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Professor of History
John.Heitmann@notes.udayton.edu
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Recent Scholarship & Works in Progress
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Distortions concerning the story of Eli Whitney and the cotton gin abound. For twenty years I have taught in the classroom that prior to 1794 and Whitney's patent, slaves separated seed from cotton by hand, and that once in use, the gin initiated a chain of events that culminated with the Civil War in America and Marxism in Europe. Angela Lakwete sets the record straight in her Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America, and consequently a close reading has forced me to severely edit my lecture notes. Lakwete has authored a most complex history that mirrors prevailing historiography by displacing "the belief that technology determines historical events with explanations that emphasize the reciprocal influence of individuals and technology on sociopolitical change." In the process of following this view, her meticulously researched monograph draws on archival, newspaper, legal, patent, and census materials to shape a strongly revisionist history illuminating themes dealing with southern industrial development in a global context. The author begins with an absolutely fascinating chapter on the origins of the gin in Asia beginning in the first century C.E. Initially consisting of a single roller and hard flat surface, this design was employed in both China and India, although the device was later modified to incorporate two rollers as well as foot-power. Subsequently the gin, in various forms, diffused to the West, where it became integral to the 18th century Atlantic Economy. As such, the roller gin was critically important to developments in rapidly industrializing Great Britain, and Lakwete does an excellent job of placing the gin within the context of an emerging late 18th century mechanized textile industry. It is then that Joseph Eve, a Philadelphia businessman and inventor, designs a self-feeding roller gin while living in the Bahamas, a machine that precedes Whitney's device by several years and initially competes with it. In 1794 Whitney, "a deliberate inventor, " employed a design using coarse wire teeth with a closely spaced metal grate to separate cotton fiber from the seed. As a result, when compared with the Eve gin, the fiber that was produced was damaged, but there was much more of it. As Lakwete notes, quality was sacrificed for quantity. Despite this noted shortcoming in the Whitney gin's performance, it was enough of a significant innovation to engage Whitney's partner, Phineas Miller, in activities to license the gin and to legally defend the design from copycats. Sensibilities concerning quality on the part of buyers gradually changed, as did varieties of cotton cultivated, and the Whitney device itself would be modified by mechanics into the saw gin, an event that Lakwete assigns as a "turning point in Southern history." As a consequence of the widespread adoption of the saw gin, along with the settlement of new land, cotton was now king. Lakwete devotes the middle of the book to the various mechanics who either made technical improvements to the saw gin, or who designed roller gins that found a market in the American South. It is here that the author's strengths and weaknesses are manifest. Rarely does one find a narrative derived from such extensive and microscopic research, as census records and newspapers are used most effectively to tell the reader more than you ever wanted to know about obscure historical individuals who often made very slight modifications to the gin. The problem, however, is that the material is so detailed that it can be soporific, and one loses sight of the forest for the trees. Finally, towards the end of this book things pick up, particularly when the author examines the lineage of writings that were responsible for making the myth of Eli Whitney. Here Lakwete points to an 1832 work by Denison Olmsted, a fellow Yale alumnus who downplays the effectiveness of roller gins, and who celebrates the young, mechanically gifted Whitney as being predestined to change the world. It was this account, according to Lakwete, that essentially shaped a story that was later canonized. In sum, despite its flaws, this work is essential reading for anyone interested in Southern
economic history or the history of technology. While its prose can be limiting, Inventing the Cotton
Gin reflects the very best in terms of research effort.
John Heitmann University of Dayton |
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