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By Root 2163 0

was a marvel. Whitney and Miller formed a partnership with every expectation of getting rich, but they were disastrous businessmen. For the use of their machine, they demanded a one-third share of any harvest—a proportion that plantation owners and southern legislators alike saw as frankly rapacious. That Whitney and Miller were both Yankees didn’t help sentiment either. They stubbornly refused to modify their demands, convinced that southern growers could not hold out in the face of such a transforming piece of technology. They were right about the irresistibility, but they failed to note that the gin was also easily pirated. Any halfway decent carpenter could knock one out in a couple of hours. Soon plantation owners across the South were harvesting cotton with homemade gins. Whitney and Miller filed sixty suits in Georgia alone and many others elsewhere, but found little sympathy in southern courts. By 1800—just seven years after the gin’s invention—Miller and Catharine Greene were in such desperate straits that they had to sell the plantation.

The South, however, was growing very rich. Cotton was soon the most traded commodity in the world, and two-thirds of all that cotton came from there. American cotton exports went from almost nothing before the invention of the cotton gin to a staggering two billion pounds by the outbreak of the Civil War. At its peak, Britain took 84 percent of it all.

Before cotton, slavery had been in decline in the United States, but now there was a great need for labor because picking cotton remained extremely labor-intensive. At the time of Whitney’s invention slavery existed in just six states; by the outbreak of the Civil War it was legal in fifteen. Worse, the northern slave states like Virginia and Maryland, where cotton couldn’t be successfully grown, turned to exporting slaves to their southern neighbors, thus breaking up families and intensifying the suffering for tens of thousands. Between 1793 and the outbreak of the Civil War, over eight hundred thousand slaves were shipped south.

At the same time, the booming cotton mills of England needed huge numbers of workers—more than population increase alone could easily provide—so increasingly they turned to child labor. Children were malleable, worked cheap, and were generally quicker at darting about among machinery and dealing with snags, breakages, and the like. Even the most enlightened mill owners used children freely. They couldn’t afford not to.

So Whitney’s gin not only helped make many people rich on both sides of the Atlantic but also reinvigorated slavery, turned child labor into a necessity, and paved the way for the American Civil War. Perhaps at no other time in history has someone with a simple, well-meaning invention generated more general prosperity, personal disappointment, and inadvertent suffering than Eli Whitney with his gin. That is quite a lot of consequence for a simple rotating drum.

Eventually, some southern states did agree to pay Whitney a little. Altogether he made about $90,000 from the gin—just enough to cover his costs. Returning north, he settled in New Haven, Connecticut, and there hit on the idea that would finally make him rich. In 1798, he landed a contract to make ten thousand muskets for the federal government. The guns were to be manufactured by a new method, which came to be known as the Whitney system or American system. The idea was to build machines that would create an endless supply of matching parts, which could then be assembled into completed products. No worker would need any particular skills. The skills would all be in the machines. It was a brilliant concept. The historian Daniel J. Boorstin has called it the innovation that made America rich.

The guns were urgently needed because at the time America seemed on the brink of going to war with France. The contract was for $134,000—the largest government contract ever signed in America to that time—and was given to Whitney even though he had no machines and no experience of making guns. But in 1801, in a moment treasured by generations