ad but one thought--how to rid their plantations of their mortgages. It
happened that the conversation turned upon some possible mechanism for
cleaning the cotton. Mrs. Greene turned to her guests, and, reminding
Eli Whitney, a young New Englander who was in her home teaching her
children, that he had invented two or three playthings for her children,
suggested that he turn his attention to the problem.

Young Whitney had no tools, but he soon made them; had no wire, but he
drew his own wire, and within a few months he perfected the cotton gin.
When the cat climbs upon the crate filled with chickens, it thrusts its
paw between the laths and pulls off the feathers, leaving the chicken
behind the laths. Young Whitney substituted wires for laths, and a
toothed wheel for the cat's paw, and soon pulled all the cotton out at
the top, leaving the seeds to drop through a hole in the bottom of the
gin. Within a year every great planter had a carpenter manufacturing
gins for the fields. With Whitney's machine one man in a single day
could clean more cotton than ten negroes could clean in an entire
winter. Planters annexed wild land, a hundred acres at a time. For the
first time the South was able to supply all the cotton that England's
manufacturers desired. The cities in England awakened to redoubled
industry. Southern cotton lands jumped from $5 to $50 an acre. Whitney
found the South producing 10,000 bales in 1793. Sixty years later it
produced 4,000,000 bales. Historians affirm that this single invention
added $1,000,000,000 as a free gift to the planters of the South.

Although Eli Whitney took out patents, every planter infringed them.
Whole States organized movements to fight Whitney before the courts. In
1808, when his patent expired, he was poorer than when he began. Feeling
that the Southern planters had robbed him of the legitimate reward of
his invention, Whitney came North and gave himself to the study of
firearms. He invented what is now known as the Colt's revolver, the
Remington rifle and the modern machine gun. Beginning with the feeling
that he had been robbed of his just rights by Southern planters, Whitney
ended by inventing the very weapons that deprived the planters of their
slaves and preserved the Union.

But the new prosperity and the increased acreage for cotton in the South
created an enormous market for slaves, and soon the sea swarmed with
slave ships. Prices advanced five hundred per cent, until a s