Carl and the Cotton Gin

by Sara Ware Bassett

"It didn't," returned his uncle. "Moreover it rendered the product very expensive, for it required a great number of slaves to clean any considerable quantity of cotton. I often think of the toil and misery that went into the cotton-growing of those slavery days. After working for a long stretch of hours in the blazing sun the negroes came in at night worn out. But were they allowed to rest? Perhaps some of them who had considerate owners were; but many, many others less fortunate were set to picking out seeds and lest they fall asleep at their task overseers prodded them with whips."

"Gee!"

"That was slavery, son," declared Captain Dillingham. "Do you wonder that Abraham Lincoln thought it would be worth even a war to rid this country of such an evil? Understand, I am not condemning all slave owners. Undoubtedly there were kind and humane ones just as there are to this day employers who are fair with their help. But urged on by commercial greed the temptation of the planters was to force the slaves to do more than was right, and as a result a great deal of cruelty was practiced. Had the primitive method of picking cotton by hand continued it is probable that slavery might have died a natural death without recourse to war, for many of the Southerners were reaching a point where the returns from cotton and tobacco were not sufficient to feed the army of slaves that swarmed over the plantations. To use a common phrase the slaves were eating their heads off. It was just at this juncture, however, that Eli Whitney came along with his cotton gin and in a twinkling the South became revolutionized and the problem of the legion of idle, profitless slaves was settled. They would now be idle and profitless no longer. Vast quantities of cotton could henceforth be planted and the negroes could cultivate and gather it. With Eli Whitney's gin to do the slow and hindering part of the process cotton-raising could be made a paying industry."

"Mr. Whitney bobbed up in the very nick of time, didn't he?" smiled Mary.

"For the financial prosperity of the South he did," her uncle responded. "But to the welfare of the negroes his advent was a fatal stroke. Slaves immediately were more in demand than they ever had been before. No mechanical device could take their place. Cotton must be planted, cultivated, and harvested by hand and the larger the cotton fields became, the harder the slaves were worked. The cotton crop became the staple product of the South. Many a Southerner who took up arms against the Union did so because he honestly believed that to free the slaves would mean the economic ruin of his section of the country."

"I never thought of that side of the question before," Mrs. McGregor murmured thoughtfully.

"Nor I," rejoined Carl.

"Nevertheless it is a fact none of us here in the North should forget," continued Captain Dillingham. "To the southern planter our point of view appeared unfair and grossly one-sided. It was easy enough for the North to say the slaves should be freed. They had no cotton fields and their prosperity was not dependent on the negroes. But to let the slaves go meant ruin for the South. It was not alone, you see, that their owners wished the profit derived from buying and selling them; they needed them to work. Never had the South had such an opportunity to coin wealth as that now opening. What wonder its residents were angry at having this dazzling prospect for fortune-making snatched away? Remember and take these facts into consideration when you think harshly of those who took up arms to defend slavery."

There was an instant's pause.

"Of course, however, none of this justifies slavery or makes it more right. The entire principle of it was wrong; it was un-Christian, unjust, and cruel, and the only honorable thing to do was to bring it to an end in this country. But that is another story altogether. What we are talking about now is the cotton itself; and to get a big view of this subject it is well to consider what was happening in the world just at this time, and why cotton was such a desirable commodity.