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sion of the heart in the head and hand analogy might
have allowed for more consideration of issues such as
manliness, femininity, and the cult of sensibility in the
construction of antebellum working and middle-class
culture.
Still, Rice has largely succeeded at a very tricky
project, teasing out meanings from rhetoric that at first
glance often seems, at best, tangential to his central
concerns. This is a book that anyone interested in class
in the antebellum period should read. It is made all the
more pleasurable by Rice's well-polished and entertaining prose.
LAWRENCE A. PESKIN
Morgan State University
ANGELA LAKWETE. Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine
and Myth in Antebellum America. (Johns Hopkins
Studies in the History of Technology.) Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press. 2003. Pp. xiii, 232.
$45.00.
One of the most enduring myths in American history
concerns Eli Whitney. Countless textbooks recount
how slaves cleaned the seeds from cotton by hand until
Whitney miraculously invented the cotton gin in 1794.
Central to this myth is the old dichotomy of the
industrial (and industrious) North versus the agricultural (and lazy) South: it was Whitney, the Yankee
inventor, who brought mechanical progress to technologically inept southern planters and slaves. Thanks to
Whitney's invention, planters began growing huge
cotton crops and slavery became economically viable.
Following the simple causality found in too many
textbooks, Whitney's gin sustained slavery and led
inevitably to the Civil War.
Remarkably, while American historians have overturned similar myths, Angela Lakwete is the first to
probe the connections among the cotton gin, slavery,
and innovation in the antebellum South. By examining
how cotton was cleaned-or ginned-Lakwete reveals
that Whitney did not invent the cotton gin and that
southerners could be quite innovative.
Lakwete traces ginning from the fifth century C.E.,
when women in Africa, Asia, and the American Southwest cleaned cotton using a long thin roller on a flat
surface. By the seventeenth century, artisans in India
had developed a hand-cranked churka with two rollers.
Seeing cotton as a potential cash crop, British colonizers transferred the churka to the Caribbean and North
America. Since there was a shortage of labor and a
strong demand for cotton, Lakwete shows how white
mechanics and enslaved Africans in the Caribbean
built larger, foot-powered models.
Demand for cotton grew rapidly at the end of the
eighteenth century as inventors in England mechanized cotton spinning. Recognizing this demand,
southern planters turned to cotton and employed
roller gins. Hoping to cash in on this shift to cotton,
Whitney patented a wire-toothed gin in 1794. Whitney's gin, however, produced tangled, low-quality fi-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
ber, prompting southern mechanics to replace the wire
teeth with circular saw blades. Whitney sued these
rivals for infringing on his patent, and although he won
several court cases, he was unable to stop them from
manufacturing saw gins. In scrutinizing Whitney's
technical contributions, Lakwete joins Edwin A. Battison, Merritt Roe Smith, and Ken Alder, who have
previously demonstrated that Whitney did not invent
interchangeable parts for firearms; interchangeablity
originated in France and was perfected in America by
other gun manufacturers.
Having dealt with Whitney, Lakwete chronicles the
experiences of antebellum gin manufacturers in New
England and across the South. Since most gin makers
were small, evanescent enterprises, Lakwete found
them by combing through newspapers, patent litigation, census records, city directories, and credit reports. In several cases, she takes us inside these
enterprises to show how gins were built by both white
and slave workers. Lakwete documents that the South
should not be considered a technological backwater; in
terms of gins, at least, King Cotton stimulated innovation.
In chronicling gin manufacture, Lakwete suggests
how the design of gins was shaped by several tensions.
However, because she organized her material into
chapters on different gins-saw and roller-it is difficult to understand how planters-perhaps the key
social group-made strategic choices in deploying the
cotton gin. Depending on location, a planter might
grow long or short-staple cotton; while the roller gin
was used with long-staple crops, short-staple planters
preferred saw gins. It is unclear whether these preferences were based on plant biology, culture, or economics. A planter wrestled with a tradeoff between quantity and quality; textile manufacturers paid more for
long fibers, but it was hard to produce quality cotton in
volume. Over the years, gin makers introduced innovations promising to increase both quantity and quality, but Lakwete does not clarify whether these innovations effectively addressed this tradeoff. Planters
must also have evaluated gins in terms of the skill
needed to operate, and one wonders if they sought gins
that could be run by unskilled slaves. Finally, cotton
prices declined during the antebellum era, and Lakwete does not explore how price changes affected how
planters deployed gin technology. Lakwete could have
balanced her investigation of the gin manufacture with
a closer look at how these machines were actually used
by planters. Only by looking at how planters made
choices about technology and labor can we understand
why slavery survived as an institution.
Nevertheless, Lakwete has achieved an important
goal-to lay to rest the myths surrounding the cotton
gin. She has demonstrated that Whitney did not heroically invent the cotton gin and that southerners actively improved a technology so necessary for King
Cotton. Through close study of the technology itself,
Lakwete challenges us to revise our understanding of
slavery in American history, and for this reason, her
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482
Reviews of Books and Films
book was awarded the 2004 Edelstein Prize by the
Society for History of Technology.
W. BERNARD CARLSON
University of Virginia
BRIDGET T. HENEGHAN. Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 2003. Pp.
xxvii, 204. $45.00.
Bridget T. Heneghan draws on a diverse array of
archaeological, literary, and other textual sources to
support the thesis that "whiteness," as a racial category, was constituted through a discursive relationship
between gentile practice and material goods. White
goods, such as ceramics, gravestones, houses, and
women's clothing, became popular in the late eighteenth century among the elite as the whitelblack
racial binary that has come to characterize American
society became entrenched. White goods were not only
more popular as the nineteenth century progressed but
became more highly valued than nonwhite items.
In favoring white materials, Heneghan suggests, the
white elite was legitimating the racial hierarchy and
making assertions about the relative worth of white
versus black persons. So pervasive was the reification
of whiteness through white materials, argues
Heneghan, it is evidenced in the literary works of white
authors like lames Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan
Poe, and Herman Melville, among others. Indeed,
African-American authors such as Frederick Douglass
and Linda Brent were also aware of the materiality of
whiteness and sought to problematize and counter it in
their abolitionist writings.
Heneghan focuses on a limited number of issues,
stating her thesis in her brief introduction and then
offering four chapters that focus on particular aspects
of that thesis. In the first chapter she presents the
majority of the material culture evidence, predominantly derived from archaeological and literary
sources. Because Heneghan's entire thesis hinges upon
whether her reader is convinced by the evidence
presented in this chapter, I will give some attention to
this portion of the work.
Heneghan is not an archaeologist, but she is more
aware of the literature from this field than most
historians. She is particularly influenced by lames
Deetz's In Small Things Forgotten: the archaelogy of
Early American Life (1977). Deetz first described the
whitening of tablewares, gravestones, and houses as
part of what he termed the "Georgian Mindset." He
used a structuralist model to explain what he saw as a
complex of changes in material life from the eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century reflective of a change
in American world view. Deetz's work predominantly
provides the white material culture side of Heneghan's
thesis.
Heneghan then turns to materials from sites occupied by enslaved African Americans, primarily in the
Chesapeake and Carolinas. Her goal was clearly to
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
create a parallel synthesis for African Americans to
complement Deetz's. To do this, she argues that while
planters were surrounded by whiteness, their enslaved
people were provisioned in earthtones. This is the
weakest part of the chapter and, in my opinion, of the
overall book. Her assertion that enslaved people were
provisioned with dark ceramics is based on data from
one site in a part of the country where there were
vibrant Native American and African pottery traditions that enslaved people culturally favored. If
Heneghan had looked at areas outside of the Chesapeake, such as Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, Texas,
and Tennessee, and had looked at plantations occupied later than the 181Os, she would have found that
enslaved people were using materials remarkably similar to those of the white elite. Part of this shortcoming
can be attributed to the age of her historical archaeology citations. The most recent are from the mid1990s. A tremendous amount of new research has been
published since that time. I would suggest that this part
of the argument is not necessary to the book's thesis.
Heneghan's work emphasizes the role of white goods
in reifying whiteness in white households, and her
African-American literary sources are playing upon
their (predominantly white) audiences' preconceptions
in their narratives.
The first chapter ends with an in-depth consideration of materiality in Brent's narrative, Incidents in
the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Heneghan is at her best
here and convincingly demonstrates that Brent was
aware of the ways that her enslavers and her audience
communicated racial entitlement and superiority
through material culture. She shows how Brent plays
upon those understandings intentionally in her text.
Chapter two, takes the next step in the thesis, linking
white materiality to a racialized class identity explicitly, focusing on changes in housing designs, the development of the dining room, and the elaboration of
table settings and etiquette during the nineteenth
century. Chapter three builds on the relationship
between whiteness and gender, including a discussion
of grave art, while the final chapter explores the
relationship between the hygiene movement's emphases on purity and cleanliness in conjunction with
whiteness and racialized notions of beauty.
Overall, Heneghan has presented an intriguing study
of how racial privilege was constructed and naturalized
through everyday practices in the antebellum period.
The work should be of interest to anyone studying this
period, particularly those with an interest in materiality and literature. Heneghan is to be commended for
her attempt to integrate very disparate lines of evidence in a meaningful historical analysis.
LAURIE A. WILKIE
University of California,
Berkeley
MICHAEL O'BRIEN. Conjectures of Order: Intellectual
Life and the American South, 1810-1860. Chapel Hill:
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