23.]
[Footnote 14: Denison Olmstead, _Memoir of Eli Whitney, Esq_. (New Haven,
1846), reprinted in J.A. Turner, ed., _Cotton Planter's Manual_, pp.
297-320. M.B. Hammond, _The Cotton Industry_, pp. 25, 26.]
Miller, who now married Mrs. Greene, promptly entered into partnership with
Whitney not only to manufacture gins but also to monopolize the business
of operating them, charging one-third of the cotton as toll. They even
ventured into the buying and selling of the staple on a large scale. Miller
wrote Whitney in 1797, for example, that he was trying to raise money for
the purchase of thirty or forty thousand pounds of seed cotton at the
prevailing price of three cents, and was projecting a trade in the lint to
far-off Tennessee.[15] By this time the partners had as many as thirty gins
in operation at various points in Georgia; but misfortune had already begun
to pursue them. Their shop on the Greene plantation had been forced by a
mob even before their patent was procured in 1793, and Jesse Bull, Charles
M. Lin and Edward Lyons, collaborating near Wrightsboro, soon put forth an
improved gin in which saw-toothed iron discs replaced the wire points of
the Whitney model.
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