Whitney's determination to introduce this system was adamantine and was laughed at by the
British and French ordnance officers to whom he explained it. They said it denied the craftsman's
individuality. Well, of course it did. But labor costs in America were so high that the craftsman
was a luxury. Whitney realized that for America to overtake Britain in manufactures it was
necessary to bypass the craftsman with a workforce of easily trained, semi-skilled men recruited
from the waves of immigrants. America was a place where an industrial worker could save up
enough in three years to buy a farm, and no immigrant would stay in the city in manufacturing
industry if he could become an independent, landowning farmer. So the thrust to reduce the
industrial headcount was enormous, and Whitney showed the way ahead. His American System' caught on in the earliest stages of the American Industrial Revolution. As early as 1835, the British politician and industrialist Richard Cobden, visiting America, said that its labor-saving machinery was superior to anything in Britain. By the 1850s, British experts marveled at what they found in the United States-standardized products mass-produced by machine methods including doors, furniture, and other woodwork, boots, shoes, plows, mowing machines, wood screws, files, nails, locks, clocks, small-arms, nuts, bolts-the list was endless." Virtually all this industry was located north of the slaveline. So if Whitney's cotton gin enabled the slave-system to survive and thrive, hisAmerican System' also gave the North the industrial muscle to crush
the defenders of slavery in due course.
The huge growth in the cotton industry made possible by Whitney's genius-it rose at 7 percent
compound annually-soon made cotton not only America's largest export but the biggest single
source of its growing wealth. It also created the South' as a special phenomenon, a culture, a cast of mind. And this in turn was the consequence of General Jackson's destruction of Indian and Spanish power in the lower Mississippi Valley. The Treaty of Fort Jackson was only the first of five in which the Indians were deprived of virtually all the land they had in the whole of this vast area. The Old South-the Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia-was not suited to growing cotton on a large scale; if anything it was tobacco country. The new states Jackson's ruthlessness brought into being, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, now constituted the Deep South where cotton was king. The population of the states multiplied threefold in the years 1810-30. It was internal migration, settlers moving from New England, where land was now scarce and the Old South, where it was exhausted. James Graham, a North Carolina tobacco planter, wrote to a friend on November 9, 1817:The Alabama Fever rages here with great violence and has carried off vast
numbers of our Citizens.’
This migration moved the plantation system from Virginia, the Carolinas, and coastal Georgia
to West Georgia, West Tennessee, and the Deep South. But both Old and New South were still
linked by chains of slavery. Before the cotton boom, the price of slaves in America had been
falling-in the quarter-century 1775-1800 it dropped by 50 percent. In the half-century 1800-50 it
rose in real terms from about $50 per slave to $800-$1,000. For every l00 acres under cotton in
the Deep South, you needed at least ten and possibly twenty slaves. The Old South was unsuited
to cotton but its plantations could and did breed slaves in growing numbers. The US Constitution
had prevented Congress from abolishing the slave-trade (as distinct from slavery itself) until
- In fact all the states had ended the legal importation of slaves by 1803, and Congress was
able to exercise the power to ban the trade from 1808. This had the effect of further increasing
the value of the home-bred variety, and slave-breeding now became the chief source of revenue
on many of the old tobacco plantations.
The Founding Fathers from Virginia who owned slaves, like Jackson and Madison, and who
hated slavery, had taken consolation from their belief that it was an outmoded and inefficient