om America.
It changed the very history of the country when, in 1793, Eli Whitney
invented the saw-gin, by which a slave could clean 1,000 pounds of
cotton per day. Slavery at once ceased to be a passive, innocuous
institution, promising soon to die out, and became a means of gain, to
be upheld and extended in all possible ways. The cotton export, but
189,316 pounds in 1791, and a third less in 1792, rose to 487,600 pounds
in 1793, to 1,610,760 pounds in 1794, to 6,276,300 pounds in 1795, and
to 38,118,041 pounds in 1804. Within five years after Whitney's
invention, cotton displaced indigo as the great southern staple, and the
slave States had become the cotton-field of the world. In 1869 the
export was nearly 1,400,000,000 pounds, worth about $161,500,000.
[Footnote: Johnson, in Lalor's Cyclopaedia, Art. "Slavery."]

So profitable was slavery to vast numbers of individuals because of this
its new status, that men would not notice how, after all, it militated
against the nation's supreme interests. It polluted social relations in
obvious ways, setting at naught among slaves family ties and the behests
of virtue, influences that reacted terribly upon the whites. The entire
government of slaves had a brutalizing tendency, more pronounced as time
passed. "Plantation manners" were cultivated, which, displaying
themselves in Congress and elsewhere, in all discussions and measures
relating to the execrable institution, made the North believe that the
South was drifting toward barbarism. This was an exaggeration, yet
everyone knew that schools in the South were rare and poor, and thought
and speech little free as compared with the same in the North. Political
power, like the slaves, was in the hands of a few great barons, totally
merciless toward even southerners who differed from them. It is of course
not meant that virtue, kindliness, intelligence, and fair-mindedness
were ever wanting in that section, but they flourished in spite of the
slave-system.

Economically slavery was an equal evil, taking as was the superficial
evidence to the contrary. No cruelty could make the slave work like a
free man, while his power to consume was enormous. Infants, aged, and
weak had to be supported by the owner. Even the best slaves were
improvident. Everywhere slave labor tended to banish free. Upon slave
soil scarcely an immigrant could be led to set foot. Poor whites grew
steadily poorer, their lot often more wretched than that of slave