vention in history ever so
suddenly transformed an industry and created enormous wealth. Eight
years before Whitney's invention, eight bales of cotton, landed at
Liverpool, were seized on the ground that so large a quantity of cotton
could not have been produced in the United States. The year before that
invention the United States exported less than one hundred and forty
thousand pounds of cotton; the year after it, nearly half a million
pounds; the next year over a million and a half; a year later still,
over six million; by 1800, nearly eighteen million pounds a year. And
by 1845 the United States was producing producing seven-eighths of the
world's cotton. Today the United States produces six to eight billion
pounds of cotton annually, and ninety-nine per cent of this is the
upland or green-seed cotton, which is cleaned on the Whitney type of gin
and was first made commercially available by Whitney's invention.*

* Roe, "English and American Tool Builders", pp. 150-51.

More than half of this enormous crop is still exported in spite of the
great demand at home. Cotton became and has continued to be the greatest
single export of the United States. In ordinary years its value is
greater than the combined value of the three next largest exports. It
is on cotton that the United States has depended for the payment of its
trade balance to Europe.

Other momentous results followed on the invention of the cotton gin. In
1793 slavery seemed a dying institution, North and South. Conditions of
soil and climate made slavery unprofitable in the North. On many of
the indigo, rice, and tobacco plantations in the South there were
more slaves than could be profitably employed, and many planters were
thinking of emancipating their slaves, when along came this simple but
wonderful machine and with it the vision of great riches in cotton; for
while slaves could not earn their keep separating the cotton from its
seeds by hand, they could earn enormous profits in the fields, once the
difficulty of extracting the seeds was solved. Slaves were no longer a
liability but an asset. The price of "field hands" rose, and continued
to rise. If the worn-out lands of the seaboard no longer afforded
opportunity for profitable employment, the rich new lands of the
Southwest called for laborers, and yet more laborers. Taking slaves with
them, younger sons pushed out into the wilderness, became possessed of
great tracts of fertile land, and bu