After the Revolution, when the Cherokees went on the warpath, the Virginia settlement was in a state of great alarm. Men, women, and children met together, and decided that it would be safer to camp in the woods in a body at night rather than run the risk of being burned to death in houses that they could not defend. They went into the depths of the woods and made an encampment. One night while they were around a fire, cooking their supper, suddenly the report of a gun was heard, and then there was a cry of "Indians!" The men seized their guns; but they hardly knew where to turn, or what to do. Suddenly a lad who had not lost his head emptied a bucket of water on the fire. This was the thing to do, but no one else had thought of it. The name of the lad was Meriwether Lewis. He went into the regular army, became the private secretary of President Jefferson, and was selected to head the party that explored the Territory of Louisiana, which had been bought from France. Meriwether Lewis selected for his companion Captain Clark, an old army friend and comrade. Leading the party, Lewis and his friend Clark left St. Louis, and pushed westward to the Pacific coast, through dangers and obstacles that few men would have cared to meet. The famous expedition of Lewis and Clark has now become a part of the history of the country. Lewis took possession of the Pacific coast in the name of the United States. There was a controversy with Great Britain some years afterwards as to the title of Oregon, but that which Lewis and Clark had established was finally acknowledged to be the best.
Meriwether Lewis won a name in history because the opportunity came to him. His name is mentioned here because he was a representative of the men who settled Upper Georgia,—the men who kept the fires of liberty alive in the State, and who, after helping to conquer the British and the Tories, became the conquerors of the wilderness that lay to the west of them. From Wilkes, Burke, Elbert, and the region where Clarke and his men had fought, the tide of emigration slowly moved across the State, settling Greene, Hancock, Baldwin, Putnam, Morgan, Jasper, Butts, Monroe, Coweta, Upson, Pike, Meriwether, Talbot, Harris, and Muscogee counties.
Some of the more adventurous crossed the Chattahoochee into Alabama, and on into the great Mississippi Valley and beyond. Their descendants live in every part of the South; and Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas have had Georgians for their governors, and their senators and representatives in Congress,—men who were descended from the Virginia and North Carolina immigrants. One of the most brilliant of these was Mirabeau B. Lamar, scholar, statesman, and soldier, the president of Texas when that Territory had declared itself a free and an independent republic.
THE COTTON GIN.
Brief mention has been made of Whitney's invention of the cotton gin. The event was of such world-wide importance that the story should be told here. Whitney, the inventor of the gin, was born in Massachusetts in 1765, in very poor circumstances. While the War of the Revolution was going on, he was earning his living by making nails by hand. He was such an apt mechanic that he was able to make and save enough money to pay his way through Yale College, where he graduated in 1792. In that year he engaged himself to come to Georgia as a private tutor in the family of a gentleman of Savannah; but when he reached that city, he found that the place had been filled.
While in Savannah, Whitney attracted the attention of the widow of General Nathanael Greene, who lived at Mulberry Grove, on the river at no great distance from the city. Mrs. Greene invited the young man to make his home on her plantation. He soon found opportunity to show his fine mechanical genius, and Mrs. Greene became more interested in him than ever.
The story goes, that soon after the young man had established himself on the Mulberry Grove Plantation, several Georgia planters were dining with Mrs. Greene. During their conversation the difficulty of removing the seed from the cotton fiber was mentioned, and the suggestion was made that this might be done by machinery. At this Mrs. Greene mentioned the skill and ingenuity of young Whitney, and advised her guests that he should be given the problem to solve. This advice was followed. The planters had a talk with the young man, and explained to him the difficulty which they found in separating the seed from the lint.
At that time one pound of lint cotton was all that a negro woman could separate from the seed in a day; and the more cotton the planters raised, the deeper they got in debt. The close of the war had found them in a state of the utmost poverty, so that they had been compelled to mortgage their lands in order to get money on which to begin business. Cotton was the only product of the farm for which there was any constant demand; but, owing to the labor of separating the lint from the seed, it could not be raised at a profit. Thus, in 1791, the number of pounds exported from the South to Europe amounted to only about 379 bales of 500 pounds each.
When the planters went to Whitney with their problem, he was entirely ignorant of the whole matter. He knew nothing of cotton or of cotton planting; but he at once set himself at work. He made a careful study of the cotton plant. He shut himself in a room with some uncleaned cotton, and worked at his task during a whole winter. He made his own tools at the plantation blacksmith shop; and all day long, and sometimes far into the night, he could be heard hammering and sawing away.