The Cotton Industrial Revolution

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Cotton production is an important economic factor in the United States. Cotton was first cultivated in the warmer regions of America in the 16th century. It was first used in the United States for making material to be worked up into a fabric between the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays in 1736. Before that time, it was regarded as an ornamental plant and reared only in gardens on the eastern shore of Mary land, the lower counties of Delaware, and a few localities in the middle state for home use. Prior to the Revolutionary war, colonies were unable to expand the cotton industry because England enacted laws to prohibit the manufacture or importation of cloth from cotton. The laws were enacted to protect the powerful English sheep and wool industry …show more content…

Cotton production was expensive in the 1700s because of the huge amount of labor necessary to remove the seeds. Samuel Slater, an English miller, migrated to America in 1790 and built the first American cotton mill. Thereafter in 1793, Eli Whitney revolutionized the production of cotton when he invented the cotton gin, a device that separated the seeds from raw cotton. Suddenly, a process that was extraordinarily labor-intensive when done by hand could be completed quickly and easily. American plantation owners, who were searching for a successful staple crop to compete on the world market, found it in cotton (Philsanz.com). Whitney never really profited from the invention that had a direct role in maintaining slavery as an institution. Though the Constitution gave Congress the power to create patent laws, the rules were difficult to enforce due to loopholes, so planters started to build their own cotton gins. Whitney later invented a process for interchangeable manufacturing parts for guns, which was very profitable …show more content…

Some Founders may have believed that slavery would fade away in the United States because of social reasons or the unprofitability of slave-produced crops before the gin was invented. In 1807, Congress passed an act to make the slave-importation ban official. During the first cotton boom, the slave population in the South swelled to 4 million people, leaving slave owners with an ample population to maintain a workforce as the children of slaves were born into slavery. By 1820, the nation was divided into Northern and Southern regions based on the legality of slavery in states and territories (americanyawp).
The most commonly used phrase describing the growth of the American economy in the 1830s and 1840s was “Cotton Is King.” This Slogan describes the plantation economy of the slavery states in the Deep South (pbs.org). The invention of the cotton gin greatly increased the productivity of cotton harvesting by slaves. This resulted in dramatically higher profits for planters, which in turn led to a seemingly insatiable increase in the demand for more slaves, in a savage, brutal and vicious cycle. Cotton was the leading American export from 1803 to

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