42 HUMAN FACTORS IN COTTON CULTURE 



that the abolition of slavery by these states would have 

 been in course of time a natural and an easy process. 



Cotton found the plantation system on the decline; it 

 revived and pushed this system across the southern map. 

 In 1793, the year Whitney invented the gin, the South 

 produced 10,410 bales of cotton and exported 3,565; in 

 1810 production had risen to 177,824 bales and exports 

 were 124,116. The Reverend William Winterbotham wrote 

 in 1795: "Cotton has been lately adopted as an article 

 of culture in the southern states; and as the prices of 

 rice, tobacco, and indigo decline, it must be very bene- 

 ficial." 15 "This economic transformation," says Frederick 

 J. Turner, "resuscitated slavery from a moribund condi- 

 tion to a vigorous and aggressive life." 



The production of cotton awaited a method of separat- 

 ing the lint from the seed. In the Carolina tidewater the 

 problem was already solved as early as 1791 to 1794 by 

 growing the two-inch lint of sea island cotton which could 

 easily be separated from its smooth, black seeds by roll- 

 ers. Such cotton commanded fancy prices, increased the 

 number of coastal plantations, and made their owners 

 rich. But sea island cotton was limited to a definite area. 

 By 1797 the cotton gin, invented in 1793 by young Mr. 

 Eli Whitney, Yale graduate, was in operation in as many 

 as thirty points in Georgia alone. The culture of short 

 staple cotton soon spread over the Carolina-Georgia up- 

 lands. Lacking any staple crop, the uplands eagerly 

 adopted the production of cotton and with it, to a fair 

 extent, the plantation system. Phillips measures the ex- 

 tent of the planters' regime by the gain of the upland 

 counties of South Carolina in Negro population from 



15 A. B. Hart, American History Told by Contemporaries, III, 67. 



16 Rise of the New West, p. 49. 



