HIS LIFE AND WORK 



providing an English market for as much wheat 

 as American farmers could sell. 



But it was not until the outbreak of the Civil 

 War that the United States learned to really 

 appreciate the Reaper. By the time that Presi- 

 dent Lincoln had made his ninth call for soldiers, 

 by the time that he had taken every third man 

 for the Northern armies, the value of the Reaper 

 was beyond dispute. By a strange coincidence, 

 in this duel between wheat States on the one 

 side, and cotton States on the other, it was a 

 Northerner, Eli Whitney, who had invented the 

 cotton-gin, which made slavery profitable; and 

 it was a Southerner, Cyrus H. McCormick, who 

 had invented the Reaper, which made the 

 Northern States wealthy and powerful. 



It was the Reaper-power of the North that 

 offset the slave-power of the South. There 

 were as many Reapers in the wheat-fields of 1861 

 as could do the work of a million slaves. As 

 the war went on, the crops in the Northern States 

 increased. Europe refused to believe such a 

 miracle; but it was true. Fifty million bushels 



[191] 



