down, on the Kentucky side, were Limestone (now Maysville) and
Newport, opposite which some settlers were founding the city of
Cincinnati. Once past Cincinnati, all was unbroken wilderness till one
reached Louisville in Kentucky, beyond which few emigrants had yet
ventured to go.

[Illustration: %Cincinnati in 1802 (Fort Washington)%]

%207. Cotton Planting.%--The South, in 1790, was on the eve of a
great industrial revolution. The products of the states south of
Virginia had been tar, pitch, resin, lumber, rice, and indigo. But in
the years following the peace the indigo plants had been destroyed year
after year by an insect. As the plant was not a native of our country,
but was brought from the West Indies, it became necessary either to
import more seed plants, or to raise some other staple. Many chose the
latter course, and about 1787 began to grow cotton.

[Illustration: %Farmers' Castle (Belpre) in 1791%]

%208. Whitney and the Cotton Gin.%--The experiment succeeded, but a
serious difficulty arose. The cotton plant has pods which when ripe
split open and show a white woolly substance attached to seeds. Before
the cotton could be used, these seeds must be picked out, and as the
labor of cleaning was very great, only a small quantity could be sent to
market. It happened, however, that a young man from Massachusetts, named
Eli Whitney, was then living in Georgia, and he, seeing the need of a
machine to clean cotton, invented the cotton gin.[1] Till then, a negro
slave could not clean two pounds of cotton in a day. With the gin the
same slave in the same time could remove the seeds from a hundred
pounds. This solved the difficulty, and gave to the United States
another staple even greater in value than tobacco. In 1792 one hundred
and ninety-two thousand pounds of cotton were exported to Europe; in
1795, after the gin was invented, six million pounds were sent out of
the country. In 1894 no less than 4275 million pounds were raised and
either consumed or exported. Of all the marvelous inventions of our
countrymen, this produced the very greatest consequences. It made
cotton planting profitable; it brought immense wealth to the people of
the South every year; it covered New England with cotton mills; and by
making slave labor profitable it did more than anything else to fasten
slavery on the United States for seventy years, and finally to bring on
the Civil War, the most terrible struggle of modern times.

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