His personality was strong, aggressive, dominating. Nothing could turn him from his course when he had made up his mind in regard to it. He was determined to make a fortune out of cotton-spinning, and he did, in spite of the loss of his patents, and the rivals who were always pursuing him. He stands high as inventor, and quite as high as one of the makers of modern commercial England. VI WHITNEY AND THE COTTON-GIN 1765-1825 Cotton-growing has been for a long time the main industry of the Southern United States, and the exporting of cotton by that part of the country has largely fed the mills of the world. Yet in 1784 the customs officers at Liverpool seized eight bags of cotton arriving on an American vessel, claiming that so much of the raw material could not have been produced in the thirteen states. In 1793 the total export of cotton from the United States was less than ten thousand bales, but by 1860 the export was four million bales. The chief reason for this marvelous advance was the cotton-gin, for which Eli Whitney applied for a patent in 1793. Wherever cotton grew in the South there the cotton-gin was to be found. It brought prosperity and ease and comfort, it allowed the small as well as the large owner to have his share of the profits of the markets of the world. It gave the cotton country its living, and yet Whitney struggled for years to win the slightest recognition of his claims. He wrote to Robert Fulton, “In one instance I had great difficulty in proving that the machine had been used in Georgia, although at the same moment there were three separate sets of this machinery in motion within fifty yards of the building in which the court sat, and all so near that the rattling of the wheels was distinctly heard on the steps of the court-house.” He came to the South from New England, having been born in Westborough, Worcester County, Massachusetts, December 8, 1765, educated at Yale College, and going to Georgia as teacher in a private family. General Greene, of Savannah, took a great interest in him, and taught him law. Whitney had been a good student, had an attractive personality, and had already shown a natural knack for mechanics. While he was teaching at the Greenes’ home he noticed that the embroidery frame that Mrs. Greene used tore the fine threads of her work. He asked her to let him study it, and shortly had made a frame on an entirely different plan that would do the same work without injuring the threads. His hostess was delighted with it, and spread the word of her young teacher’s ingenuity through the neighborhood.