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WHITNEY

2080

WHITNEY

pieces which made up this book an irregular rhythm took the place of rime and measure. In this he but followed Matthew Arnold's Strayed Reveller, the Old-English poem of Beowulf etc. Whitman is variously called by his admirers ' 'the poet of democracy" and "the good gray poet." Professor Beers says: "He liked the people — m u 11 i-tudes of people; the swarm of life beheld from a Broadway omnibus or a Brooklyn ferryboat. The rowdy and the negro truck-driver were closer to his sympathy than the gentleman and the scholar." Whitman himself said: "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." During the Civil War he gave himself up to the care of the wounded soldiers in the Washington hospitals, and about this experience he wrote his Dresser. In Drum-Taps, poems on the Civil War, is one of his finest pieces, My Captain, written after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. In 1888 appeared his last volume, November Boughs. Whitman made his home in the latter part of his life at Camden, N. J., where he died on March 26, 1892. Consult Edmund Clarence Stedman's Poets of America. Whit'ney, Eli. One fine morning in 1793 a young man with a serious, New England type of face, was sitting in his room in a big plantation-house on Savannah River, Georgia, engaged in studying law. A company of rich planters had arrived from Augusta, and were being entertained by the mistress, the widow of General Nathanael Greene (q.v.), a hero of the Revolutionary War, So the young man had withdrawn to his own quiet quarters. Presently he was interrupted by a black servant who said that Mrs. Greene and the gentlemen wished to see him in the drawing-room. He went immediately.

"Gentlemen," said Mrs. Greene, "this is my ingenious young friend, Mr. Whitney, who has just been graduated from Yale College. Explain what you require, and I am sure he can help you."

ELI WHITNEY

"Will you please invent for us a machine for ginning cotton, and do it as soon as possible? The south has unlimited acres for cotton-growing, and the new inventions in England for spinning and weaving have increased the demand enormously. But there is no use in our growing the cotton so long as the fiber must be separated from the seed by hand."

The man to whom interested people would turn in such an emergency could have been nothing less than remarkable. Eli Whitney was 28 years old. He was born on Dec. 8, 1765, a month later than Robert Fulton. But his birthplace was Westboro, Massachusetts, and his ancestry Puritan. His home was a plain, bare farmhouse; his father a stern, unimaginative man who brought his children up to hard work arid few pleasures. Every New England ^armer at that time had a workshop, and Eli showed such skill in making and mending the many articles needed in house, stable and field, that the shop was practically turned over to him. One cold Sunday, when sickness kept him home from church, he took his father's silver watch apart and put it together again so well tha*£ no one knew it had been meddled with. He mended violins and made nails on a little forge during the Revolutionary War, when the supply from abroad failed. Of course he went to school and learned to read and write and cipher. When he was 19, he set about earning enough money to go to Yale College. But it was a long, hard task, and he was 27 when he graduated. He accepted an offer of a position as a teacher in a private school in the south, intending to use his spare time in the study ot law..

On the voyage from New York to Savannah he had the brilliant and wealthy Mrs. Greene for a fellow-passenger, who soon discovered that Eli Whitney was no ordinary young man. So, when he discovered that the position was not what it was represented to be, Mrs. Greene insisted that he be her guest until he could place himself to better advantage. His mechanical skill that had supported him through college was now turned to many services for the gracious lady who had befriended him. Thus it came about that law-books were abandoned, and Eli Whitney won fame as the inventor of the machine that brought wealth to the south.

The problem presented was this: There are two varieties of cotton as of peaches — the freestone and the clingstone. Cotton with the loose seed is easily managed by a simple contrivance, like the clothes-wringer, that presses the seed out. This is the sea-island cotton that grows only near water. The tight-seeded cotton-plant that flourishes inland had to have the fibers pulled from the embedded seeds by hand, a slow and expensive process, even when there were slaves to do the work.

WALT WHITMAN