This fact is easily explained by the remarkable series of inventions that revolutionized this industry between 1738 and 1830, including Arkwright's, Watt's, Compton's, and Cartwright's epoch making contrivances. The effect which these inventions had on the manufacture of cotton goods is best illustrated by the fact that in England, the chief cotton market of the world, the consumption of raw cotton rose steadily from 13,000 bales in 1781, to 572,000 in 1820, to 871,000 in 1830, and to 3,366,000 in 1860. Very early, therefore, came the query whence the supply of raw cotton was to come. Tentative experiments on the rich, broad fields of the Southern United States, together with the indispensable invention of Whitney's cotton gin, soon answered this question. A new economic future was opened up to this land, and immediately the whole South began to extend its cotton culture, and more and more to throw its whole energy into this one staple.

Here it was that the fatal mistake of compromising with slavery in the beginning, and of the policy of laissez-faire pursued thereafter, became painfully manifest; for, instead now of a healthy, normal, economic development along proper industrial lines, we have the abnormal and fatal rise of a slave-labor, large-farming system, which, before it was realized, had so intertwined itself with and braced itself upon the economic forces of an industrial age, that a vast and terrible civil war was necessary to displace it. The tendencies to a patriarchal serfdom, recognized in the age of Washington and Jefferson, began slowly but surely to disappear; and in the second quarter of the century Southern slavery was irresistibly changing from a family institution to an industrial system.

DuBois, "Suppression of the Slave Trade," p. 151.

A list of the chief inventions most graphically illustrates the above:—

1738,John Jay, fly shuttle.
John Wyatt, spinning by rollers.
1748,Lewis Paul, carding machine.
1760,Robert Kay, drop box.
1769,Richard Arkwright, water-frame and throstle.
James Watt, steam-engine.
1772,James Lees, improvements on carding-machine.
1775,Richard Arkwright, series of combinations.
1779,Samuel Compton, mule.
1785,Edmund Cartwright, power-loom.
1803-4,Radcliffe and Johnson, dressing-machine.
1817,Roberts, fly-frame.
1818,William Eaton, self-acting frame.
1825-30,Roberts, improvements on mule.

Cf. Baines, "History of the Cotton Manufactures," pp. 116-23; "Encyclopædia Britannica," 9th ed., article "Cotton."

Note 2

In 1832, Alabama declared that "any person or persons who shall attempt to teach any free person of color or slave to spell, read, or write, shall, upon conviction thereof by indictment, be fined in a sum not less than $250, nor more than $500."

Georgia, in 1770, fined any person who taught a slave to read or write twenty pounds. In 1829 the State enacted:

"If any slave, Negro or free person of color, or any white person, shall teach any other slave, Negro or free person of color to read or write, either written or printed characters, the same free person of color or slave shall be punished by fine and whipping, or fine or whipping, at the discretion of the court; and if a white person so offend, he, she or they shall be punished with a fine not exceeding $500 and imprisonment in the common jail at the discretion of the court."