The Clermont.
III.
ELI WHITNEY.
Eli Whitney.
In 1784 an American vessel arrived at Liverpool having on board, as part of her cargo, eight bags of cotton, which were seized by the Custom-House under the conviction that they could not be the growth of America. The whole amount of cotton arriving at Liverpool from America during the two following years was less than one hundred and twenty bags. When Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton-gin, applied for his first patent in 1793, the total export of cotton from the United States was less than ten thousand bales. Fifty years later, the growth of this industry, owing almost wholly to Whitney's gin, had increased to millions of bales, and by 1860, the export amounted to four million bales.