At this juncture, Whitney invented the
cotton-gin, and the growth of cotton as a marketable crop commenced
upon a more extended scale. In a few years it became general--each
farmer growing more or less, according to his means. Some one man, most
able to do so, erected a gin-house, first in a county, then in each
neighborhood. These either purchased in the seed the cotton of their
neighbors, or ginned it and packed it for a certain amount of toll
taken from the cotton. This packing was done in round bales, and by a
single man, with a heavy iron bar, and was a most laborious and tedious
method; and the packages were in the most inconvenient form for
handling and transportation.
Up to this time the slave-trade had been looked upon most unfavorably
by the people of the South. Among the first sermons I remember to have
heard, was one depicting the horrors of this trade. I was by my
grandmother's side at Bethany, in Greene county, and, though a child, I
remember, as if of yesterday, the description of the manner of
capturing the African in his native wilds--how the mother and father
were murdered, and the boys and the girls borne away, and how England
was abused for the cruel inhumanity of the act.
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