The Cotton Gin and Slavery

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Recommended: The impact of the cotton gin on slavery and the American industry

The Cotton Gin was an invention that allowed the mass production of cotton. Cotton was previously a very difficult crop to profit from, because of the long hours required to separate cotton seeds from the actual cotton fibers. This all changed when Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793, a machine that sped up the process, thereby making cotton farming a profitable industry for the Southern States. With large areas of prime land ready for crops the Southern states bought and transported slaves in record numbers in order to work on their cotton farms. Although there are no definitive statistics approximately 1,000,000 slaves were moved west from the 'old Southern states' to the new ones; i.e. Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas to Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama. The new ease of cotton ginning coupled with the high demand for cotton in the textile industry gave rise to the need for a workforce to harvest the cotton. The farmers turned to a readily available labor force they didn't have to pay: slaves.

Slaves being transported to the South were usually ripped from their families and the surroundings they were familiar and comfortable with. These slaves then faced their new life at the plantation, a very different environment from what they were used to. They faced harder work, such as clearing trees and planting crops, than they had back in the ‘old Southern states’. The great demand for slaves on the plantations produced two very distinct types of slaves, rural and urban. Rural slaves, as you might have guessed worked on the plantations usually from dawn till dusk, driven by their overseer. Whereas urban slavery resulted from the lack of white laborers in the mining and lumber industries, because so many whites defected to t...

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Works Cited

Bellis, Mary. "The Cotton Gin and Eli Whitney." About.com:Inventors. About.com. Web. 08

Nov. 2009. .

"Slavery in the United States." Wikipedia. 8 Nov. 2009. Web. 9 Nov. 2009.

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Phillips, William. "The Cotton Gin". EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. 10 Feb.

2004. Web. 9 Nov.2009. .

Giesen, James C. "Cotton." New Georgia Encyclopedia. 20 Apr. 2009. Web. 9 Nov. 2009.

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"Slavery." Think Quest. Web. 9 Nov. 2009.

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Dattle, Eugene R. "Cotton in a Global Economy: Mississippi (1800-1860)." Mississippi History

Now. Oct. 2006. Web. 9 Nov. 2009. .

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