Whitney received his patent in March, 1794, and entered on his new work with enthusiasm.His partner, Phineas Miller, was a cultivated New England gentleman, a graduate of Yale College, who, like Whitney, had sought his fortune as a teacher in the South.He had been a tutor in the Greene household and on General Greene's death had taken over the management of his estates.He afterwards married Mrs.Greene.The partners decided to manufacture the machines in New Haven, Whitney to give his time to the production, Miller to furnish the capital and attend to the firm's interests in the South.
At the outset the partners blundered seriously in their plan for commercializing the invention.They planned to buy seed cotton and clean it themselves; also to clean cotton for the planters on the familiar toll system, as in grinding grain, taking a toll of one pound of cotton out of every three."Whitney's plan in Georgia," says a recent writer, "as shown by his letters and other evidence, was to own all the gins and gin all the cotton made in the country.It is but human nature that this sort of monopoly should be odious to any community."* Miller appears to have calculated that the planters could afford to pay for the use of the new invention about one-half of all the profits they derived from its use.An equal division, between the owners of the invention on the one hand and the cotton growers on the other, of all the super-added wealth arising from the invention, seemed to him fair.Apparently the full meaning of such an arrangement did not enter his mind.Perhaps Miller and Whitney did not see at first that the new invention would cause a veritable industrial revolution, or that the system they planned, if it could be made effective, would make them absolute masters of the cotton country, with the most stupendous monopoly in the world.Nor do they appear to have realized that, considering the simple construction of their machine and the loose operation of the patent law at that time, the planters of the South would never submit to so great a tribute as they proposed to exact.
Their attempt in the first instance to set up an unfair monopoly brought them presently into a sea of troubles, which they never passed out of, even when they afterwards changed their tack and offered to sell the machines with a license, or a license alone, at a reasonable price.
* Tompkins, "Cotton and Cotton Oil", p.86.
Misfortune pursued the partners from the beginning.Whitney writes to his father from New Haven in May, 1794, that his machines in Georgia are working well, but that he apprehends great difficulty in manufacturing them as fast as they are needed.In March of the following year he writes again, saying that his factory in New Haven has been destroyed by fire: "When Ireturned home from N.York I found my property all in ashes! My shop, all my tools, material and work equal to twenty finished cotton machines all gone.The manner in which it took fire is altogether unaccountable." Besides, the partners found themselves in distress for lack of capital.Then word came from England that the Manchester spinners had found the ginned cotton to contain knots, and this was sufficient to start the rumor throughout the South that Whitney's gin injured the cotton fiber and that cotton cleaned by them was worthless.It was two years before this ghost was laid.Meanwhile Whitney's patent was being infringed on every hand."They continue to clean great quantities of cotton with Lyon's Gin and sell it advantageously while the Patent ginned cotton is run down as good for nothing," writes Miller to Whitney in September, 1797.Miller and Whitney brought suits against the infringers but they could obtain no redress in the courts.
Whitney's attitude of mind during these troubles is shown in his letters.He says the statement that his machines injure the cotton is false, that the source of the trouble is bad cotton, which he ventures to think is improved fifty per cent by the use of his gin, and that it is absurd to say that the cotton could be injured in any way in the process of cleaning."I think," he says, writing to Miller, "you will be able to convince the CANDIDthat this is quite a mistaken notion and them that WILL NOTBELIEVE may be damn'd." Again, writing later to his friend Josiah Stebbins in New England: "I have a set of the most Depraved villains to combat and I might almost as well go to HELL in search of HAPPINESS as apply to a Georgia Court for Justice." And again: "You know I always believed in the 'DEPRAVITY OF HUMANNATURE.' I thought I was long ago sufficiently 'grounded and stablished' in this Doctrine.But God Almighty is continually pouring down cataracts of testimony upon me to convince me of this fact.'Lord I believe, help thou,' not 'mine unbelief,' but me to overcome the rascality of mankind." His partner Miller, on the other hand, is inclined to be more philosophical and suggests to Whitney that "we take the affairs of this world patiently and that the little dust which we may stir up about cotton may after all not make much difference with our successors one hundred, much less one thousand years hence." Miller, however, finally concluded that, "the prospect of making anything by ginning in this State [Georgia] is at an end.Surreptitious gins are being erected in every part of the country; and the jurymen at Augusta have come to an understanding among themselves, that they will never give a verdict in our favor, let the merits of the case be as they may."** Cited in Roe, "English and American Tool Builders", p.153.
Miller and Whitney were somewhat more fortunate in other States than in Georgia though they nowhere received from the cotton gin enough to compensate them for their time and trouble nor more than a pitiable fraction of the great value of their invention.
