rica, white or black, was never
and could never be as cheap as in India. American slaves could be much
more profitably employed in the cultivation of rice and indigo.

Three varieties of the cotton plant were grown in the South. Two kinds
of the black-seed or long-staple variety thrived in the sea-islands and
along the coast from Delaware to Georgia, but only the hardier and more
prolific green-seed or short-staple cotton could be raised inland. The
labor of cultivating and harvesting cotton of any kind was very great.
The fiber, growing in bolls resembling a walnut in size and shape,
had to be taken by hand from every boll, as it has to be today, for no
satisfactory cotton harvester has yet been invented. But in the case
of the green-seed or upland cotton, the only kind which could ever be
cultivated extensively in the South, there was another and more serious
obstacle in the way, namely, the difficulty of separating the fiber
from the seeds. No machine yet devised could perform this tedious and
unprofitable task. For the black-seed or sea-island cotton, the churka,
or roller gin, used in India from time immemorial, drawing the fiber
slowly between a pair of rollers to push out the seeds, did the work
imperfectly, but this churka was entirely useless for the green-seed
variety, the fiber of which clung closely to the seed and would yield
only to human hands. The quickest and most skillful pair of hands could
separate only a pound or two of lint from its three pounds of seeds in
an ordinary working day. Usually the task was taken up at the end of the
day, when the other work was done. The slaves sat round an overseer who
shook the dozing and nudged the slow. It was also the regular task for a
rainy day. It is not surprising, then, that cotton was scarce, that
flax and wool in that day were the usual textiles, that in 1783 wool
furnished about seventy-seven per cent, flax about eighteen per cent,
and cotton only about five per cent of the clothing of the people of
Europe and the United States.

That series of inventions designed for the manufacture of cloth, and
destined to transform Great Britain, the whole world, in fact, was
already completed in Franklin's time. Beginning with the flying shuttle
of John Kay in 1738, followed by the spinning jenny of James Hargreaves
in 1764, the water-frame of Richard Arkwright in 1769, and the mule of
Samuel Crompton ten years later, machines were provided which could spin
any quant