could not earn their keep separating the cotton from its seeds by
hand, they could earn enormous profits in the fields, once the
difficulty of extracting the seeds was solved. Slaves were no
longer a liability but an asset. The price of "field hands" rose,
and continued to rise. If the worn-out lands of the seaboard no
longer afforded opportunity for profitable employment, the rich
new lands of the Southwest called for laborers, and yet more
laborers. Taking slaves with them, younger sons pushed out into
the wilderness, became possessed of great tracts of fertile land,
and built up larger plantations than those upon which they had
been born. Cotton became King of the South.

The supposed economic necessity of slave labor led great men to
defend slavery, and politics in the South became largely the
defense of slavery against the aggression, real or fancied, of
the free North. The rift between the sections became a chasm.
Then came the War of Secession.

Though Miller was dead, Whitney carried on the fight for his
rights in Georgia. His difficulties were increased by a patent
which the Government at Philadelphia issued in May, 1796, to
Hogden Holmes, a mechanic of Augusta, for an improvement in the
cotton gin. The Holmes machines were soon in common use, and it
was against the users of these that many of the suits for
infringement were brought. Suit after suit ran its course in the
Georgia courts, without a single decision in the inventor's
favor. At length, however, in December, 1806, the validity of
Whitney's patent was finally determined by decision of the United
States Circuit Court in Georgia. Whitney asked for a perpetual
injunction against the Holmes machine, and the court, finding