The Beginner's American History Part 19

179. A talk about raising cotton, and about cotton seeds.--Not long after this, a number of cotton-planters were at Mrs. Greene's house.

In speaking about raising cotton they said that the man who could invent a machine for stripping off the cotton seeds from the plant would make his fortune.

For what is called raw cotton or cotton wool, as it grows in the field, has a great number of little green seeds clinging to it. Before the cotton wool can be spun into thread and woven into cloth, those seeds must be pulled off.

[Ill.u.s.tration: POD OF THE COTTON PLANT WHEN RIPE AND OPEN. On the right a seed with the wool attached; on the left the seed after the wool has been picked off.]

At that time the planters set the negroes to do this. When they had finished their day's labor of gathering the cotton in the cotton field, the men, women, and children would sit down and pick off the seeds, which stick so tight that getting them off is no easy task.

[Ill.u.s.tration: NEGROES GATHERING COTTON IN THE FIELD.]

After the planters had talked awhile about this work, Mrs. Greene said, "If you want a machine to do it, you should apply to my young friend, Mr. Whitney; he can make anything." "But," said Mr. Whitney, "I have never seen a cotton plant or a cotton seed in my life"; for it was not the time of year then to see it growing in the fields.

180. Whitney gets some cotton wool; he invents the cotton-gin; what that machine did.--After the planters had gone, Eli Whitney went to Savannah and hunted about until he found, in some store or warehouse, a little cotton wool with the seeds left on it. He took this back with him and set to work to make a machine which would strip off the seeds.

He said to himself, If I fasten some upright pieces of wire in a board, and have the wires set very close together, like the teeth of a comb, and then pull the cotton wool through the wires with my fingers, the seeds, being too large to come through, will be torn off and left behind. He tried it, and found that the cotton wool came through without any seeds on it. Now, said he, if I should make a wheel, and cover it with short steel teeth, shaped like hooks, those teeth would pull the cotton wool through the wires better than my fingers do, and very much faster.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WHITNEY'S FIRST CONTRIVANCE FOR PULLING OFF THE COTTON SEEDS.]

He made such a wheel; it was turned by a crank; it did the work perfectly; so, in the year 1793, he had invented the machine the planters wanted.

Before that time it used to take one negro all day to clean a single pound of cotton of its seeds by picking them off one by one; now, Eli Whitney's cotton-gin,[5] as he called his machine, would clean a thousand pounds in a day.

[Footnote 5: Gin: a shortened form of the word _engine_, meaning any kind of a machine.]

181. Price of common cotton cloth to-day; what makes it so cheap; "King Cotton."--To-day nothing is much cheaper than common cotton cloth. You can buy it for ten or twelve cents a yard, but before Whitney invented his cotton-gin it sold for a dollar and a half a yard. A hundred years ago the planters at the south raised very little cotton, for few people could afford to wear it; but after this wonderful machine was made, the planters kept making their fields bigger and bigger. At last they raised so much more of this plant than of anything else, that they said, "Cotton is king." It was Eli Whitney who built the throne for that king; and although he did not make a fortune by his machine, yet he received a good deal of money for the use of it in some of the southern states.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CARRYING COTTON TO THE COTTON-GIN.]

Later, Mr. Whitney built a gun-factory near New Haven, Connecticut, at a place now called Whitneyville; at that factory he made thousands of the muskets which we used in our second war with England in 1812.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE "STAR SPANGLED BANNER."[6]]

[Footnote 6: In the war of 1812 the British war-s.h.i.+ps attacked Fort McHenry, one of the defences of Baltimore. Francis Scott Key, a native of Maryland, who was then detained on board a British man-of-war, anxiously watched the battle during the night; before dawn the firing ceased. Key had no means of telling whether the British had taken the fort until the sun rose; then, to his joy, he saw the American flag still floating triumphantly above the fort--that meant that the British had failed in their attack, and Key, in his delight, hastily wrote the song of the _Star Spangled Banner_ on the back of a letter which he had in his pocket. The song was at once printed, and in a few weeks it was known and sung from one end of the United States to the other.]

182. Summary.--About a hundred years ago (1793), Eli Whitney of Westboro', Ma.s.sachusetts, invented the cotton-gin, a machine for pulling off the green seeds from cotton wool, so that it may be easily woven into cloth. That machine made thousands of cotton-planters and cotton manufacturers rich, and by it cotton cloth became so cheap that everybody could afford to use it.

What name did a boy cut on a door? What did Eli make in that workshop?

What did he make while his father was away? What did his father say?

What did Eli's fiddle seem to say? What did Eli make next? How did he make his nails? Where did he go after he gave up making nails?

When he left college where did he go? What lady did he become acquainted with? What did he make for her? What did the cotton-planters say? What must be done to raw cotton before it can be made into cloth? Who did this work? What did Mrs. Greene say to the planters? What did Mr. Whitney say? What did he do? Tell how he made his machine. What did he call it? How many pounds of cotton would his cotton-gin clean in a day? How much could one negro clean? What is said about the price of cotton cloth? What did the planters say about cotton? Who built the throne for King Cotton? What did Mr.

Whitney build at Whitneyville? What did he make there?

THOMAS JEFFERSON (1743-1826)

183. How much cotton New Orleans sends to Europe; Eli Whitney's work; who it was that bought New Orleans and Louisiana for us.--To-day the city of New Orleans, near the mouth of the Mississippi River, sends more cotton to England and Europe than any other city in America.

If you should visit that city and go down to the riverside, you would see thousands of cotton bales[1] piled up, and hundreds of negroes loading them on ocean steamers. It would be a sight you would never forget.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LOADING COTTON AT NEW ORLEANS.]

Before Eli Whitney[2] invented his machine, we sent hardly a bale of cotton abroad. Now we send so much in one year that the bales can be counted by millions. If they were laid end to end, in a straight line, they would reach clear across the American continent from San Francisco to New York, and then clear across the ocean from New York to Liverpool, England. It was Eli Whitney, more than any other man, who helped to build up this great trade. But at the time when he invented his cotton-gin, we did not own New Orleans, or, for that matter, any part of Louisiana or of the country west of the Mississippi River. The man who bought New Orleans and Louisiana for us was Thomas Jefferson.

[Footnote 1: A bale or bundle of cotton is usually somewhat more than five feet long, and it generally weighs from 400 to 550 pounds. The cotton crop of this country in 1891 amounted to more than 8,650,000 bales; laid end to end, in a straight line, these bales would extend more than 8000 miles.]

[Footnote 2: 2 See paragraph 180.]

184. Who Thomas Jefferson was; Monticello;[3] how Jefferson's slaves met him when he came home from Europe.--Thomas Jefferson was the son of a rich planter who lived near Charlottesville in Virginia.[4] When his father died, he came into possession of a plantation of nearly two thousand acres of land, with forty or fifty negro slaves on it.

There was a high hill on the plantation, which Jefferson called Monticello, or the little mountain. Here he built a fine house. From it he could see the mountains and valleys of the Blue Ridge for an immense distance. No man in America had a more beautiful home, or enjoyed it more, than Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson's slaves thought that no one could be better than their master. He was always kind to them, and they were ready to do anything for him. Once when he came back from France, where he had been staying for a long time, the negroes went to meet his carriage. They walked several miles down the road; when they caught sight of the carriage, they shouted and sang with delight. They would gladly have taken out the horses and drawn it up the steep hill. When Jefferson reached Monticello and got out, the negroes took him in their arms, and, laughing and crying for joy, they carried him into the house. Perhaps no king ever got such a welcome as that; for that welcome was not bought with money: it came from the heart. Yet Jefferson hoped and prayed that the time would come when every slave in the country might be set free.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JEFFERSON'S HOME AT MONTICELLO.]

[Footnote 3: Monticello (Mon-ti-cel'lo).]

[Footnote 4: See map in paragraph 140.]

185. Thomas Jefferson hears Patrick Henry speak at Richmond.--Jefferson was educated to be a lawyer; he was not a good public speaker, but he liked to hear men who were. Just before the beginning of the Revolutionary War (1775), the people of Virginia sent men to the city of Richmond to hold a meeting in old St. John's Church. They met to see what should be done about defending those rights which the king of England had refused to grant the Americans.

One of the speakers at that meeting was a famous Virginian named Patrick Henry. When he got up to speak he looked very pale, but his eyes shone like coals of fire. He made a great speech. He said, "We must fight! I repeat it, sir,--we must _fight!_" The other Virginians agreed with Patrick Henry, and George Was.h.i.+ngton and Thomas Jefferson, with other noted men who were present at the meeting, began at once to make ready to fight.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "WE MUST FIGHT!"]

186. Thomas Jefferson writes the Declaration of Independence; how it was sent through the country.--Shortly after this the great war began. In a little over a year from the time when the first battle was fought, Congress asked Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and some others to write the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson really wrote almost every word of it. He was called the "Pen of the Revolution"; for he could write quite as well as Patrick Henry could speak.

The Declaration was printed and carried by men mounted on fast horses all over the United States. When men heard it, they rang the church bells and sent up cheer after cheer. General Was.h.i.+ngton had the Declaration read to all the soldiers in his army, and if powder had not been so scarce, they would have fired off every gun for joy.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.]

187. Jefferson is chosen President of the United States; what he said about New Orleans.--A number of years after the war was over Jefferson was chosen President of the United States; while he was President he did something for the country which will never be forgotten.

Louisiana and the city of New Orleans, with the lower part of the Mississippi River, then belonged to the French; for at that time the United States only reached west as far as the Mississippi River. Now as New Orleans stands near the mouth of that river, the French could say, if they chose, what vessels should go out to sea, and what should come in. So far, then, as that part of America was concerned, we were like a man who owns a house while another man owns one of the doors to it. The man who has the door could say to the owner of the house, I shall stand here on the steps, and you must pay me so many dollars every time you go out and every time you come in this way.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Map showing the extent of the United States at the close of the Revolution, and also when Jefferson became President (1801).]

Jefferson saw that so long as the French held the door of New Orleans, we should not be free to send our cotton down the river and across the ocean to Europe. He said we must have that door, no matter how much it costs.