Eli Whitney Commemorative Stamp

On Oct. 7, 1940, the U.S. Post Office held first-day-of-issue ceremonies in Savannah for 1-cent commemorative stamp that shows Eli Whitney. The stamp was one of 35 stamps in the "Famous Americans" series issued that year. Whitney was one of five great American inventors honored in the series.

Born in Massachusetts in 1765, Whitney graduated from Yale College in 1792. He was subsequently hired by Catharine Greene, widow of Gen. Nathanael Green, to tutor her children at Mulberry Grove Plantation outside of Savannah. At the time, cotton was not a major agricultural crop in the South. However, in 1793, after hearing planters talking about the difficulty of separating cotton seed from the fiber, Whitney invented a machine he called a cotton gin that would do this mechanically. Suddenly, cotton, a valuable cash crop, and cotton farming quickly spread into the interior of Georgia and other southern states. This drove up the need for slave labor, which eventually contributed to a national crisis over slavery that led to the Civil War.

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