White Over Black by Winthrop D. Jordan

Author:Winthrop D. Jordan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2010-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

One incident capsulates the elements of sectionalism and national union and also a major aspect of the problem of the Negro in America. In the autumn of 1792, as the nation was girding its unanimity for re-election of General Washington as president of the United States, a tall young man from the rolling hill country of central Massachusetts found himself aboard ship bound for Savannah, Georgia. Fresh from Yale College, he was headed for a post as tutor in a South Carolina family. Aboard the same vessel was a recent acquaintance, Mrs. Nathanael Greene, widow of the Rhode Island general, herself headed for the plantation which a grateful state of Georgia had conferred on her late husband. Upon docking in Savannah the young man found the tutor’s post would pay only half what he had been led to expect, so he accepted Mrs. Greene’s kind invitation to reside at her plantation. During that warm and pleasant winter he heard from gentlemen visiting the plantation of the need for some method of rendering upland cotton a feasible crop and learned that the difficulty lay in the laborious process of plucking out the seeds. The young man from Massachusetts possessed a penchant and, as it turned out, a talent for tinkering; he pieced together a machine, as so many men have before and since, without thought that he was shaping an economic revolution. By April Eli Whitney’s machine was so efficient that one Negro could grind out fifty pounds of fiber in a day.2

The neatness of this incident has been compelling to later generations, especially when highlighted by statistics of cotton production. The nation harvested 6,000 bales in 1792; 17,000 in 1795; 73,000 in 1800; 146,000 in 1805; and 178,000 in 1810.3 This enormous expansion has played upon the American imagination with such force as to make cotton sometimes appear both the foundation of American slavery and (presumably hence) the cause of Negro degradation. One modern social scientist has dated the origins of racial prejudice in America from the spring of 1793.4 In fact, however, expansion of cotton production was by no means the midnight reprieve of a doomed institution, for in 1793 slavery was flourishing in the Lower South. Production of cotton was not new: the smooth-seed variety had been cultivated, and processed with the roller gin, before the Revolution. The war and postwar economic dislocation retarded expansion of cotton, but increasing amounts were grown for domestic use in the postwar period, taking up some of the slack caused by the decline of indigo. In the late 1780’s sea-island cotton, a smooth-seed, long-staple variety, was introduced along the Georgia and South Carolina coast and enjoyed considerable popularity. Tobacco became important in the upland areas in the 1780’s. Rice continued a major staple: exports from Charleston reached their peak in 1792–93, just as Whitney set to work. In short, as far as slave labor was concerned, there is every indication that expansion of cotton production in the 1790’s merely whetted an existing appetite for slaves in the Lower South which was showing no signs of incipient satiation.

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