Cotton Gin Influence

What if I told you that the cotton gin did more to this country than any other invention? Eli Whitney's cotton gin significantly influenced the US negatively in the 19th century by making cotton and slave much more profitable, laying the foundation for the Civil War, and making the era of slavery much longer than it should've been. For example, cotton became extremely popular in the 19th century, and the only thing that was holding cotton back from booming was the amount of time it took for the seeds to be picked out of the cotton, and when the gin was invented. The cotton gin pushed Westward Expansion forwards, which caused the North to retaliate with putting more pressure on the South which eventually broke out to a Civil War once Lincoln

In fact, Whitney's gin harmed many more people than it helped, ripping more than 250,000 African-Americans away from their homes and into the US. Slavery spread into every facet of the South now that cotton was extremely easy to gain money from, and plantation owners immediately started moving west to gain more land to farm cotton on. As a result, this created a massive domino effect of events that eventually lead up to the horrific events of the Civil War. Mainly, the amount of slaves owned because of the cotton gin was almost 4X larger than it was from 1800, 893,602 slaves, to 1850, 3,204,313 slaves (CITATION). This was due to the fact that America was then producing ¾ of the world's cotton, and they needed a huge workforce to keep up with the huge demand. But now that the South had this amount of slaves, cotton became the US's leading export. They had an immense inflow of money since the US had amazing land for growing cotton and because there were buyers everywhere across the globe wanting cotton textiles and just pure cotton. The US got extremely rich from this invention, but it still does not excuse the terrible ways that they went about making

When farmers moved west, it caused a disruption between the North and South to whether they should let the stated be slave or not slave states. The US Government had it balanced out, but when Missouri wanted to convert to non-slave, they had to make a compromise to keep the balance. You could see that the gin affected the country on a national scale when profits were able to be made with cotton. However, when the Kansas-Nebraska Act was implemented, it started violence between abolitionists and anti-abolitionists by making farmers move to the west for better farmland. It stated that if people wanted the states Kansas or Nebraska to be a slave or non slave, they could vote on it. When people saw this, abolitionists and anti-abolitionists would move to the state they would want to be slave / non-slave and vote for it. Consequently, when those two parties were put together violence emerged to discourage the opposite party from voting. Things got so violent that the violence started breaking out more and over 50 people were killed because of it. See, terrible things happened when the gin was invented, and this isn't even the worst of