%206.  Towns along the Ohio.%—­As the emigrant in such an ark floated down the river, he would come first to Wheeling, a town of fifty log cabins, and then to Marietta, a town planted in Ohio in 1788 by settlers sent by the Ohio Company.  Below Marietta were Belpre and Gallipolis, a settlement made by Frenchmen brought there by the Scioto Company.  Yet farther down, on the Kentucky side, were Limestone (now Maysville) and Newport, opposite which some settlers were founding the city of Cincinnati.  Once past Cincinnati, all was unbroken wilderness till one reached Louisville in Kentucky, beyond which few emigrants had yet ventured to go.

[Illustration:  %Cincinnati in 1802 (Fort Washington)%]

%207.  Cotton Planting.%—­The South, in 1790, was on the eve of a great industrial revolution.  The products of the states south of Virginia had been tar, pitch, resin, lumber, rice, and indigo.  But in the years following the peace the indigo plants had been destroyed year after year by an insect.  As the plant was not a native of our country, but was brought from the West Indies, it became necessary either to import more seed plants, or to raise some other staple.  Many chose the latter course, and about 1787 began to grow cotton.

[Illustration:  %Farmers’ Castle (Belpre) in 1791%]

%208.  Whitney and the Cotton Gin.%—­The experiment succeeded, but a serious difficulty arose.  The cotton plant has pods which when ripe split open and show a white woolly substance attached to seeds.  Before the cotton could be used, these seeds must be picked out, and as the labor of cleaning was very great, only a small quantity could be sent to market.  It happened, however, that a young man from Massachusetts, named Eli Whitney, was then living in Georgia, and he, seeing the need of a machine to clean cotton, invented the cotton gin.[1] Till then, a negro slave could not clean two pounds of cotton in a day.  With the gin the same slave in the same time could remove the seeds from a hundred pounds.  This solved the difficulty, and gave to the United States another staple even greater in value than tobacco.  In 1792 one hundred and ninety-two thousand pounds of cotton were exported to Europe; in 1795, after the gin was invented, six million pounds were sent out of the country.  In 1894 no less than 4275 million pounds were raised and either consumed or exported.  Of all the marvelous inventions of our countrymen, this produced the very greatest consequences.  It made cotton planting profitable; it brought immense wealth to the people of the South every year; it covered New England with cotton mills; and by making slave labor profitable it did more than anything else to fasten slavery on the United States for seventy years, and finally to bring on the Civil War, the most terrible struggle of modern times.

[Footnote 1:  The word “gin” is a contraction of “engine.”]

[Illustration:  %The cotton gin% A.  Whitney’s original gin. B.  A later form.]