le price.

* Tompkins, "Cotton and Cotton Oil", p. 86.

Misfortune pursued the partners from the beginning. Whitney writes to
his father from New Haven in May, 1794, that his machines in Georgia are
working well, but that he apprehends great difficulty in manufacturing
them as fast as they are needed. In March of the following year he
writes again, saying that his factory in New Haven has been destroyed
by fire: "When I returned home from N. York I found my property all in
ashes! My shop, all my tools, material and work equal to twenty finished
cotton machines all gone. The manner in which it took fire is altogether
unaccountable." Besides, the partners found themselves in distress
for lack of capital. Then word came from England that the Manchester
spinners had found the ginned cotton to contain knots, and this was
sufficient to start the rumor throughout the South that Whitney's gin
injured the cotton fiber and that cotton cleaned by them was worthless.
It was two years before this ghost was laid. Meanwhile Whitney's
patent was being infringed on every hand. "They continue to clean great
quantities of cotton with Lyon's Gin and sell it advantageously while
the Patent ginned cotton is run down as good for nothing," writes Miller
to Whitney in September, 1797. Miller and Whitney brought suits against
the infringers but they could obtain no redress in the courts.

Whitney's attitude of mind during these troubles is shown in his
letters. He says the statement that his machines injure the cotton is
false, that the source of the trouble is bad cotton, which he ventures
to think is improved fifty per cent by the use of his gin, and that
it is absurd to say that the cotton could be injured in any way in the
process of cleaning. "I think," he says, writing to Miller, "you will
be able to convince the CANDID that this is quite a mistaken notion and
them that WILL NOT BELIEVE may be damn'd." Again, writing later to
his friend Josiah Stebbins in New England: "I have a set of the most
Depraved villains to combat and I might almost as well go to HELL in
search of HAPPINESS as apply to a Georgia Court for Justice." And
again: "You know I always believed in the 'DEPRAVITY OF HUMAN NATURE.'
I thought I was long ago sufficiently 'grounded and stablished' in this
Doctrine. But God Almighty is continually pouring down cataracts of
testimony upon me to convince me of this fact. 'Lord I believe,
help thou,' not 'mine unbelief,' bu