You're listening to an Air Wave Media Podcast. Welcome to True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Suddenly out of the dark it's a bit of a lob. You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? Vengeance felt good. Seeing these people pay for what they've done felt righteous. True Spies from Spicecape Studios, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and thank you for joining the American Revolution. This week Episode 383, Eli Whitney and Dolly Madison. A few weeks ago I mentioned that Congress had made some changes to the patent law in 1793, making it easier to register new patents. In 1794, a new patent would be registered that would change the South forever. It all started at the Mulberry Grove Plantation. Before the war, Royal Lieutenant Governor John Graham owned Mulberry Grove, which sits along the Savannah River just northwest of the city of Savannah. Graham fled back to Britain in 1776, abandoning his property. The Patriot government seized the plantation at the end of the war in 1783. State officials then gifted that plantation to General Nathaniel Green for his services in defending the state during the Revolutionary War. They also gifted neighboring Richmond Plantation to General Anthony Wayne. General Green had been from Rhode Island. He had incurred massive debts during the war, most of which were to help pay for the military campaigns that he headed in defense of the South. Congress, as they were doing with everyone at the time, either denied or delayed his claims for reimbursement. His creditors were not as patient. He ended up selling his home in Rhode Island as part of the effort to pay down his debts and ended up opting to settle on Mulberry Grove in Georgia. Mulberry Grove had been a profitable rice plantation before the war. Green believed he could make it profitable again. In addition to the land, though, he would need some startup capital. Green was able to obtain loans, including one from Robert Morris, the Philadelphia merchant who had also helped finance the war. Around this time, Green, who had been raised as a Quaker, told a friend that he believed there was no defense of slavery. Despite the moral objections, though, his desire to support himself and his family caused him to take ownership of more than a hundred slaves. Some of them had come with the plantation, others he purchased at auction in Charleston and St. Augustine. While trying to get his plantation up and running, Green continued to fend off lawsuits from creditors. In June 1786, Green traveled with his wife, Katie, to Savannah in an attempt to convince a creditor to delay his collection efforts. He returned home in an open carriage without a hat. The Georgia's son took its toll and gave him a headache. He went straight to bed, but woke up the next morning feeling even worse. They called for a doctor who bled him, but that didn't seem to help. After a few more days in bed, he died on June 19, 1786. Cause of death was heat stroke. This left his wife, Katie Green, in control of Mulberg Grove. Katie was now a 31-year-old widow with five children. She also inherited all of her husband's debts. Green's first instinct was to move back to Rhode Island to be with her family. But several men, including Anthony Wayne and her family's tutor, Phineas Miller, convinced her to stay. Her only chance of getting out of debt would be to continue to grow and sell rice on the plantation. Miller agreed to take over management of the plantation. This change also meant that Green's children would need a new tutor. In 1792, they asked Yale president Ezra Stiles if he could recommend anyone. Stiles recommended an older student in his late 20s named Eli Whitney. He had just graduated and planned to study law, but couldn't afford law school. Instead, Whitney accepted the tutoring position and moved to Georgia. On his arrival in 1792, Whitney reported to several friends that Katie Green and Phineas Miller were essentially living as husband and wife. The two had not married since Green was still trying to get Congress to pay off her husband's debts, and the two of them had agreed that her status as the widow of General Green would carry more weight with Congress than if she became Mrs. Miller. At that time, the primary cash crops in the South were rice and indigo. Further north, tobacco still dominated. Cotton grew well in the region, but it could not be produced profitably. The hard part was removing the seeds from the cotton. It was a slow and tedious process. One person had a hard time extracting the seeds from just one pound of cotton in a day. Even with slave labor, that simply wasn't a profitable use of time. Whitney listened to discussions of locals who had a discussion about the problem at Mulberry Grove. Whitney didn't know anything about cotton production until he arrived in Georgia. He'd grown up in Massachusetts, where his father had run a mill. As a boy, he saw how machines could accomplish tasks that would be much harder to do by hand. As a teenager, he had actually, on his own, produced things and sold them like nails, hatpins, and walking sticks. Over the winter of 1792-93, in a spare time, Whitney began working on a machine that could separate cotton from seeds automatically. He came up with a device that passed raw cotton through a rotating wooden cylinder with rows of wire hooks that pulled the raw cotton fibers and caused the seeds to fall away as the cotton passed through a narrow gate that was smaller than the cotton seeds. He still needed a way to get the cotton off the hooks. Katie Green suggested a second cylinder with brush bristles that would sweep against the teeth and brush the cotton fibers into a separate bin. All of this work could be done by a single person who just dumped raw cotton into the top and then turned a hand crank that did all the work. By spring of 1793, Whitney had a working model that allowed a single person to produce over 50 pounds of cotton per day. He dubbed it the cotton gin. Realizing how revolutionary this would be, he applied for and received a patent signed by President Washington in March of 1794. He also formed a partnership with Katie Green and Phineas Miller. Green provided much of the startup capital to begin production. Whitney's first problem was that the South simply wasn't set up for industrial production. He couldn't find trained workmen or easily get the materials to produce cotton gins, so instead he established his factory in New Haven, Connecticut. He'd become familiar with the area while attending Yale, knew he could find men who could do the job, and had access to the materials he would need through imports from New York City. He had a factory operational by early 1794, even before he received his patent. By early 1795, he had produced 26 cotton gins. Green began to advertise their availability in the Savannah Gazette. The next problem was that the farmers didn't have any money to buy cotton gins. Farmers were notoriously cash poor and could not afford a large upfront investment. Instead, Whitney would give away the cotton gins, subject to an agreement, of course, that the farmer would give 40% of the processed cotton back to the company as compensation. Now this was a great deal for the farmers. Instead of producing only one pound of cotton per worker per day, they could keep 30 of the 50 pounds that they could produce with the gin. Things seemed to be moving along well when disaster struck in March 1795 on a day when Whitney was in New York. The workmen left the workshop for breakfast, a fire broke out, and consumed the workshop very quickly. It destroyed the building, all of the specialized tools that Whitney had constructed, as well as 20 nearly completed cotton gins. It also burned all of his drawings and papers regarding his creation of the manufacturing process. Miller and Green provided him with additional credit. Green even put up Mulberry Grove Plantation as collateral for a business loan. Whitney was able to rebuild all of his machinery from memory, and the rebuilding went remarkably fast. Seven months after the fire, Whitney's new factory completed 26 finished cotton gins to ship to Georgia. The cotton gin proved wildly popular. Farmers began planting much more cotton, and it became an extremely lucrative cash crop. In May of 1796, Katie Green traveled with Phineas Miller to Philadelphia, where they visited the Washingtons. Green had gotten to know George and Martha Washington during the war when she spent years with her husband, General Nathaniel Green. Washington had visited Green at Mulberry Grove during his 1791 Southern tour, and Katie Green returned the visit, calling on the Washingtons at the Presidential Mansion in Philadelphia. The Washingtons were happy to see her, but expressed concerns that she and Phineas Miller had not married. They noted that this could be problematic for their reputation, so Katie and Phineas decided to marry right there and then. They held a private ceremony in the Presidential Mansion in Philadelphia with George and Martha serving as witnesses. Unfortunately, Whitney, Green, and Miller never personally benefited from the invention as much as they probably should have. Within a few years, copycat gins began showing up all over Georgia. Farmers did not like having to give 40% of their yield to the inventor because it was much cheaper to buy a pirated gin and keep everything. Farmers quickly grew resentful of this Yankee who was taking nearly half of their hard-earned crop. When Whitney sued for patent violations, most Georgia juries refused to find in his favor. Even when he won cases, Whitney often had to spend more illegal fees than he could collect in damages. Georgia Governor James Jackson, in response to appeals by farmers, even tried to have the state legislature suppress Whitney's patent. Despite these legal fights, the cotton gin changed southern agriculture, creating a new cash crop that would soon become known as King Cotton. Another marriage took place in Philadelphia around the same time as the one between Green and Miller. James Madison had been a major player in the establishment of the federal government, but he never seemed particularly lucky in love. He was small in stature, reported only about 5 feet 4 inches tall and a little over 100 pounds. He was also rather shy, especially around women. He'd courted several of them when he was younger, but never managed to get a yes. By 1794, Madison was a 43-year-old bachelor. Dolly was only 26 years old. She was considered a great beauty and had a very outgoing personality, something that caused her a bit of a struggle as a young Quaker. She had been born in Virginia, but her family moved to Philadelphia when she was just 15 years old. Her father arranged for Dolly to marry John Todd when she was 21 years old. The following year, 1792, her father died and her mother opened a boarding house to support herself. Dolly seemed to be doing pretty well. She and her husband quickly produced two sons. Then came the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1793, which we discussed a couple of weeks ago. Dolly's husband, John, sent her with the two children to a small village outside of Philadelphia while he stayed and helped with victims in the city as well as attending to his business. Most of the family got sick. Dolly remained in bed for two weeks, suffering from fever and other brutal effects. As she was getting better, though, she learned that both her husband and her baby William had died on the same day, October 14th. Dolly, a 25-year-old widow with a 2-year-old son, Payne, had a total of $19 to support the family. Her mother had already fled Philadelphia to go stay with her other daughter Lucy. Lucy had married George Steptoe Washington, a nephew of the president, and they lived on a plantation in Virginia. So Dolly was on her own in Philadelphia. She could have had her husband's estate to support her, but her brother-in-law, John Todd, decided to keep her rightful inheritance from her and left her with nothing. Her husband had not named an executor in his will. Dolly, because she was a woman, could not sue on her own right in court. She began barraging John with daily letters, demanding her money from the estate, but he just refused. Finally, Dolly was able to retain an attorney to represent her in court. She finally received access to her husband's estate, but it was after several months had passed. Following a period of mourning, Dolly began to be out and about around town. She attracted the attention of many men, including James Madison. As I said, the two were an unlikely pair. He was 17 years older and four inches shorter than Dolly. She was considered fun, attractive, outgoing, while Madison had a reputation of being rather dour dreary and a bit of a hypochondriac. Despite the differences, Madison asked Senator Aaron Burr to introduce him to Dolly. Burr was living in Dolly's mother's boarding house and knew her well. In fact, Burr had become the temporary male guardian of Dolly's living son, Payne. At this time, Burr was still married to Theodosia. The two had got together during the war. She was the wife of a British officer who was away and the two simply shacked up and lived together. After many years, her husband died and the two were finally married. Burr and Theodosia had a daughter who was around 10 years old by this time. His wife was 10 years older than him and had been sick for many years. So Theodosia, the wife, lived in New York while Burr lived in Philadelphia doing his job as a US senator. Burr was not exactly a gentleman all the time. We know that Burr fathered two other children with an Indian servant named Mary Emmons. There are also stories that Burr had his own interests in Dolly. But in this case, he appeared to act as a gentleman and introduced her to a very interested James Madison. Dolly and Jemmi, as she soon began calling him, hit it off almost immediately. Madison was clearly smitten. She also found Madison to be a delight. While Madison appeared very formal, even somber in public, he apparently had a good wit and loved telling funny stories in private to those close to him. The two were soon seen all over town, attending concerts and plays, going to lunch and dinner together. They also began writing love letters to one another. Well, Madison actually got someone else to write many of the letters for him. He asked Dolly's cousin, Catherine Coles, to write the letters on his behalf because the author of the Constitution and President Washington's speechwriter did not consider himself up to the task of writing a good love letter. In one letter, Coles sent to Dolly, she said, He thinks so much of you in the day and has lost his tongue. At night he dreams of you and starts in his sleep a calling on you to relieve his flame, for he burns to such an excess that he will be shortly consumed. So while they were clearly in love, marriage raised some other concerns. In addition to the age difference, Dolly was a Quaker and James was an Anglican. If they got married, Dolly would be expelled from her meeting. She would also likely have to give up living in the city for more time on Madison's plantation back in Virginia. She'd also have to get used to the idea of owning slaves. Dolly spent some time researching her suitor and reaching out to some of his friends to get their candid views about them. One of them was an attorney who helped her get her estate, William Wilkins, who also happened to be a good friend of Madison's. Support for the marriage also came from another source. During the summer of 1794, Dolly received an invitation to the presidential mansion. When she arrived, Martha Washington assured Dolly that Madison, who had been a close friend of her husband's for years, would make a wonderful husband. Dolly opted to leave town for a while to get some perspective. She went to visit relatives in Virginia. Madison, of course, recalled that years earlier he had had a fiance named Kitty Floyd who had done the same thing. Left Philadelphia to go home for a while and she never came back. She ended up marrying someone else in New York that summer. So Madison had to wonder, would history repeat itself? He kept up a steady stream of love letters, most of which were still written by Coles. In one of the letters that he wrote himself, Madison did ask Dolly to marry him. He spent several weeks awaiting a reply. When it finally came, the answer was yes. The two got married on September 15, 1794, on Dolly's sister's plantation near what is today Charlestown, West Virginia. The honeymoon probably was not much of one. For starters, Dolly's two sisters, Anna and Lucy, accompanied them. They visited friends and relatives. But even that trip was cut short when Dolly became ill with the flu. They then had to return to Philadelphia when Madison had to be back in Congress. As expected, Dolly was forced to leave her Quaker meeting. Madison moved out of his boarding house and rented a house on Spruce Street, recently occupied by James Monroe. Madison's old friend and political rival had been appointed to replace Gov. Morris as ambassador to France. So he had to leave Philadelphia. Dolly's youngest sister, Anna, who was age 14 at the time, also moved in with them. Her two-year-old son, Payne, also rejoined the household after returning from Lucy's plantation, where he had stayed during the honeymoon trip. Monroe, when he arrived in France, was happy to purchase French furniture, carpets, and china for the Madison's. The Madison's also began attending more social gatherings in Philadelphia. Even John Adams, who rarely had anything good to say about anyone, wrote to his wife that, quote, Mrs. Madison is a fine woman. Madison seemed to adapt happily to his new life as a husband and father. He would later tell friends that his marriage to Dolly was the most fortunate event of his life. Next week, Congress decides it's finally time for the new government to have its own Navy. LUSSEL! Hey, thanks for joining the American Revolution podcast after show, part of the Airwave Media Network. Thanks to my Patreon supporters in the Alexander Hamilton Club, George Davis, and Gordon Kemp. Thanks also to Robert Morris Circle supporters, Jason Harrison, and Ron Thorson. I also want to thank Michael D'Albor, Bennett Spare, and Matthew Delaney for one-time gifts via PayPal or Venmo. Now, almost every week I say how grateful I am for all the support that so many people have given this podcast, and I really mean that. But despite your generosity, I have seen a significant drop-off in donor support in recent months, like 20%. If you think it's worth continuing this podcast, please consider supporting it on Patreon or other donation sources. I made a commitment to keep working on this project as long as people would support it, and I really hope to continue with that. We covered two separate events this week that weren't only kind of associated with each other because they happened around the same time. The first was the development of the cotton gin. As I mentioned in the main episode, Whitney and his partner Finneas Miller, as well as the person who bankrolled this whole thing, Katie Green, never really made the fortune that they thought they deserved from the invention. Farmers thought that they should be able to use an idea and just build their own gins. Southern state governments wanting to ingratiate themselves with the farmers pretty much tried to let them get away with it. Katie Green, who, as I said, financed the initial operation, ended up selling Mulberry Grove in 1798 and moving to a smaller plantation on Cumberland Island. Years later, Aaron Burr showed up at their door. Shortly after he killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, Katie allowed Burr to stay there, but left her home. She would not stay under the same roof with the man who had murdered someone she had been friends with. When Katie left, Burr got the message and moved on. Katie would continue to live in Georgia and would eventually die after she caught malaria in 1814 at age 59. Eli Whitney and his partner, Katie's husband, Finneas Miller, had lawsuits tied up in courts for decades. Most of their victories were eaten up by legal fees. At one point, Whitney noted that he had spent about $40,000 in legal costs to obtain about $30,000 in awards. Eventually, some states agreed to pay him to allow his patent to become available for public use. South Carolina paid him $50,000 for the patent rights. North Carolina generated a little over $14,000 through a tax that had imposed on gins as a settlement to the dispute there. In the end, the partnership probably collected about half of the nearly $100,000 that the gin made for them before the patent expired in 1807. Whitney got the bulk of that money because Miller had squandered much of the company's money in the Yazoo Land scandal. Something we'll probably talk about in the future. Meanwhile, cotton production in the South exploded, from less than 700 metric tons in 1790 to 121,000 in 1825 when Eli Whitney died. It only continued to grow, reaching over a million by the beginning of the Civil War. Many blame Whitney for the fact that his invention created a much stronger demand for slaves to harvest the cotton that could be processed through his cotton gin. I suppose there's truth to the idea that making an agricultural product far more lucrative did require a larger workforce, but the fact that the workforce became more slaves I don't think can be blamed on the inventor of the cotton gin. The growth of the cotton industry helped build the southern economy and made cotton clothing much cheaper and more accessible for both Americans and Europeans. Southern farmland also became much more valuable as a result. At the time of Whitney's death in 1825, the southern states were producing three-quarters of the world's cotton. Whitney himself would go on to produce other machines, including a milling machine in 1818. He also married the granddaughter of the famous evangelist Jonathan Edwards. He was a big part in establishing the use of machine-tooled interchangeable parts for industry and building armaments for the federal government. But whatever else he did, Eli Whitney will always be remembered for the cotton gin. We also covered the marriage of James and Dolly Madison. They would go on to have a very long and happy marriage, lasting more than 40 years. They would never have any children of their own. Dolly's surviving son, Payne Todd, would be a continuing frustration for both of his parents. Madison retired from politics in 1796 for reasons that we'll cover in an upcoming episode, and was determined to live a quiet life of a gentleman farmer. That didn't last long, though. In 1799, he returned to the Virginia legislature. He frequently commented on federal policy, and after Jefferson's election as president, returned to the federal government as secretary of state. After Jefferson's two terms as president, Madison became president himself. His son, who went by his middle name Payne, was only 17 when Madison became president. The Madison's tried to get Payne to focus on school, sending him to board at St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore. But the young and handsome son of a president was more interested in the social scene and all the attention that he received. Madison then tried to curb this by sending him to Russia on a State Department mission. Payne's time in Europe only increased his interests in gambling, drinking, and womanizing. He was arrested several times for disturbing the peace after his return to America, and yet his parents always bailed him out. After Madison's death, Payne's gambling debts and business failures bankrupted the estate. Dolly had to survive by selling Madison's papers to Congress late in her life. Even after that, she died in 1849 with almost nothing. Payne outlived his mother by only a few years. He died of typhoid fever in 1852. For my book recommendation this week, I went with a biography of Dolly Madison. There's a ton of good books out there that cover Dolly Madison as a subject. Most of them are written for children. If you're looking for a good longer book, I recommend Strength and Honor, The Life of Dolly Madison by Richard Cote. I picked this one because it gets into pretty good detail. It's over 350 pages long, not counting notes and index. I also like that it didn't devote the majority of the book to the Madison presidency, but rather focused on Dolly's entire life. There's a borrow only copy of the book on archive.org if you just want to check it out before buying. But it's a good book, worth reading if you want to learn more about Dolly Madison. The book title again is Strength and Honor, The Life of Dolly Madison by Richard Cote. My online recommendation is an older book about Eli Whitney. It was published in 1848. Again, there's a great many children's books about Whitney. This older book is not a children's book, but it is a short one, less than 100 pages. And it focuses on his entire life, not just the cotton gin. It was first published as a series of articles in the American Journal of Science in 1836, just a few years after Whitney's death, but it was later released as a short book. Of course, the book is in the public domain and is available as a download. As always, I've included direct links to the book on my blog and in the show notes. My question this week asks, why did the French Revolution backfire and the American Revolution did not? Why did the French Revolution lead to Napoleon and dozens, if not hundreds, getting beheaded? Well, first off, there were not just hundreds getting beheaded in France. There were many thousands. Depending on if you're just talking about the guillotine, there's certainly over 10,000, probably more. And there were many other executions by other means. And deaths from people waiting in prison, awaiting execution. You're talking tens of thousands of deaths as a result of the French Revolution. In America, there were a handful of executions for ideological reasons, but it never became anything like France. There's lots of complex reasons for the different paths, but the main one, as I see it, was that the French Revolution tended to be much more, well, revolutionary. It attempted to destroy and rebuild all national and local institutions. The results were chaos, which eventually led to a dictator taking advantage of that chaos and restoring order. Even after Napoleon took control of France and eventually was deposed, France went back to a king for a short time. By contrast, the American Revolution did not try to recreate everything. State governments remained very similar to the colonial governments that had existed for decades, including being operated by many of the same people. The main difference in most colonies was that they started having an elected governor rather than one appointed by the king. The creators of the new federal government drew heavily on the British parliamentary model without trying to reinvent everything in government. Another major factor was that when French revolutionaries overthrew their king, there was no single enemy. France didn't go to war with other countries until several years after the revolution began, so the various factions went to war with one another, and this resulted in so many mass executions. In America, there were various factions in Congress, but they all realized the need to compromise and work together and maintain unity because they had to defeat the British Empire. The other big difference in my view was George Washington. As the most popular leader in a relatively chaotic America by the end of the war, he probably could have grabbed power much like Napoleon did in France. Instead, he focused on calming various factions and serving as a leading example of respect for elected civilian authorities. Lafayette had tried to become such a figure in France, but he never had the national respect nor the clout to control the other factions. For that reason, France spun out of control in ways that the American Revolution did not. If you have a question you'd like me to answer, please reach out to me either via email or on ex-Facebook Quora or Reddit. Well, that's all for this week. I hope you will join me again next week for another American Revolution podcast.
