xxvi INTRODUCTION. 



forks and hoes. The exhibitor was a sensible English dealer, who, discovering the superiority of this 

 class of American implements as compared with articles of the same description manufactured in his own 

 country, has for years been importing and selling them to his customers- On being asked why English 

 manufacturers did not make them, he replied: We can t do it; have been trying ever since the great 

 exhibition of 1851, but somehow don t succeed. It is a mortifying admission to make, but it is 

 nevertheless true, that you Yankees have a knack of doing some things which we have not the skill to 

 imitate. &quot; 



COTTON-GINS. 



Although cotton-gins are made by a few establishments in the northern States, their manufacture 

 is principally a southern one, and amounted in 1860 to the value of $1,077,315, which was the product 

 of fifty-five establishments, all but three of them southern. Alabama is the largest manufacturer of 

 machinery for cleaning cotton, having sixteen factories, employing 178 hands, and producing gins to the 

 value of $434,805. Georgia ranks next, having twelve establishments, whose product exceeded a 

 quarter of a million. The manufactories of cotton-gins in Mississippi are relatively the largest, three 

 factories employing seventy hands, and returning an aggregate product of $131,900. In Texas, where 

 the first cotton-gin was erected about 1823, there are four manufactories of gins. Many of these 

 machines are made in northern machine-shops, along with other cotton machinery, from which they 

 are inseparable in the general estimate of value. 



The history of the cotton-gin furnishes one of the most remarkable examples on record of the 

 power of a single labor-saving machine to influence the social and industrial interests, not merely of a 

 single nation, but in a great measure of the civilized world. The simple mechanism of the saw-gin 

 invented by Whitney enabled one farm-hand to separate the seed from 300 pounds of cotton fibre in a 

 day, instead of one pound, as he had been able to do by hand. Its introduction at the particular period 

 when the completion of the brilliant series of inventions for carding, spinning, and weaving cotton had 

 created a demand for the raw material, at once directed into a new and profitable channel the agricul 

 ture of the south, and at the same time furnished the manufacturing industry of Europe and America 

 with one of the most valuable staples, and the shipping and commercial interests of the world with an 

 enormous trade in its raw and manufactured products. The increase in the growth and exportation of 

 raw cotton which followed has no parallel in the annals of industry, save in the wonderful develop 

 ment of its manufacture in England and the United States. The effects of this growth of the 

 husbandry and manufacture of cotton in increasing national wealth, in furnishing employment to labor 

 and capital, and in increasing the comfort of all classes, can scarcely be conceived in all its magnitude. 



In 1792, the year preceding the introduction of the saw-gin, the amount of cotton exported from 

 the United States was only 138,328 pounds, and the total domestic consumption was about five and a 

 half millions of pounds. During the next year there were exported nearly half a million pounds ; in 

 1794, 1,601,700 pounds; in 1795, 5,276,300 pounds; and in 1800, 17,789,803 pounds.* In 1860 the 

 production of ginned cotton in the southern States amounted to 5,198,077 bales of 400 pounds each, 

 or 2,079,230,800 pounds, which was more than seven-eighths of the total production of cotton through 

 out the world. The quantity exported in that year was 1,765,115,735 pounds, equivalent to 4,412,789 

 bales of 400 pounds each. To prepare this large amount of cotton for market by the primitive methods 

 would have been utterly impracticable. Not only is the labor of the planter facilitated and cheapened 

 by the use of the machine, but the cotton is much better cleaned than by the old methods, which left 

 it unsuitable for the finer fabrics. 



Although the earliest mode of separating cotton from the seed, and the one chiefly practiced in the 

 cotton States previous to the invention of the saw-gin, was to separate the seed with the fingers ; yet 



mechanical contrivances for that purpose have been long in use, having been chiefly borrowed from 







o Woodbiiry a Treasury Report, 1835- 36. 



