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  • Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America
  • Peter A. Coclanis (bio)
Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America. By Angela Lakwete. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii+232. $45.

The appeal of counterfactual history ebbs and flows among academic historians, but undergraduate students almost invariably are intrigued by the approach. Professors have long been cognizant of this, and, as a result, have regularly used counterfactuals in the classroom. For example, there cannot be more than a handful of specialists in one of my own areas of interest—southern history—who, hoping to enlighten, enliven, or maybe just awaken a class, have not at one time or another floated the counterfactual about Eli Whitney, the cotton gin, and the course of southern history.

In simplest form, this counterfactual invites students to ponder what would have happened to the institution of slavery, which was purportedly on the ropes in the South during the era of the American Revolution, had not that Connecticut Yankee, Eli Whitney, snagged a tutoring job near Augusta, Georgia, in the fall of 1792. Once in Georgia, Whitney begged off from the tutoring job and instead became an "inventor," introducing, allegedly almost singlehandedly, "a machine for ginning cotton," which invention, allegedly almost singlehandedly, transformed southern history.

How? By solving the purported supply bottleneck limiting the expansion of the short-staple cotton industry and, thereby, the expansion of slavery into the interior of the South. Without this invention, the story goes, ginning short-staple cotton (separating the cotton fiber from the seed) would have been too slow and costly to allow for the massive expansion of cultivation that was to become virtually synonymous with the history of the American South in the nineteenth century. Slavery was teetering, the cotton economy was bottled up, and then that Whitney character came down South, and—depending on one's point of view—either saved the region's economy or sped the South down the road to perdition. What if Whitney had remained up in New England? One intriguing possibility is [End Page 834] that he might have been able to begin his famous second act, his "pioneering" role in the establishment of mass-production technology in America, a bit sooner.

In Inventing the Cotton Gin, Angela Lakwete, who teaches history at Auburn University in Alabama, takes all of the air out of this counterfactual balloon. Indeed, after reading her book one must, however regretfully, retire the Whitney counterfactual from the pedagogical arsenal. Although Lakwete's impressively researched study is replete with revisionist insights, perhaps the most important of these holds that the "invention" of the cotton gin should be viewed as a complex, long-term, multiplayer process rather than as a discrete event pulled off by one individual, however talented and ambitious.

More specifically, Lakwete demonstrates conclusively in the eight tightly focused chapters of Inventing the Cotton Gin that: (a) mechanical cotton ginning did not begin with Whitney's wire-tooth gin in 1794 but hundreds of years earlier in India and China; (b) mechanical (roller) gins were transferred from Asia to America in the seventeenth century; (c) various types of gins, particularly foot-powered roller gins, were developed and employed in the South prior to 1794; and (e) gins of various types, including supposedly retrograde roller gins, continued in use in the region well after 1794, before ultimately losing out to the saw gins that themselves superseded Whitney's wire-tooth technology because they proved more efficient "pullers" of cotton fiber.

When viewed in this way, the history of the cotton gin takes on an entirely different cast. Whitney—or even Whitney along with his less-well-known partner Phineas Miller—becomes relatively less important, as does the putative importance of his/their invention both in saving slavery and in permitting the creation of the Cotton South. Other inventors, or, perhaps more to the point, other mechanics—pre- and post-Whitney, northern and southern, black and white—gain prominence. Southerners become more active agents in the making of their own history, and the South qua region is transformed from a technological backwater into a mainstream, dynamic, modernizing American place. And, arguably best...

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