are not found to be a very troublesome
species of property ere many years have passed over our heads."[1] But at
that very time the addition of cotton and sugar to the American staples was
on the point of transforming the slaveholders' prospects.

[Footnote 1: New York Public Library _Bulletin_, 1898, pp. 14, 15.]

For centuries cotton had been among the world's materials for cloth,
though the dearth of supply kept it in smaller use than wool or flax. This
continued to be the case even when the original sources in the Orient were
considerably supplemented from the island of Bourbon and from the colonies
of Demarara, Berbice and Surinam which dotted the tropical South American
coast now known as Guiana. Then, in the latter half of the eighteenth
century, the great English inventions of spinning and Weaving machinery so
cheapened the manufacturing process that the world's demand for textiles
was immensely stimulated. Europe was eagerly inquiring for new fiber
supplies at the very time when the plantation states of America were under
the strongest pressure for a new source of income.

The green-seed, short-staple variety of cotton had long been cultivated
for domestic use in the colonies from New Jersey to Georgia, but on such a
petty scale that spinners occasionally procured supplies from abroad. Thus
George Washington, who amid his many activities conducted a considerable
cloth-making establishment, wrote to his factor in 1773 that a bale of
cotton received from England had been damaged in transit.[2] The cutting
off of the foreign trade during the war for independence forced the
Americans to increase their cotton production to supply their necessities
for apparel. A little of it was even exported at the end of the war, eight
bags of which are said to have been seized by the customs officers at
Liverpool in 1784 on the ground that since America could not produce so
great a quantity the invoice must be fraudulent. But cotton was as yet kept
far from staple rank by one great obstacle, the lack of a gin. The fibers
of the only variety at hand clung to the seed as fast as the wool to the
sheep's back. It had to be cut or torn away; and because the seed-tufts
were so small, this operation when performed by hand was exceedingly slow
and correspondingly expensive. The preparation of a pound or two of lint a
day was all that a laborer could accomplish.

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