Eli was forced to seek his own fortune.

             Whitney moved to Grafton, Massachusetts where he found a job teaching. He spent his free time furthering his education while attending Leicester Academy. He studied for the college entrance exams during this time. His efforts were rewarded when he was accepted at Yale University in 1797. At the age of 24 he began his higher education and graduated with a college degree three years later. Whitney could not find a position that fit his aspirations, nor mechanical experience, upon his graduation. He reluctantly accepted a position as a private tutor for a southern family in South Carolina. On the way to South Carolina he met Mrs. Catherine Greene, the widow of a Revolutionary War hero and plantation owner. Phineas Miller, the plantation's manager, accompanied Green. .

             The three established a good friendship upon arriving in South Carolina. When Whitney's tutoring job did not work out, he willingly accepted Greene's offer to remain on her estate. His plan was to study law, but his attentions became directed elsewhere. He quickly learned that most planters could no longer afford to keep slaves because they had no crop that made enough money. Tobacco had been the major cash crop, but most of the land's fertility was depleted within a few harvests. Corn and indigo crops were worth too little, and cotton crops were too labor intensive. Green seed cotton demanded constant maintenance, taking days to remove the seeds from the fibers by hand.

             Whitney used his mechanical background to construct a simple machine that would turn cotton growing into a lucrative business. A trained slave could harvest fifty boils of cotton a day, but it would take that same slave twenty-five days to de-seed the same amount. Whitney"s invention, the cotton gin, could dramatically increase the speed of the de-seeding process. The gin had wire combs that would remove the cotton fibers from the seed.