"Gentlemen," said Mrs. Greene, "tell this to my young friend, Mr. Whitney.
Verily, I believe he can make anything." As a result of this conversation,
in two or three months Eli Whitney had invented the cotton-gin (1793),
although in so doing he had to make all his own tools.
The cotton-gin brought about great changes. Before its invention it took a
slave a whole day to separate the seed from five or six pounds of cotton
fibre. But by the use of the cotton-gin he could separate the seed from a
thousand pounds in a single day.
[Illustration: Whitney's Cotton-Gin.]
This, of course, meant that cotton could be sold for very much less than
before, and hence there arose a much greater demand for it. It meant,
also, that the labor of slaves was of more value than before, and hence
there was a greater demand for slaves.
As slavery now became such an important feature of southern life, let us
pause for a glimpse of a southern plantation where slaves are at work. If
we are to see such life in its pleasantest aspects, we may well go back to
Virginia in the old days before the Civil War. There the slaves led a
freer and easier life than they did farther south among the rice-fields of
South Carolina or the cotton-fields of Georgia.
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