and a man who is in fear of making a fool of himself is hardly fitted for an amatory career. & 3 At quick step, with drums beating, the long blue thread of soldiers passes through the gates at Jefferson Barracks. The regiment is on its way to Louisiana, to Texas, to a land of coppery suns and burning plains. War with Mexico is to be on the next page of American history and the page is turning. The war between the United States and Mexico, if you look at it in one way, was a historical melodrama with Texas appearing on the stage as a weeping heroine, tearful and vociferous, with a shotgun concealed under her cloak. She appealed to the United States to rescue her from the Mexican dragon; but long before her rescuer appeared she had rescued herself. If you look at it from another point of view, it was simply a case of international highway robbery, brutally frank, with Mexico as the victim. Both of these conceptions are misleading. They are mere bubbles on the surface of events. The real cause of the Mexican War ran through our history as the Gulf Stream runs through the ocean. To understand its true significance we must go back to the last decade of the eighteenth century. CHAPTER V THE RESULTS OF INVENTIVE GENIUS §1 'N the year 1793 a young man on a Georgia plantation I tinkered with a contraption that resembled an old-fash ioned music box, crudely contrived out of odd pieces of board and a wooden roller with wires projecting from it. The young man's name was Eli Whitney, and his device was the first cotton gin. He was a Yankee, a graduate of Yale, with the clipped nasal tone of New England in his speech. Having come to Georgia with the hope of being a school teacher, he stayed with the family of the late General Greene while waiting for his school to materialize. In a letter to his father he said: I heard much said of the extreme difficulty of ginning cotton, that is, separating it from its seeds. There were a number of respectable gentlemen at Mrs. Greene's who all agreed that if a machine could be invented which would clean the cotton with expedition, it would be a great thing both to the country and to the inventor. I involuntarily happened to be thinking on the subject and struck out a plan of a machine in my mind. ... Within ten days he had made a rough model of a cotton gin. It worked so well that he gave up the idea of teaching school and devoted himself to perfecting his invention. I made one before I came away, which required the labor of one man to turn it and with which one man will clean ten times as much cotton as he can in any other way before known and also cleanse it much better than in the usual mode. At that period slavery was losing ground as an American institution. Many Southerners of ability and foresight were abolitionists while the Northern people had hardly begun to think of the slavery question at all. Washington, Jefferson and most of the enlightened Southern statesmen of the epoch were opposed to slavery and deplored its existence. They considered it uneconomic, and a dead drag on Southern industry. But they did not know what to do about it. Washington hoped that some form of gradual emancipation would eventually be adopted. Jefferson advocated the colonizing of the negroes in Africa, or elsewhere, and he almost succeeded in having his colonization plan incorporated into the Virginia state constitution. Cotton-growing, which became the backbone of the slave system in the half-century that preceded the Civil War, was a negligible industry in the 1790's. Before the invention of the cotton gin the task of separating one pound of cotton from its seed required eight or ten hours of labor. A field-hand could raise about twenty-five hundred pounds of cotton in a season, on good land, but the separation of the seed and fiber would then require the work of twenty-five slaves for one hundred days. These circumstances made it impossible to produce cotton on a large scale. Slavery was concentrated in the warm, damp lands of the seacoast, where the chief crops were rice, indigo and tobacco. In the cultivation of these products animal drudgery was worth more than intelligence. This condition of affairs was affected profoundly by the new method of ginning cotton. The immense uncleared regions back of the coast became available for cotton planting, and it was found that a negro was worth as much in a cotton field The Cotton Gin 65 as in a rice swamp. Within five years after Whitney had puttered over his contrivance, the entire South blazed with the energy of new lands and new fortunes. White cotton fields appeared on the red soil of the upland counties. The movement from the coast to the upland regions was equaled by that from east to west. Planters from the Carolinas carried small armies of slaves to the rich young lands of Mississippi. Slavery ran like a tidal wave across the Gulf states. Whitney's invention was the most momentous achievement of a single individual that has ever occurred on the American continent. It made cotton one of the great agricultural products of the United States. It put fresh life into the languid institution of slavery, perpetuated the slave system, and created a new Southern aristocracy. Without the cotton gin, there can be hardly a doubt that the Civil War would not have happened. Slavery would have died peaceably of economic anemia. The Southern states would have done away with it on their own initiative. In the historical background of Grant's career Whitney and his cotton gin are gigantic figures. In a genealogy that is almost Biblical in its directness we may say that Grant came from the Civil War; the Civil War came from cotton; and cotton came from Eli Whitney. 82 The production of cotton by slave labor, as it was generally carried on, was wasteful in the extreme. Most of the planters were shiftless and unbusinesslike. They seldom used fertilizers and hardly any attempt was made, by rotation of crops, or otherwise, to maintain the productivity of the soil, for land was abundant and cheap. The planter would have his slaves clear the ground in a haphazard fashion, plant cotton on it for a few years until it was worn out and full of gullies-and then clear new fields. There were, of course, exceptions to this general rule. In the bright glow of cotton-made fortunes the Southern idea of emancipating the negro slowly faded to a shadow. But what of the North? Long before the Revolution it had been found that negroes were not worth their keep on Northern farms, and so slavery gradually disappeared, but there was no emphatic feeling against it in the great mass of Northern people. The opposition to slavery was kept alive by small groups of intelligentsia, or reformers, who were disliked by their neighbors. In Northern communities they held about the same place in popular esteem that is occupied to-day by radical socialists and communists. The first definite crystallization of Northern antagonism to slavery was not moral, but political, and was brought about by the intense ambition of the Southern leaders to maintain control of the national government. They created a Southern oligarchy in Congress which was so nearly airtight that hardly any measure proposed by a Northern Congressman-unless it happened to be entirely without bearing on Southern affairscould get itself passed. The Southern theory of gradual emancipation died, but it died hard, and echoes of it were heard for many years. It is surprising to learn that even as late as 1826 there were one hundred and three emancipation societies in the Southern states. Free negroes were considered citizens in North Carolina, and voted in that state until 1835, when a new state constitution deprived them of the franchise. Many wealthy Southerners followed the example of George Washington and left provision in their wills for the freeing of their slaves. Owing to this and other causes the number of free negroes in the South was greatly increased. In 1840 nearly ten per cent of all Southern negroes were free. These freedmen were much restricted in their activities by municipal laws, but in the mass of documents on the subject one comes across many |