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