could obtain his patent,
cotton gins based on his were being manufactured and used.

Whitney received his patent in March, 1794, and entered on his new
work with enthusiasm. His partner, Phineas Miller, was a cultivated New
England gentleman, a graduate of Yale College, who, like Whitney, had
sought his fortune as a teacher in the South. He had been a tutor in
the Greene household and on General Greene's death had taken over
the management of his estates. He afterwards married Mrs. Greene. The
partners decided to manufacture the machines in New Haven, Whitney
to give his time to the production, Miller to furnish the capital and
attend to the firm's interests in the South.

At the outset the partners blundered seriously in their plan for
commercializing the invention. They planned to buy seed cotton and clean
it themselves; also to clean cotton for the planters on the familiar
toll system, as in grinding grain, taking a toll of one pound of cotton
out of every three. "Whitney's plan in Georgia," says a recent writer,
"as shown by his letters and other evidence, was to own all the gins and
gin all the cotton made in the country. It is but human nature that this
sort of monopoly should be odious to any community."* Miller appears to
have calculated that the planters could afford to pay for the use of the
new invention about one-half of all the profits they derived from its
use. An equal division, between the owners of the invention on the one
hand and the cotton growers on the other, of all the super-added wealth
arising from the invention, seemed to him fair. Apparently the full
meaning of such an arrangement did not enter his mind. Perhaps Miller
and Whitney did not see at first that the new invention would cause a
veritable industrial revolution, or that the system they planned, if it
could be made effective, would make them absolute masters of the cotton
country, with the most stupendous monopoly in the world. Nor do they
appear to have realized that, considering the simple construction of
their machine and the loose operation of the patent law at that time,
the planters of the South would never submit to so great a tribute as
they proposed to exact. Their attempt in the first instance to set up
an unfair monopoly brought them presently into a sea of troubles, which
they never passed out of, even when they afterwards changed their tack
and offered to sell the machines with a license, or a license alone, at
a reasonab