and Whitney and Miller were beginning their long involvement in lawsuits.  Their overreaching policy of monopolizing the operation of their gins turned public sentiment against them and inclined the juries, particularly in Georgia, to decide in favor of their opponents.  Not until 1807, when their patent was on the point of expiring did they procure a vindication in the Georgia courts.  Meanwhile a grant of $50,000 from the legislature of South Carolina to extinguish the patent right in that state, and smaller grants from North Carolina and Tennessee did little more than counterbalance expenses.[17] A petition which Whitney presented to Congress in 1812 for a renewal of his expired patent was denied, and Whitney turned his talents to the manufacture of muskets.

[Footnote 15:  American Historical Review.  Ill, 104.]

[Footnote 16:  J.A.  Turner, ed., Cotton Planter’s Manual, pp. 289, 290, 293-295.]

[Footnote 17:  M.B.  Hammond, “Correspondence of Eli Whitney relating to the Invention of the Cotton Gin,” in the American Historical Review, III, 90-127.]

In Georgia the contest of lawyers in the courts was paralleled by a battle of advertisers in the newspapers.  Thomas Spaulding offered to supply Joseph Eve’s gins from the Bahama Islands at fifty guineas each;[18] and Eve himself shortly immigrated to Augusta to contend for his patent rights on roller-gins, for some of his workmen had changed his model in such a way as to increase the speed, and had put their rival gins upon the market.[19] Among these may have been John Currie, who offered exclusive county rights at $100 each for the making, using and vending of his type of gins,[20] also William Longstreet of Augusta who offered to sell gins of his own devising at $150 each,[21] and Robert Watkins of the short-lived town of Petersburg, Georgia, who denounced Longstreet as an infringer of his patent and advertised local non-exclusive rights for making and using his own style of gins at the bargain rate of sixty dollars.[22] All of these were described as roller gins; but all were warranted to gin upland as well as sea-island cotton.[23] By the year 1800 Miller and Whitney had also adopted the practice of selling licenses in Georgia, as is indicated by an advertisement from their agent at Augusta.  Meanwhile ginners were calling for negro boys and girls ten or twelve years old on hire to help at the machines;[24] and were offering to gin for a toll of one-fifth of the cotton.[25] As years passed the rates were still further lowered.  At Augusta in 1809, for example, cotton was ginned and packed in square bales of 350 pounds at a cost of $1.50 per hundredweight.[26]

[Footnote 18:  Columbian Museum (Savannah, Ga.), April 26, 1796.]

[Footnote 19:  J.A.  Turner, ed., Cotton Planter’s Manual, p. 281.]

[Footnote 20:  Augusta, Ga., Chronicle, Dec. 10, 1796.]

[Footnote 21:  Southern Sentinel (Augusta, Ga.), July 14, 1796.]