rka partially cleaned India cotton. A Yankee
schoolmaster, Eli Whitney, set King Cotton on a throne by his invention
of the cotton-gin in 1792. This comparatively simple but inestimable
invention completely revolutionized cloth manufacture in England and
America. It also changed general commerce, industrial development, and
the social and economic order of things, for it gave new occupations and
offered new modes of life to hundreds of thousands of persons. It
entirely changed and cheapened our dress, and altered rural life both in
the North and South.

A man could, by hand-picking, clean only about a pound of cotton a day.
The cotton-gin cleaned as much in a day as had taken the hand-picker a
year to accomplish. Cotton was at once planted in vast amounts; but it
certainly was not plentiful till then. Whitney had never seen cotton nor
cotton seed when he began to plan his invention; nor did he, even in
Savannah, find cotton to experiment with until after considerable
search.

After the universal manufacture and use of the cotton-gin, negro women
wove cotton in Southern houses, sometimes spinning their own cotton
thread; more frequently buying it mill-spun. But, after all, this was in
too small amounts to be of importance; it needed the spinning-jennies
and power-looms of vast mills to use up the profuse supply afforded by
the gin.

A very interesting account of the domestic manufacture of cotton in
Tennessee about the year 1850 was written for me by Mrs. James Stuart
Pilcher, State Regent of the Daughters of the American Revolution in
Tennessee. A portion of her pleasant story reads:--

"There were two looms in the loom-room, and two negro women were
kept busy all the time weaving; there were eight or ten others who
did nothing but spin cotton and woollen thread; others spooled and
reeled it into hanks. The spinning was all done on the large wheel,
from the raw cotton; a corn-shuck was wrapped tightly around the
steel spindle, then the thread was run and spun on this shuck until
it was full; then these were reeled off into hanks of thread, then
spooled on to corn-cobs with holes burned through them. These were
placed in an upright frame, with long slender rods of hickory wood
something like a ramrod run through them. The frame held about one
hundred of these cob-spools; the end of the cotton thread from
each spool was gathered up by an experienced warper wh