This invention came at a most opportune time for slavery in the
United States, as the cheapness of rice, indigo, and other staples
of the South were such as to prevent their large and profitable
production even with the labor of slaves. Cotton was not, in 1794,
the date of Jay's treaty with Great Britain, known to him as an
article of export. Soon, by the use of the cotton-gin, cotton
became the principal article of export from the United States;
cotton plantations rapidly increased in size and number, and their
owners multiplied their slaves and grew rich. Cotton production
increased from 1793 to 1860 one thousand fold.

It is highly probably that Eli Whitney's cotton-gin operated to
prevent the much-hoped-for early emancipation of slaves in America,
and that thus the inventive genius of man was instrumental in
forging the fetters of man.

Other products, such as rice and sugar, were successfully produced
in the South, but the demand for them was limited by competition
in other countries, in some of which slave labor was employed.
The ease of producing cotton stimulated its common use throughout
the world, and it soon became a necessary commodity in all civilized
countries. "Cotton is king" was the cry of the slaveholder and
the exporter. Southern aristocracy rested on it. In the more
northern of the slave States, where cotton, on account of the
climate, could not be successfully grown, the breeding of slaves
with which to supply the cotton planters with the requisite number
of hands became a source of great profit; and the slave trade was
revived to aid in supplying the same great demand.

Tobacco and some of the cereals were also produced by slave labor,
but they could be produced by free labor North as well as South.
Of the above 3,000,000 slaves in the United States in 1850, it has
been estimated that 1,800,000 were employed in the growth and
preservation of cotton alone, and its value that year was $105,600,000,
while the sugar product was valued, the same year, at only $12,400,000,
and rice at $3,000,000. The total domestic exports for the year
ending 1850 were $137,000,000, of which cotton reached $72,000,000,
and all breadstuffs and provisions only $26,000,000.(29)

(29) DeBow's _Resource_, etc., vol. iii., p. 388.

VIII
FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW--1793

Contemporaneous with the cotton-gin came, in 1793, the first fugitive-
slave law.

The Constitution was not self-executing, if it really contained