Eli Whitney & His Inventions

Most of us use this fabric in multiple capacities each and everyday but we think very little about where it comes from or how it is harvested. One man changed the way that it was harvested with his invention. He also greatly increased the exports of the Southern States and the importation of slaves.

 Eli Whitney was born in Massachusetts in 1765. He was born into a notable family. His father was a revolutionary war hero. He worked with his father in the families nail factory. His mother died when he was eleven. His stepmother did not want him to seek higher education. He worked as a schoolteacher to earn money for college. He entered Yale in May 1789 and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1792. He wanted to be a lawyer but ran out of money to secure this degree.   He had strived to become an engineer due to his great ability to work with machinery. There were no engineering jobs at the time so Eli Whitney accepted a teaching position on South Carolina.

Eli left the North to take the position and soon learned that Southerners needed a better and more efficient way to grow and harvest cotton. He was soon introduced to Catherine Greene a widow of General Nathanael Greene. He served as a general in the American Revelatory war. He also meet Phineas Miller. Phineas Miller was the plantation manager for Ms. Green. At a social meeting with Catherine Greene and other former revolutionary war veterans it was suggested that growing cotton was not profitable due to green-seed cotton was hard to deal with and took a long time to pick the seeds out.  The other party guests agreed with Ms. Green and Ms. Green suggested the Eli could build anything and help them out. Eli soon accepted an invitation from Ms. Green to stay at her plantation. Once he arrived he saw the first hand conditions of harvesting cotton.

 Eli worked in a back shed on an invention that would become the cotton gin.  The cotton gin were machines used to separate the cotton kernel from the seeds. Once it was produced it came in multiple varieties. It could be cranked by hand, driven by livestock or with water pressure. "One man and a horse will do more than fifty men with the old machines," wrote Whitney to his father.  Eli made the machine and applied for the patent. He could foresee that everywhere you looked on a plantation you could see a cotton gin machine. The cotton gin helped to expedite the production of cotton. It took far fewer slaves to pick the seeds out of the cotton. Eli applied for a patent for the cotton gin, which he first made in 1793, and Thomas Jefferson granted him the patent for his cotton gin in 1794. Thomas Jefferson was at the time secretary of state and in a letter back expressed interest in the cotton gin for his plantation in Virginia.

Eli started to mass produce the cotton gin with the help of his business partner Phineas Miller. Issues soon started to arise. There were multiple copies of Eli’s cotton gin out there and Georgia farmers resented the fact that they could not buy Eli’s machine but they would pay a fee of two fifths of the profit from their cotton sales to be paid in cotton. Most George farmers looked at this as a tax. Miller started filing lawsuits soon after against the other cotton gin manufactures but these were not successful until 1800 when the US patent laws were changed. Eli and Phineas had problems making a profit until after 1800 due to these legal issues.

It is true that the number of slaves needed decreased in relation to picking the seeds out of the cotton. But the importation of slave increased along with the demand for larger size plantations. The cotton gin made cotton a premier cash crop due to decreasing the production time. Most plantations owners increased the size of their plantations and planted more crops.

"Cotton growing became so profitable for the planters that it greatly increased their demand for both land and slave labor. In 1790 there were six slave states; in 1860 there were 15. From 1790 until Congress banned the importation of slaves from Africa in 1808, Southerners imported 80,000 Africans. By 1860 approximately one in three Southerners was a slave.”

Eli Whitney will always be remembered for his cotton gin invention. He also invented interchangeable parts. This started with the musket in 1798. Thus is ultimately what made Eli rich. The legal battles keep him form profit with the cotton gin.

I wonder did Eli Whitney see the evils that his machine helped or was he simply trying to help the south?

Resources:

Joan Brodsky Schur, “cotton gin patent,” archives.com, http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/cotton-gin-patent/ (accessed February 17, 2011).

Olmsted, Denison. 1846. Memoir of Eli Whitney, Esq. 1846: Durrie & Peck