Development Of The Cotton Gin

1517 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Role Of Technology In Agriculture

In the antebellum south, cotton was king. The idea of a diverse agricultural south became a fallacy upon Eli Whitney’s development of the cotton gin. The ability to gin cotton creates a market place for a cash crop and the increase in slave labor. Therefore it is cotton that fuels the financial wealth of thousands of southern families and replaced stable crops. The development of the most beneficial technology in the Old South that we all know as the cotton gin was developed by Yale graduate Eli Whitney in the year 1793. This took place shortly after his relocation from Massachusetts to Georgia when it was brought to his attention from his former manager that harvesting cotton was both time consuming and unbeneficial to plantation owners. As a result, he was then asked to develop a resolution for support; thus the cotton gin was born. This extraordinary machine had the ability to separate cotton from its seeds through hand cranking. The acquisition of the cotton gin was the fact that cotton evolved into the most economically beneficial crop in the Old South. This became the primary reason for the use of the slogan “King Cotton”. The success that the Southerners acquired from the cotton gin was surprisingly not enough due to their greed. As a result of the importation of slaves being illegal for that time being, the plantation owners relied on the female slaves to produce children (future slaves) in pursuit of expanding their cotton harvests. This caused Whitney to believe that the goal of his invention took a wrong turn. Eventually, the overwhelming desire for more cotton slowly became a southern wide trend by reason of multiple purchases of land in order to produce more cotton for an economic benefit. Another tragic part about c... ... middle of paper ... ...that African Americans have today. All in all, agricultural diversity in the south was mainly revolved around the slaves who became valuable property to the slave owners due to the increase in economic activity that they produced during the need of labor force. Cotton was the primary crop of the Old South as a resultant of the development of the cotton gin which made the production less difficult for the plantation owners to develop wealth. It would be fairly safe to say that compared to other crops in the south, both cotton and the cotton gin would represent the mascots for the Sothern region due to their extraordinary success agriculturally. To answer the question of what significance the other crops held for the region, they simply didn’t because they weren’t needed to generate economic activity by reason of it already being done by both cotton and the cotton gin.

Show More
Related

  • Upper South Vs Lower South Essay

    1854 Words  | 4 Pages

    “The contrast in the relative prominence of slavery between the Upper South and the Lower South reflects the adverse health conditions and arduous labor requirements of lowland rice cultivation, whereas tobacco farming continued to be attractive to free family farmers as well as to slave owners”(Engerman, Sutch, & Wright, 2004). The lower South depended on their slaves more than the Upper because they were in the process of cropping tobacco. The Upper South had to keep up with the lower south, because they had to focus on their slave trade that would build and expand their plantations. During this era, the diverse between these two regions were more concerned with the values of slaves. The values of slave price can increase because of high demands between the upper and the lower South. As the upper South was coming up short, the slave profession took off. The slave profession helped the Upper South, yet there were numerous deformities. The slave percentage was at the end of its usefulness of significance “in the Upper South” significance it had a weaker understanding of community reliability than in the cotton areas. This made the upper south separate on what the future may hold. It was not clear on whether if the future was based on the Deep South’s financial growth between the North and the

    Read More

  • Eli Whitney And The Cotton Gin

    718 Words  | 2 Pages

    Eli Whitney's machine could produce up to 23 kg (50 lb) of cleaned cotton daily, making southern cotton a profitable crop for the first time. Unfortunately Whitney failed to profit from his invention; imitations of his machine appeared, and his 1794 invention was not upheld until 1807.

    Read More

  • Differing Perspectives of the American Civil War

    910 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the South, however, the economy was predominantly agricultural. Cotton and tobacco plantations relied heavily on the free labor of slaves for their economic prosperity. They saw the urbanization and industrialization of the North, and the economic connection between the North a...

    Read More

  • Slavery in America between 1800 and 1860

    724 Words  | 2 Pages

    Within the economy a great development had been achieved when the upper south handed its power to the lower south all due to the rise of an agricultural production. This expansion was led by the excessive growth of cotton in the southern areas. It spread rapidly throughout America and especially in the South. During these times it gave another reason to keep the slavery at its all time high. Many wealthy planters started a ‘business’ by having their slaves work the cotton plantations, which this was one of a few ways slavery was still in full effect. Not only were there wealthy planters, at this time even if you were a small slave-holder you were still making money. While all of this had been put into the works, Americans had approximately 410,000 slaves move from the upper south to the ‘cotton states’. This in turn created a sale of slaves in the economy to boom throughout the Southwest. If there is a question as to ‘why’, then lets break it d...

    Read More

  • Why Did The South Secede In 1860 Research Paper

    1422 Words  | 3 Pages

    Geographically, North and South were very different places. The pastures of New England were similar to those found in England, suitable for a variety of uses. Hot Southern prairie lands were perfect for cotton growing, a lucrative business at this time. Following the invention of Eli Whitney's Cotton Gin, the South became increasingly dependent on this crop, and an entire society grew out of it. The society was one of wealthy planters, who led a life similar to the landed gentry of England, controlling politics and society of the day. In the fields laboured Negro slaves, usually only a handful per plantation, though larger farms were occasionally seen. In addition, there lived poor whites, tenant farmers or smallholders, who eked out a living from the land. This contrasted sharply with Northern society, where industrialisation flourished, creating wealthy entrepreneurs and employing cheap immigrant labour. Given the localised nature of media, and difficulties of transport two cultures grew up in the same nation, remarkably different and often suspicious of one another.

    Read More

  • Slavery in The Cotton Kingdom

    915 Words  | 2 Pages

    Secondly, the demand for cotton grew tremendously as cotton became an important raw material for the then developing cotton industries in the North and Britain. The growing of cotton revived the Southern economy and the plantations spread across the south, and by 1850 the southern U.S produced more than 80% of cotton all over the world. As this cotton based economy of the south grew so did the slave labor to work in these large scale plantations since they were more labor-intensive...

    Read More

  • How Did Eli Whitney's Cotton Gin Affect The Institution Of Slavery

    743 Words  | 2 Pages

    Eli Whitney’s cotton gin created a system that cleaned the cotton at a much more rapid rate than before. Due to the speed of the cotton, this led to more cotton being planted. Which would eventually lead to more slaves to pick them. Southerners wanted more slaves to keep up with the demands of the cotton gin.

    Read More

  • The First Cotton Gin Analysis

    1285 Words  | 3 Pages

    In chapter 4, Lakwete depicts the thirty-year transition from the roller to saw gin as more evolutionary that revolutionary. Whitney's invention was an important advance in cotton gin history, but many southerners before and after Whitney played vital roles in the development of the machine. In a direct writing style, Lakwete presents in-depth and wide-ranging research with helpful summaries at the beginning and end of each chapter. She painstakingly explains complicated technological issues, including the nuts and bolts of each machine, while providing the reader with context. This is an important book, and now in paperback form, a good candidate for graduate level courses. As is evident in this reviewer's attempt to summarize her chapters, Lakwete had her work cut out for her in trying to explain this complex industry and its even more complex machines. While Inventing the Cotton Gin serves as an exciting revision and raises even more exciting questions, Lakwete's detailed exploration of cotton ginning makes for slow reading for those not technologically inclined. It is understandable that Lakwete should demonstrate the differences between Whitney's machine and its predecessors and successors, and it is helpful to reveal the evolutions in production, marketing, and the needs of planters. But this reviewer would have preferred less detail and more summary, guidance, and context. Lakwete documents many cases of, and raises tantalizing questions about, southern industrialization, but readers of H-Southern-Industry will find themselves wanting more. Specifically, she declares in the preface that the "innovative southern gin industry belies constructions of failure read back from 1865. Instead, it forces a reconciliation of an industrializing, modernizing, and slave labor-based South" (p. ix). While Lakwete documents such innovation and returns to this theme occasionally, readers may wish for a

    Read More

  • Civil War Sectionalism

    873 Words  | 2 Pages

    The south thrived in the cotton business, “King Cotton”, thus resulting in slavery. Slavery help built the south and their ideologies. Closer to the Civil

    Read More

  • Economic Causes To The Civil War

    991 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the beginning of the 1800s, economic diversities between the two different regions had also grown. By the year 1860, cotton was the chief crop for the South; it also represented fifty-seven percent of all American exports. The prosperity of cotton fulfilled the South's reliance on the plantation system and its crucial element—slavery.

    Read More

  • Cotton Industrial Revolution

    1154 Words  | 3 Pages

    Cotton was an extremely labor-intensive crop that requires hours of manual labor to harvest and many more in preparation for spinning. Many Americans looked for ways to improve this process and make it faster, however it was not until the American Industrial Revolution came about that great steps were made in this process. When the American Industrial Revolution hit, it brought about a major change and was arguably one of the greatest factors in the modernization of the United States. Along with this Industrial Revolution came a great invention in the world of cotton which many historians argue sparked the revolution itself. Eli Whitney brought a revolution to cotton production when he invented the cotton gin. This machine quickly separated the cotton seeds from the cotton and allowed it to be processed at rates up to twenty times faster than before. The cotton production in the U.S. and its annual yield had been relatively low before the invention of the cotton gin, but after its introduction annual cotton production soared to all-time highs. Along with the cotton gin, large mills and metal tools vastly enhanced the production of cotton in the 1800’s. The production of cotton was primarily centered on its export to Europe and these new technologies produced a new age of production in New England and created a vast domestic market for southern cotton farmers. This European cotton trade produced a strong market that supported many southern states. Europeans were the primary source in turning this raw cotton into textiles through the African cotton trade. “Europeans also learned that the African trade could be integrated within a wider space of exchange that encompassed the entire Atlantic. This was called ‘triangular trade’ in which raw materials (cotton) were traded from the Americas to Europe, where they served to manufacture and print cotton textiles. These textiles were then in turn sold on international

    Read More

  • Slavery In The Lower South Analysis

    720 Words  | 2 Pages

    Slavery was an integral part of the Lower Southern economy and agricultural production. In his essay, “The Domestic Slave Trade,” historian Steven Deyle discusses the changing demand of slavery in America. Changes of agricultural production resulted in a surplus of slaves in some regions, such as the Chesapeake, however, with the invention of the cotton gin in 1792, an “almost insatiable demand for slaves developed in the new cotton states.” This new demand of slaves helped facilitate the domestic slave trade in America, and served as a new source of slaves, as all importation of slaves was ended in 1808. These slaves that were sold from the Upper South to the Lower South, therefore, were often born in America, guaranteeing a “steady supply

    Read More

  • Cotton Gin Influence

    1044 Words  | 3 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • Cotton In The 1800s

    1132 Words  | 3 Pages

    Have you ever wanted to know how and why cotton was such a big deal during a specific time period in American history? During the Antebellum period in the United States, the south grew tobacco, indigo, wheat, and bought slaves but wanted a crop that would really make the farmers wealthy. In the 1800s, the crop cotton was noticed and became a high demand for the whole nation and Britain. There were many causes, effects and impacts that happened because of the rise of King Cotton.

    Read More

  • cotton

    1038 Words  | 3 Pages

    Cotton was and still is a vital crop plant, it chiefly provided the South with a monetary advantage over several parts of the United States, and as for me… it made my family. My grandmother would have never left the small town of Moultrie, Georgia in search of a new life in South Florida, she was tired of picking cotton and knew there were better prospects. Even though cotton is an essential part of our daily wear, there were painful recollections surrounding the harvesting of cotton from my descendants. My mother, my grandmother and my great- grandmother all handpicked cotton, and as a child listening to their stories, I had a negative connotation of the crop, nevertheless there is more to cotton than what I comprehend.

    Read More

More about Development Of The Cotton Gin

Open Document