This year marks the two hundredth anniversary of the death of Eli Whitney, probably America’s most celebrated inventor after Thomas Edison. Whitney is known for two things: the cotton gin and interchangeable parts. The cotton gin is by far the more famous. Many have been taught that without it, cotton cultivation could not have spread across much of the South. Since cotton was cultivated by enslaved people, and the states most dominated by slavery were that ones that seceded from the Union to protect slavery, it has been said that the cotton gin was a necessary cause for the Civil War.
Necessary, but not sufficient. Secession was how southern leaders responded to what they saw as the northern free states’ growing aggression against them. But why did the North threaten the South, intentionally or otherwise? According to another common line of thought, the North was industrializing and didn’t need slavery, which was an old and inefficient way to produce things. Northern industrialists then dragged the agricultural South kicking and screaming into the modern world in a terrible war that could have been avoided.
This is where interchangeable parts come in. Making standardized and identical products–rather than customized and variable ones–is a core principle of industrial production. Practically, this means breaking production down into a series of highly specialized steps and mass manufacturing each component with machines instead of having skilled craftsmen make entire products from start to finish by hand. In this process, each instance of each component must be made with enough precision to be effectively identical to each other instance of that component—that is, parts must be interchangeable. Without this, industrialization as we know it isn’t possible.
It seems remarkable, then, that this one guy—Eli Whitney, the paradigmatic clever Yankee—invented both the cotton gin and interchangeable parts. It’s as if Whitney single-handedly set the South and the North on opposite courses of economic development that later collided with consequences at once deadly, tragic, and emancipatory.
It’s an incredible story. It just happens to be mostly untrue. The real Whitney story is less grand than the legend, but more interesting and, ultimately, more edifying. It dispels several widely held ideas that aren’t very true. First, that the Whitney cotton gin was essential for the rise of the Cotton Kingdom in the Deep South. Second, that the antebellum North was an industrial behemoth that overpowered the agricultural South. And most importantly, that technological innovation occurs in dramatic leaps and bounds made by individual inventors.