The history of cotton in America is a cornerstone of the early American experience. And to a lesser degree it resulted in the tribulations we are still struggling with today. So much of what we were to become can be traced to something as simple as a technical innovation.

The South didn’t always grow huge quantities of cotton. In the late 1700’s, there were two principal types of cotton: black-seed, or sea-island cotton, and green-seed, or upland cotton. Sea-island cotton, imported from the Bahamas when Southern planters failed with several other varieties, only grew on some of the coasts and the islands of Georgia and South Carolina. This type of cotton produced a long, silky fiber and sold at high prices. But the most important quality that separated it from the upland cotton was that the cotton seeds could be removed with little effort. To remove the seeds, the cotton was fed between two simple rollers and the seeds were easily squeezed out. However, with so little available acreage on which to grow sea-island cotton, its real economic value was small.

The green-seed cotton was a different story. Although it sold for less than the sea-island cotton, it could be grown just about anywhere and its yield per acre was greater. However, this short-staple variety, the one that piqued the planters’ interest, had a severe drawback: the seeds clung to the cotton fiber with such ferocity that it required an entire day for one individual to separate one pound of fiber from the seeds. This task made it too expensive to produce in large amounts; therefore, it was very seldom grown in the United States. For the time being, growing cotton on a large scale in the South was not to be.

At about the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, a transformation was occurring – the beginning of England’s industrial revolution and the factory system. The invention of the steam engine was changing the way Britain approached the business of manufacturing.

Early in British history, wool was the fabric of choice. It was woven by skilled craftsmen and produced through a cottage industry. It was exported throughout Europe and was of great economic importance to England. Then, in 1599, a few ships from the East India Company brought back cotton textiles from India. It didn’t take long before the beauty and texture of the cotton cloth grabbed hold of the British, and the world.

While the demand for wool waned, the demand for cotton textiles increased, and England began to produce cotton cloth. The British used the steam engine and coal, extracted from British mines, to transform the textile business from the small-scale woolen cottage industry, built around the family as a small business, to a cotton factory system where the primary workers were women and children who operated cloth-making machines powered by the steam engine.

However, there was one hitch in the process: cotton had to be imported to produce cloth and then, in turn, exported to the rest of the world. Whereas the British had tended the sheep from which wool originates, they did not grow cotton. Eventually, England became concerned that an ample supply of raw cotton could not be supplied by India and the West Indies to meet the world’s rising demand for cotton products.

Briefly, a factory system existed in England which had the potential to produce huge amounts of cotton cloth. In addition, an agricultural system existed in America which had the potential to supply the factories with an almost endless quantity of raw material. Everything was in place except for one small detail: the only cotton that could be grown in prodigious quantities for export to England could not be efficiently and cheaply separated from its seeds.

Enter Eli Whitney. Born in 1765 on a farm in Massachusetts, Eli showed early promise with his mechanical skills. As a boy, he manufactured nails during the Revolutionary War and later hairpins. At 19, he attended Yale with the intention of acquiring an education. At one point he even entertained the idea of becoming a lawyer.

Upon graduation ten years later, at the age of 28, he was hired to tutor the children of a family in South Carolina. On the ship from New York to Savannah he met and became friends with the widow of Revolutionary War hero, Nathanael Greene. She was returning to her plantation in the South after spending the summer in the North. She invited him to stay at her plantation, Mulberry Grove, before making his way to South Carolina.

During his stay, he demonstrated his mechanical prowess by making toys for Ms. Greene’s children and trinkets for her. In addition, he also learned of the terrible plight of the Southern planter. Ms. Greene’s frequent guests included her husband’s former military associates, and they often discussed the problem of the green-seed cotton and what riches awaited the inventor, and the South, if a machine was manufactured that could easily separate the seed from the fiber.

Surrounded by all of this discussion and conjecture, Eli’s mechanical mind could not help but search for a solution to the planters’ problem. His tutoring job was not working out as he expected, and he was becoming more and more interested in the cotton problem.

Finally, he came up with a solution and proposed it to Phineas Miller, an agent to Mrs. Greene’s estate. Mr. Miller agreed to provide the funding for the project as long as the profits were split equally. They entered into an agreement and in ten days Eli had a model – the cotton gin was born. He completed the drawings and a working model, and applied for a patent on June 20, 1793. Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State, issued the patent and expressed a personal interest in the gin. He evidently understood the ramifications of the device.

A year after the original model was built, the machine was being manufactured. The gin used wire teeth to pull the cotton through a screen that removed the seeds from the lint, and a brush to remove the lint from the wire teeth. Over the next several years, Miller and Whitney operated several gins in the South. Others began to copy the gin, and Whitney was constantly embroiled in legal battles over his device. In 1798, he was awarded a contract to build muskets for the government and a short while later, with the gin not producing enough income, he left it behind to concentrate on other projects.

Whitney’s gin significantly altered the course of history in the South. Before the gin, slavery was actually on the decline, and many people in the North, and South, could see its eventual demise. However, the cotton gin halted any talk of freedom for the slaves. Now, seeds from the favored upland cotton could be easily extracted with Whitney’s invention. But to grow, pick, and transport cotton to the gins required large numbers of field hands, and no better hands were available than slaves. The proliferation of slavery throughout the South was just beginning. Decades later, those slaves became sharecroppers, white and black.

The course of history was changed as it always is when inventions of such significance are unleashed on the world. That a Yankee would come south and have so profound an impact on the economy and social and racial structure of the South is at the very least ironic. The South, where so many of us have grown up, has always been anchored in the tinkerings of a mechanically gifted tutor.

Thanks to David L. Cohn, prolific Mississippi author of The Life and Times of King Cotton, Oxford University Press, 1956.