Slave Labor In Eli Whitney's Definition Of Slavery

Along with the demand for cotton came a demand for labor. Black slaves from Africa were used to hand pick cotton in cotton fields, a tedious and daunting job. After Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin, cotton production skyrocketed from the average 3,000 bails per year to 300,000 bails per year. Unlike the north, the south lacked transportation improvements such as railways, roads, and water canals.

Before the cotton gin was invented, picking and processing cotton was a very difficult and tedious task. It would take a long ten hours for slaves to separate the seeds from the cotton fibers from only one pound of cotton(a turn of a crank). With cotton being so difficult to process, the demand for cotton was very low, wool was used instead. Also the dependency on slaves was not high either due to the lack of crops needing to be harvested. This all changed when Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin.

The cotton gin invented by Eli Whitney in 1794 had a powerful impact on the slavery business and the Civil War. It allowed one slave to produce much more cotton, making the demand for cotton and slaves much higher, ultimately provoking the civil war and causing much more pain and suffering than what was needed.

Before the cotton gin was invented there weren’t need for many slaves. They cotton business wasn’t a money making business because of how long it took to produce cotton and seeds. I once was in Georgia and picked a big garbage bag full of it took me a year to remove the seeds from half the bag. Since the cotton gin removed all the seeds and took less time there was need for more slaves to speed the process of picking from the fields. The cotton gin made this business a moneymaker causing increased need for slavery.

In 1793 the cotton industry bloomed because of Eli Whitney when he invented the cotton gin. With the invention of the cotton gin, cotton became a tremendously profitable industry, creating many fortunes for white plantation owners in the antebellum South. “American inventor Eli Whitney and his cotton gin improved the cleaning of raw cotton, facilitating the continuing growth of the industry in many locales.” This proves that the cotton industry rose after the gin was invented. It is evident that Eli Whitney played a major part of the growth of the cotton industry. Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin revolutionized the cotton industry.

The cotton gin had an enormous impact on American slaves and the economy, in 1794. Before Whitney came up with this astonishing invention, the plantations were becoming less profitable.This was a very efficient way to make quick cash. Instead of having to take care of slaves in the intense heat of the south. It was more reliable to depend on technology, rather than slaves. The cotton gin helped the economy to become more established, but the owners needed a multitude of slaves to help operate.

The cotton gin was a simple machine which de-seeded cotton. Eli Whitney created this cotton gin in 1793 when he was in Georgia. When living on a plantation in Georgia, he heard some visitors complaining about how cotton was a nice crop to have but took too long to seperate from the seeds (Patchett, 17). The visitors were told about how Eli was a good mechanic and saw some of what Eli had made. The visitors at the plantation went to Eli asking him to make something to help with this cotton problem. At first Eli was reluctant to make anything for the men because he, as he said, “had no extraordinary mechanical skills”(Patchett,18). Secondly, he said he knew nothing of cotton for he had never seen cotton or cotton seeds. Then Whitney changed his mind knowing he couldn’t resist the challenge and began a search for cotton. Once he found some cotton it only took Eli a few days to have a machine in mind (Patchett, 19).

American society was hugely impacted by Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin because it changed the way cotton was separated, in turned made cotton production easier and made cotton plantations spread across the South. This increased the need for slavery and caused a bigger wedge between the North and the South. In the South, during the late 1700’s, tobacco became a less lucrative crop, and it also laid waste to the land robbing it of nutrients. Other crops of the period, hardly made any profit for the southern plantation owners.

The cotton gin impacted the Southern States’ growth of slavery. Did you know, that the cotton gin’s process was inspired by how to the slaves cleaned the cotton? Eli Whitney (the inventor of the cotton gin), watched the slaves clean the cotton. He watched the slaves grab the seeds with one hand, and pull back the lint with the other. That is almost how the cotton gin works. The seed is stopped because it can’t fit through the opening. Then a brush comes and pulls back the lint.

Although Whitney acknowledged the difficulty, he didn’t want the valuable commodity,cotton, to disappear. With this in mind, Eli Whitney constructed an invention, the Cotton Gin, that took away all the laboriousness and hardship of producing cotton in time. According to an article, Growth and Entrenchment of Slavery, it said, “With the gin (short for engine), raw cotton could be quickly cleaned; Suddenly cotton became a profitable crop, transforming the southern economy and changing the dynamics of slavery.” The creation of the Cotton Gin created a huge innovation for the southern states. The Cotton Gin was able to produce the result the people needed and cotton was able to be yield easier. In order to make the Cotton Gin harvest large amounts of cotton faster and easier, Whitney conceptualized ideas to improve the existing Cotton Gin. By this time, the northern states were more concentrated toward industrial due to the non-fertile soil found there. According to an article, the Growth of the Cotton Industry, it said, “Additionally, the development of large-scale mills and metal machine tools dramatically increased textile production in Northern mill towns in the early 1800s.” This quote shows the effect of the Cotton Gin on the northern states. To sum up my points, the Cotton Gin will continue to thrive due to benefit it brought to the people in northern and southern

The South considered agriculture, especially the production of cotton, to be the crux of their economy. The South was producing half of the world's cotton. Sprawling estates and plantations with hundreds of slaves running them dotted the southern region. Eli Whitney's cotton gin made cotton production easier, faster, and it revived the industry once again. Soon, tons of cotton was being traded in foreign countries and in the North. Cotton was a fast cash business, but it ruined the soil, leaving the plantation owners to constantly be looking for new land. In little to no time, the South had become a one-crop economy with everything becoming dependent on cotton sales, which were dependent on other factors such as demand for cotton goods. One of the most lucrative, horrifying, and large businesses was the slave trade. Many Southern whites considered slavery a necessity for their economy. The South was able to produce these enormous amounts of cotton because of the manual labor provided by slaves. In the beginning, during the era of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, slavery was considered a necessary evil. However, views of slavery were rapidly changing and by the Jacksonian era, many Southerners saw no other option than slavery. William Harper, a jurist in South Carolina, ventured to say, "The cultivation… of great staple crops cannot be

In 1793 Eli Whitney revolutionized America’s South with his invention of the cotton gin machine. This machine separated the cotton rapidly, without the need of having slaves take out individual cotton that took a lifetime thus causing many injuries. The cotton gin was such a big success that it

Therefore, the population of slaves started to grow again in the 1790s and spread into other lands that became the cotton belt (Clifford, 2005). At round 1793, cotton cultivation expanded into large scale as a result of the invention of gin. The slaves in the southern states were used as laborers in spite of the American Revolution’s natural rights philosophy (Clifford, 2005). According to Clifford (2005), the slave owners started to improve the lives of their slaves on the cotton plantations after a

With Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793, cotton became very profitable. This machine was able to reduce the time it took to separate seeds from the cotton. However, at the same time the increase in the number of plantations willing to move from other crops to cotton meant the greater need for a large amount of cheap labor, i.e. slaves. Thus, the southern economy became a one crop economy, depending on cotton and therefore on slavery. On the other hand, the northern economy was based more on industry than agriculture. In fact, the northern industries were purchasing the raw cotton and turning it into finished goods. This disparity between the two set up a

Two important industries inspired the existence of black slaves in the British American colonies. These were the cotton and sugar cane plantations. Cotton case has its roots in the "cotton gin", a machine that removed seeds at an incredible rate of fifty people doing it by hand. Arose the need of more workers in the Southern to seed and collect cotton to meet the demand for this prosperous new industry in America. African slaves filled this necessity of cotton plantation labor.