INVENTION AND INDUSTRY AT THE SOUTH. 381 



found a literary magazine in Charleston all met with failure, 

 despite the fact that an unusually cultivated society dwelt in 

 that city. Washington Allston, after finishing his art studies in 

 Europe, located in Boston, which was able to hold out to him 

 greater inducements than the little city of Charleston, the metrop- 

 olis of his native State. Gottschalk, the composer, whose dreamy, 

 sensuous music suggests his Southern birth, after finishing his 

 musical course in Paris, made his dehut there, and died finally in 

 Brazil, spending but little time in New Orleans. Audubon, with 

 his dog and gun, and his pencil and drawing pad, searched the 

 woods and bayous of his native Louisiana for his specimens of 

 birds and natural history that were to win for him the name of 

 the greatest naturalist of the New World. But he labored imder 

 adverse conditions, and he had to canvass the large cities of Eu- 

 rope for subscribers to enable him to publish his book on the 

 birds of America, the greatest ornithological work ever under- 

 taken. This he brought out at New York in 1830, with plates 

 containing over one thousand birds of life size, and Cuvier pro- 

 nounced it " the most magnificent monument that Art has yet 

 raised to Nature." 



In the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Madison, of 

 Virginia, and Charles Pinckney, of South Carolina, proposed the 

 clause protecting authors and inventors, which was the founda- 

 tion of our copyright and patent-right system. The Patent Oflfice 

 was organized and placed on a firm basis largely through the ef- 

 forts of Jefferson, who is credited with being its founder, and later 

 on it was reorganized and perfected during Jackson's administra- 

 tion. Jefferson was himself an inventor, being the first American 

 to study and improve the plow. The year 1789 is memorable as 

 the date upon which Rumsey, a Maryland machinist, then living 

 in Virginia, launched his boat upon the Potomac, propelled by 

 steam. Fitch performing a similar experiment upon the Delaware 

 about the same time. Later on, in 1793, Rumsey went to England 

 and made a successful trial trijj on the Thames. This same year 

 Eli Whitney, a young New-Euglander, invented his famous cot- 

 ton gin, that may be said to have revolutionized the history of the 

 South and the Union. As an illustration of the scarcity of manu- 

 facturing and mechanical establishments in the South at that date, 

 it may be mentioned that Whitney had to draw himself the iron 

 wire he needed and make his own iron tools at the plantation of 

 Mrs. Greene, the wife of General Nathanael Greene, on the Sa- 

 vannah River, where he was residing. It is a notable circum- 

 stance that the first canal in America of any consequence, the 

 first telegraph line, and the first railway propelled by steam were 

 all constructed in the South, and the first steamship to cross the 

 Atlantic embarked from a Southern port. The first canal of im- 



