ilt up larger plantations than those
upon which they had been born. Cotton became King of the South.

The supposed economic necessity of slave labor led great men to defend
slavery, and politics in the South became largely the defense of slavery
against the aggression, real or fancied, of the free North. The rift
between the sections became a chasm. Then came the War of Secession.

Though Miller was dead, Whitney carried on the fight for his rights
in Georgia. His difficulties were increased by a patent which the
Government at Philadelphia issued in May, 1796, to Hogden Holmes, a
mechanic of Augusta, for an improvement in the cotton gin. The Holmes
machines were soon in common use, and it was against the users of these
that many of the suits for infringement were brought. Suit after suit
ran its course in the Georgia courts, without a single decision in the
inventor's favor. At length, however, in December, 1806, the validity of
Whitney's patent was finally determined by decision of the United States
Circuit Court in Georgia. Whitney asked for a perpetual injunction
against the Holmes machine, and the court, finding that his invention
was basic, granted him all that he asked.

By this time, however, the life of the patent had nearly run its course.
Whitney applied to Congress for a renewal, but, in spite of all his
arguments and a favorable committee report, the opposition from the
cotton States proved too strong, and his application was denied. Whitney
now had other interests. He was a great manufacturer of firearms, at New
Haven, and as such we shall meet him again in a later chapter.

CHAPTER III. STEAM IN CAPTIVITY

For the beginnings of the enslavement of steam, that mighty giant whose
work has changed the world we live in, we must return to the times of
Benjamin Franklin. James Watt, the accredited father of the modern steam
engine, was a contemporary of Franklin, and his engine was twenty-one
years old when Franklin died. The discovery that steam could be
harnessed and made to work is not, of course, credited to James Watt.
The precise origin of that discovery is unknown. The ancient Greeks had
steam engines of a sort, and steam engines of another sort were pumping
water out of mines in England when James Watt was born. James Watt,
however, invented and applied the first effective means by which steam
came to serve mankind. And so the modern steam engine begins with him.

The story is old, of how this Sc