CYRUS HALL McCORMICK
A little group of Negro slaves had spasms of uncomprehending delight in one corner of the field, not one of them guessing that “Massa” McCormick’s comical machine was cutting at the chains that bound their children. And a noisy crowd of white labourers followed the reaper up and down the field with boisterous enmity; for here was an invention which threatened to deprive them of the right to work—the precious right to work sixteen hours a day for three cents an hour.
The field was hilly and the reaper worked badly. It slewed and jolted along, cutting the grain very irregularly. Seeing this, the owner of the field—a man who was Ruff by name and rough by nature, rushed up to McCormick and shouted—“Here! This won’t do. Stop your horses! Your machine is rattling the heads off my wheat.” “It’s a humbug,” bawled one of the labourers. “Give me the old cradle yet, boys!” exclaimed a round-shouldered farmer. The Negroes turned handsprings with delight; and the whole jeering mob gathered around the discredited machine.
Just then a fine-looking man rode up on horseback. The crowd made way as he came near, for they recognised him as the Honourable William Taylor—a conspicuous politician of that day.
“Pull down the fence and cross over into my field,” he said to young McCormick. “I’ll give you a fair chance to try your machine.”
McCormick quickly accepted the offer, drove into Taylor’s field, which was not as hilly, and cut the grain successfully for four or five hours. Although the United States had been established more than fifty years before, this was the first grain that had ever been cut by machinery. The Fathers of the Republic had eaten the bread of hand-labour all their lives, and never dreamed that the human race would ever find a better way.
When he arrived home that evening, Cyrus thought that his troubles were over. He had reaped six acres of wheat in less than half a day—as much as six men would have done by the old-fashioned method. He had been praised as well as jeered at. “Your reaper is a success,” said his father, “and it makes me feel proud to have a son do what I could not do.”
Two Big Men had given him their approval—William Taylor and a Professor Bradshaw, of the Female Academy in the town of Lexington, Virginia. The professor, who was a pompous and positive individual, made a solemn investigation of the reaper, and then announced, in slow, loud, and emphatic tones—“That—machine—is—worth—a hundred—thousand—dollars.”
But if Cyrus McCormick hoped to wake up the following morning and find himself rich and famous, he was roughly disappointed. The local excitement soon died out, and in a few days the men in the village store were discussing Webster’s last speech against Nullification and Andrew Jackson’s war against the bankers. One old woman expressed the general feeling by saying that young McCormick’s reaper was “a right, smart curious sort of thing, but it won’t come to much.”