After watching Henry Louis Gates' PBS presentation “Too Many Rivers to Cross,” last night about the “African American experience in America,” and on the cotton gin in particular, I was moved to recall the treatment of this revolutionary agricultural implement in other sources that I had earlier read.
First, there was Patricia Carter Sluby in THE INVENTIVE SPIRIT OF AFRICAN AMERICANS; then, there was William Wells Brown's THE NEGRO IN THE AMERICAN REBELLION.
I had been most recently struck by Wells' use of the verb “introduced” rather than the verb “invented” to describe Eli Whitney's association with that epochal economic implement.
William Wells Brown wrote:
"The introduction of the cotton-gin in the South, by Whitney of Connecticut, had materially enhanced the value of slave property; the emancipation societies of Virginia and Maryland had ceased to petition their Legislatures for the "Gradual Emancipation" of the slaves; and the above two states had begun to make slave-raising a profitable business, when the American Antislavery Society was formed in Philadelphia in the year 1833. The agitation of the question in Congress, the mobbing of William Lloyd Garrison in Boston, the murder of Rev. E.P. Lovejoy in Illinois, and the attempt to put down free speech throughout the country, only hastened the downfall of the institution."
P.37, "Growth of the Slave Power," THE NEGRO IN THE AMERICAN REBELLION, by William Wells Brown (1867)
Sufficiently intrigued, I then turned to Patricia Carter Sluby's book for a more in-depth assessment of this crude eighteenth century tool's historical evolution and economic impact.
Sluby wrote:
“At the height of the slave trade, New England native Eli Whitney obtained a patent on March 14, 1794, for an invention dubbed the 'cotton gin.' This grant, issued a mere four years after the first U.S. Patent, gave Whitney full credit as the original, first, and sole inventor of the initial cotton engine. Was this true? Some doubt still lingers.
“Whitney came south to study law and accepted a position as a tutor on a plantation called Mulberry Grove, a tract of land given by the state of Georgia to the Revolutionary War officer Major General Nathaniel Greene, who died in 1786. Greene's widow, Catherine Littleton Greene, had personally met Whitney in 1792 and offered him a position on the plantation. Whitney eventually busied himself in the plantation shops.
“Mulberry Grove was in an area that produced upland cotton, a plant that had greenish fuzzy seed that was difficult to manually separate from the lint. Nearby, off the coast of Georgia, was a different kind of cotton—the long, silky Sea Island cotton that was easily ginned. Though easy to process, it was not favored cotton shipped offshore. By 1810, only one-tenth of Sea Island cotton, compared to upland cotton, was being exported.
“The enslaved labored intensively to loosen the seeds from the cotton. It took ten hours for one slave to pick a pound of lint from three pounds of mixed lint and seeds. Some historians relate that Whitney saw people of color using a crude comb like instrument to perform this task. Being mechanically oriented from his earlier manufacturing days in his father's Westboro, Massachusetts, shop, Whitney improved upon and perfected the crude comb device. Contrarily, it was told that a bondsman named Sam bettered the device made by his father. Carter G. Woodson and Charles Wesley in The Negro in Our History recorded the opinion of patent examiner Henry E. Baker to be that 'slaves made certain appliances, experimenting with the separation of the seed from cotton, which, when observed by Eli Whitney, were assembled by him as the cotton-gin.'
“In just ten days, allegedly, Whitney developed the famous cotton gin as an improvement over the crude apparatus to process cotton gin. The principal parts of his machine were the frame, the cylinder, the breastwork, the cleaner, and the hopper. The gin basically was a roller equipped with wire teeth that pulled the cotton fiber from the seed as spikes revolved between hopper slots. In a few years, cotton exported from the United States escalated from a mere 138,000 pounds per year to 6 million pounds per year.”
pp.12-15, “Slaves as Originators,” THE INVENTIVE SPIRIT OF AFRICAN AMERICANS: PATENTED INGENUITY by Patricia Carter Sluby (Praeger Publishers, Westport Connecticut: 2004).
Even if slaves did “originate” the cotton-gin as a labor-saving device, however, it could not have been patented by them due to their non-citizen status under American law. The first “utility patent” that was issued to a black person was that which was issued to “a free man of color,” Thomas L. Jennings in 1821, Sluby states, for his “early dry cleaning process, called scouring, to get rid of dirt and grease and renew clothing to its original appearance.” (p.15)
She states:
“Enslaved thinkers and tinkerers in antebellum days were forced to assign their invention rights to their master because of a citizenship technicality in the patent application oath. Simply put, slaves could not hold patents because they, as noncitizens, could not own property. Classified as intellectual property, patents can be assigned, sold, or transferred like real estate, a function denied slaves but not the master who often secured patents for the inventions of his chattel (obviously in an oath that he was the true inventor). The owner then reaped all manufacture and sale benefits.” (pp.30-31).
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
COTTON GIN MYSTERIES
COTTON GIN MYSTERIES
by Rev. Dr. Larry Delano Coleman
10/30/13
After watching Henry Louis Gates' PBS presentation “Too Many Rivers to Cross,” last night about the “African American experience in America,” and on the cotton gin in particular, I was moved to recall the treatment of this revolutionary agricultural implement in other sources that I had earlier read.
First, there was Patricia Carter Sluby in THE INVENTIVE SPIRIT OF AFRICAN AMERICANS; then, there was William Wells Brown's THE NEGRO IN THE AMERICAN REBELLION.
I had been most recently struck by Wells' use of the verb “introduced” rather than the verb “invented” to describe Eli Whitney's association with that epochal economic implement.
William Wells Brown wrote:
"The introduction of the cotton-gin in the South, by Whitney of Connecticut, had materially enhanced the value of slave property; the emancipation societies of Virginia and Maryland had ceased to petition their Legislatures for the "Gradual Emancipation" of the slaves; and the above two states had begun to make slave-raising a profitable business, when the American Antislavery Society was formed in Philadelphia in the year 1833. The agitation of the question in Congress, the mobbing of William Lloyd Garrison in Boston, the murder of Rev. E.P. Lovejoy in Illinois, and the attempt to put down free speech throughout the country, only hastened the downfall of the institution."
P.37, "Growth of the Slave Power," THE NEGRO IN THE AMERICAN REBELLION, by William Wells Brown (1867)
Sufficiently intrigued, I then turned to Patricia Carter Sluby's book for a more in-depth assessment of this crude eighteenth century tool's historical evolution and economic impact.
Sluby wrote:
“At the height of the slave trade, New England native Eli Whitney obtained a patent on March 14, 1794, for an invention dubbed the 'cotton gin.' This grant, issued a mere four years after the first U.S. Patent, gave Whitney full credit as the original, first, and sole inventor of the initial cotton engine. Was this true? Some doubt still lingers.
“Whitney came south to study law and accepted a position as a tutor on a plantation called Mulberry Grove, a tract of land given by the state of Georgia to the Revolutionary War officer Major General Nathaniel Greene, who died in 1786. Greene's widow, Catherine Littleton Greene, had personally met Whitney in 1792 and offered him a position on the plantation. Whitney eventually busied himself in the plantation shops.
“Mulberry Grove was in an area that produced upland cotton, a plant that had greenish fuzzy seed that was difficult to manually separate from the lint. Nearby, off the coast of Georgia, was a different kind of cotton—the long, silky Sea Island cotton that was easily ginned. Though easy to process, it was not favored cotton shipped offshore. By 1810, only one-tenth of Sea Island cotton, compared to upland cotton, was being exported.
“The enslaved labored intensively to loosen the seeds from the cotton. It took ten hours for one slave to pick a pound of lint from three pounds of mixed lint and seeds. Some historians relate that Whitney saw people of color using a crude comb like instrument to perform this task. Being mechanically oriented from his earlier manufacturing days in his father's Westboro, Massachusetts, shop, Whitney improved upon and perfected the crude comb device. Contrarily, it was told that a bondsman named Sam bettered the device made by his father. Carter G. Woodson and Charles Wesley in The Negro in Our History recorded the opinion of patent examiner Henry E. Baker to be that 'slaves made certain appliances, experimenting with the separation of the seed from cotton, which, when observed by Eli Whitney, were assembled by him as the cotton-gin.'
“In just ten days, allegedly, Whitney developed the famous cotton gin as an improvement over the crude apparatus to process cotton gin. The principal parts of his machine were the frame, the cylinder, the breastwork, the cleaner, and the hopper. The gin basically was a roller equipped with wire teeth that pulled the cotton fiber from the seed as spikes revolved between hopper slots. In a few years, cotton exported from the United States escalated from a mere 138,000 pounds per year to 6 million pounds per year.”
pp.12-15, “Slaves as Originators,” THE INVENTIVE SPIRIT OF AFRICAN AMERICANS: PATENTED INGENUITY by Patricia Carter Sluby (Praeger Publishers, Westport Connecticut: 2004).
Even if slaves did “originate” the cotton-gin as a labor-saving device, however, it could not have been patented by them due to their non-citizen status under American law. The first “utility patent” that was issued to a black person was that which was issued to “a free man of color,” Thomas L. Jennings in 1821, Sluby states, for his “early dry cleaning process, called scouring, to get rid of dirt and grease and renew clothing to its original appearance.” (p.15)
She states:
“Enslaved thinkers and tinkerers in antebellum days were forced to assign their invention rights to their master because of a citizenship technicality in the patent application oath. Simply put, slaves could not hold patents because they, as noncitizens, could not own property. Classified as intellectual property, patents can be assigned, sold, or transferred like real estate, a function denied slaves but not the master who often secured patents for the inventions of his chattel (obviously in an oath that he was the true inventor). The owner then reaped all manufacture and sale benefits.” (pp.30-31).
After watching Henry Louis Gates' PBS presentation “Too Many Rivers to Cross,” last night about the “African American experience in America,” and on the cotton gin in particular, I was moved to recall the treatment of this revolutionary agricultural implement in other sources that I had earlier read.
First, there was Patricia Carter Sluby in THE INVENTIVE SPIRIT OF AFRICAN AMERICANS; then, there was William Wells Brown's THE NEGRO IN THE AMERICAN REBELLION.
I had been most recently struck by Wells' use of the verb “introduced” rather than the verb “invented” to describe Eli Whitney's association with that epochal economic implement.
William Wells Brown wrote:
"The introduction of the cotton-gin in the South, by Whitney of Connecticut, had materially enhanced the value of slave property; the emancipation societies of Virginia and Maryland had ceased to petition their Legislatures for the "Gradual Emancipation" of the slaves; and the above two states had begun to make slave-raising a profitable business, when the American Antislavery Society was formed in Philadelphia in the year 1833. The agitation of the question in Congress, the mobbing of William Lloyd Garrison in Boston, the murder of Rev. E.P. Lovejoy in Illinois, and the attempt to put down free speech throughout the country, only hastened the downfall of the institution."
P.37, "Growth of the Slave Power," THE NEGRO IN THE AMERICAN REBELLION, by William Wells Brown (1867)
Sufficiently intrigued, I then turned to Patricia Carter Sluby's book for a more in-depth assessment of this crude eighteenth century tool's historical evolution and economic impact.
Sluby wrote:
“At the height of the slave trade, New England native Eli Whitney obtained a patent on March 14, 1794, for an invention dubbed the 'cotton gin.' This grant, issued a mere four years after the first U.S. Patent, gave Whitney full credit as the original, first, and sole inventor of the initial cotton engine. Was this true? Some doubt still lingers.
“Whitney came south to study law and accepted a position as a tutor on a plantation called Mulberry Grove, a tract of land given by the state of Georgia to the Revolutionary War officer Major General Nathaniel Greene, who died in 1786. Greene's widow, Catherine Littleton Greene, had personally met Whitney in 1792 and offered him a position on the plantation. Whitney eventually busied himself in the plantation shops.
“Mulberry Grove was in an area that produced upland cotton, a plant that had greenish fuzzy seed that was difficult to manually separate from the lint. Nearby, off the coast of Georgia, was a different kind of cotton—the long, silky Sea Island cotton that was easily ginned. Though easy to process, it was not favored cotton shipped offshore. By 1810, only one-tenth of Sea Island cotton, compared to upland cotton, was being exported.
“The enslaved labored intensively to loosen the seeds from the cotton. It took ten hours for one slave to pick a pound of lint from three pounds of mixed lint and seeds. Some historians relate that Whitney saw people of color using a crude comb like instrument to perform this task. Being mechanically oriented from his earlier manufacturing days in his father's Westboro, Massachusetts, shop, Whitney improved upon and perfected the crude comb device. Contrarily, it was told that a bondsman named Sam bettered the device made by his father. Carter G. Woodson and Charles Wesley in The Negro in Our History recorded the opinion of patent examiner Henry E. Baker to be that 'slaves made certain appliances, experimenting with the separation of the seed from cotton, which, when observed by Eli Whitney, were assembled by him as the cotton-gin.'
“In just ten days, allegedly, Whitney developed the famous cotton gin as an improvement over the crude apparatus to process cotton gin. The principal parts of his machine were the frame, the cylinder, the breastwork, the cleaner, and the hopper. The gin basically was a roller equipped with wire teeth that pulled the cotton fiber from the seed as spikes revolved between hopper slots. In a few years, cotton exported from the United States escalated from a mere 138,000 pounds per year to 6 million pounds per year.”
pp.12-15, “Slaves as Originators,” THE INVENTIVE SPIRIT OF AFRICAN AMERICANS: PATENTED INGENUITY by Patricia Carter Sluby (Praeger Publishers, Westport Connecticut: 2004).
Even if slaves did “originate” the cotton-gin as a labor-saving device, however, it could not have been patented by them due to their non-citizen status under American law. The first “utility patent” that was issued to a black person was that which was issued to “a free man of color,” Thomas L. Jennings in 1821, Sluby states, for his “early dry cleaning process, called scouring, to get rid of dirt and grease and renew clothing to its original appearance.” (p.15)
She states:
“Enslaved thinkers and tinkerers in antebellum days were forced to assign their invention rights to their master because of a citizenship technicality in the patent application oath. Simply put, slaves could not hold patents because they, as noncitizens, could not own property. Classified as intellectual property, patents can be assigned, sold, or transferred like real estate, a function denied slaves but not the master who often secured patents for the inventions of his chattel (obviously in an oath that he was the true inventor). The owner then reaped all manufacture and sale benefits.” (pp.30-31).
