-295.]

[Footnote 17: M.B. Hammond, "Correspondence of Eli Whitney relating to the
Invention of the Cotton Gin," in the _American Historical Review_, III,
90-127.]

In Georgia the contest of lawyers in the courts was paralleled by a battle
of advertisers in the newspapers. Thomas Spaulding offered to supply Joseph
Eve's gins from the Bahama Islands at fifty guineas each;[18] and Eve
himself shortly immigrated to Augusta to contend for his patent rights on
roller-gins, for some of his workmen had changed his model in such a way as
to increase the speed, and had put their rival gins upon the market.[19]
Among these may have been John Currie, who offered exclusive county rights
at $100 each for the making, using and vending of his type of gins,[20]
also William Longstreet of Augusta who offered to sell gins of his own
devising at $150 each,[21] and Robert Watkins of the short-lived town of
Petersburg, Georgia, who denounced Longstreet as an infringer of his patent
and advertised local non-exclusive rights for making and using his own
style of gins at the bargain rate of sixty dollars.[22] All of these were
described as roller gins; but all were warranted to gin upland as well as
sea-island cotton.[23] By the year 1800 Miller and Whitney had also
adopted the practice of selling licenses in Georgia, as is indicated by an
advertisement from their agent at Augusta. Meanwhile ginners were calling
for negro boys and girls ten or twelve years old on hire to help at the
machines;[24] and were offering to gin for a toll of one-fifth of the
cotton.[25] As years passed the rates were still further lowered. At
Augusta in 1809, for example, cotton was ginned and packed in square bales
of 350 pounds at a cost of $1.50 per hundredweight.[26]

[Footnote 18: _Columbian Museum_ (Savannah, Ga.), April 26, 1796.]

[Footnote 19: J.A. Turner, ed., _Cotton Planter's Manual_, p. 281.]

[Footnote 20: Augusta, Ga., _Chronicle_, Dec. 10, 1796.]

[Footnote 21: _Southern Sentinel_ (Augusta, Ga.), July 14, 1796.]

[Footnote 22: _Ibid_., Feb. 7, 1797; Augusta _Chronicle_, June 10, 1797.]

[Footnote 23: Augusta _Chronicle_, Dec. 13, 1800.]

[Footnote 24: _Southern Sentinel_, April 23, 1795.]

[Footnote 25: Augusta _Chronicle_, Jan. 16, 1796.]

[Footnote 26: _Ibid_., Sept. 9, 1809.]

The upland people of Georgia and the two Carolinas made prompt response to
the new opportunity. By 1800 even Tennessee had joined the movement, and
a gin of such excellence was erected near Nashville that the proprietors
exacted fees from visitors wishing to view it;[27] and by 1802 not only
were consignments being shipped to New Orleans for the European market, but
part of the crop was beginning to be peddled in wagons to Kentucky and in
pole-boats on the Ohio as far as Pittsburg, for the domestic making of
homespun.[28] In 1805 John Baird advertised at Nashville that, having
received a commission from correspondents at Baltimore, he was ready to
buy as much as one hundred thousand pounds of lint at fifteen cents a
pound.[29] In the settlements about Vicksburg in the Mississippi Territory,
cotton was not only the staple product by 1809, but was also for the time
being the medium of exchange, while in Arkansas the squatters were debarred
from the new venture only by the poverty which precluded them from getting
gins.[30] In Virginia also, in such of the southerly counties as had
summers long enough for the crop to ripen in moderate security, cotton
growing became popular. But for the time being these were merely an
out-lying fringe of cotton's principality. The great rush to cotton growing
prior to the war of 1812 occurred in the Carolina-Georgia Piedmont, with
its trend of intensity soon pointing south-westward.

[Footnote 27: _Tennessee Gazette_ (Nashville, Tenn.), April 9, 1800.]

[Footnote 28: F.A. Michaux in Thwaites, ed., _Early Western Travels_, III,
252.]

[Footnote 29: _Tennessee Gazette_, March 27, 1805.]

[Footnote 30: F. Cuming, _Tour to the Western Country_ (Pittsburg, 1810),
in Thwaites, ed., _Early Western Travels_, IV, 272, 280, 298.]

A shrewd contemporary observer found special reason to rejoice that the new
staple required no large capital and involved no exposure to disease. Rice
and indigo, said he, had offered the poorer whites, except the few employed
as overseers, no livelihood "without the degradation of working with
slaves"; but cotton, stimulating and elevating these people into the rank
of substantial farmers, tended "to fill the country with an independent
industrious yeomanry."[31] True as this was, it did not mean that producers
on a plantation scale were at a disadvantage. Settlers of every type,
in fact, adopted the crop as rapidly as they could get seed and ginning
facilities, and newcomers poured in apace to share the prosperity.

[Footnote 31: David Ramsay, _History of South Carolina_ (Charleston, 1808),
II, 448-9.]

The exports mounted swiftly, but the world's market readily absorbed them
at rising prices until 1801 when the short-staple output was about forty
million pounds and the price at the ports about forty-four cents a pound.
A trade in slaves promptly arose to meet the eager demand for labor; and
migrants coming from the northward and the rice coast brought additional
slaves in their train. General Wade Hampton was the first conspicuous one
of these. With the masterful resolution which always characterized him, he
carried his great gang from the seaboard to the neighborhood of Columbia
and there in 1799 raised six hundred of the relatively light weight bales
of that day on as many acres.[32] His crop was reckoned to have a value of
some ninety thousand dollars.[33]

[Footnote 32: Seabrook, pp. 16, 17.]

[Footnote 33: Note made by L. C Draper from the Louisville, Ga., _Gazette_,
Draper MSS., series VV, vol. XVI, p. 84, Wisconsin Historical Society.]

The general run of the upland cultivators, however, continued as always to
operate on a minor scale; and the high cost of transportation caused them
generally to continue producing miscellaneous goods to meet their domestic
needs. The diversified regime is pictured in Michaux's description of a
North Carolina plantation in 1802: "In eight hundred acres of which it is
composed, a hundred and fifty are cultivated in cotton, Indian corn, wheat
and oats, and dunged annually, which is a great degree of perfection in the
present state of agriculture in this part of the country. Independent of
this [the proprietor] has built in his yard several machines that the same
current of water puts in motion; they consist of a corn mill, a saw mill,
another to separate the cotton seeds, a tan-house, a tan-mill, a distillery
to make peach brandy, and a small forge where the inhabitants of the
country go to have their horses shod. Seven or eight negro slaves are
employed in the different departments, some of which are only occupied at
certain periods of the year. Their wives are employed under the direction
of the mistress in manufacturing cotton and linen for the use of the
family."[34]

[Footnote 34: F.A. Michaux in Thwaites, ed., _Early Western Travels_, III,
292.]

The speed of the change to a general slaveholding regime in the uplands may
easily be exaggerated. In those counties of South Carolina which lay wholly
within the Piedmont the fifteen thousand slaves on hand in 1790 formed
slightly less than one-fifth of the gross population there. By 1800
the number of slaves increased by seventy per cent., and formed nearly
one-fourth of the gross; in the following decade they increased by ninety
per cent., until they comprised one-third of the whole; from 1810 to 1820
their number grew at the smaller rate of fifty per cent, and reached
two-fifths of the whole; and by 1830, with a further increase of forty per
cent., the number of slaves almost overtook that of the whites. The slaves
were then counted at 101,982, the whites at 115,318, and the free negroes
at 2,115. In Georgia the slave proportion grew more rapidly than this
because it was much smaller at the outset; in North Carolina, on the
other hand, the rise was less marked because cotton never throve there so
greatly.

In its industrial requirements cotton was much closer to tobacco than to
rice or sugar. There was no vital need for large units of production. On
soils of the same quality the farmer with a single plow, if his family did
the hoeing and picking, was on a similar footing with the greatest planter
as to the output per hand, and in similar case as to cost of production per
bale. The scale of cotton-belt slaveholdings rose not because free labor
was unsuited to the industry but because slaveholders from the outside
moved in to share the opportunity and because every prospering
non-slaveholder and small slaveholder was eager to enlarge his personal
scale of operations. Those who could save generally bought slaves with
their savings; those who could not, generally continued to raise cotton
nevertheless.