The Slavery Of America Has Been Long And Treacherous

During the industrial revolution, Eli Whitney’ development of the cotton gin in the year of 1794, was an extremely popular and widely used invention throughout the United States of America. This particular machine, is capable of completely separating the seeds, from what we know as cotton. Prior to Whitney’s generous contribution, manual physical employment was necessary for this job. The cotton gin allowed quicker expansion of cotton, which quickly lead to an increase in the economy in the South. The fact that slaves were used to produce such cotton was one of the main causes for tension between the North and the South. The opposite sides had opposite views and opinions on

Life before the cotton gin was very strange, unpredictable, and production of cotton was very sluggish. In the 1800s, before the cotton gin, slaves had to pick seeds out of the cotton fiber by hand. Production was so slow southerners began to give slaves breaks until the cotton gin was invented. (Cotton). “The seeds could only be removed by hand, which proved slow and inefficient, Whitney once remarked to a friend that he had never met anyone able to clean more than one pound a day.” (Elizabeth). During this time the only way was by hand, it took slaves days just to get a pound or two.

In 1794, U.S. inventor Eli Whitney patented a machine that transformed the production of cotton by significantly speeding up the process of removing seeds from cotton fiber called the cotton gin. By the middle of the 19th century cotton had become America’s leading export. This gave Sothern’s the rationalization to maintain and expand slavery despite large number of abolitionists in America. While the cotton gin made cotton processing easier, it facilitated planters in earning greater profits, resulting in larger cotton crops. This in turn increased slavery because it was the cheapest form of labor. As for the North, particularly New England, the cotton gin and cotton’s increase meant a steady supply of raw materials for its textile mills.

The crops grown on plantations and the slavery system changed significantly between 1800-1860. In the early 1800s, plantation owners grew a variety of crops – cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco, hemp, and wheat. Cotton had the potential to be profitable, but there was wasn’t much area where cotton could be grown. However, the invention of the cotton gin changed this - the cotton gin was a machine that made it much easier to separate the seeds from cotton. Plantation owners could now grow lots of cotton; this would make them a lot of money. As a result, slavery became more important because the demand for cotton was high worldwide. By 1860, cotton was the main export of the south. The invention of the cotton gin and high demand for cotton changed

Slavery in the United States first started in 1619, when African slaves were transported to Jamestown, a settlement in the colony in Virginia. These slaves were brought to the United States primarily to help with the making of crops, especially tobacco. The practice of slavery remained present throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in other colonies of the United States, which helped build and strengthen the American economy as a whole. In 1793, the cotton gin was invented, which triggered the immense importance of the practice of slavery towards the success of the economy in the southern parts of the United States. On the other hand, the northern parts of the United States experienced a

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.

Due to this, the economy of America at this period of time was centred around cotton and as Clement Eaton stated, 'After the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, the tempo of life in the South quickened.' The industry was able to achieve large profits through the use of slaves-the cheapest labour of all-and eventually 'Three-fourths of the world's supply of cotton came from the southern states.'

In the original thirteen colonies, slavery was legal but not necessarily moral. As decades passed the North and South grew further and further apart morally. The South held onto slavery because it was so profitable for the South. The North worked toward an industrial future while the South continued improving their machinery to improve its farming community. Eli Whitney was an important inventor for the farmers in the South. He was the inventor of many tools to help the South but the most important one was the cotton gin. With Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin, there was less work for the slaves and more money for the slave owners. As time went by the South added tobacco crops to their farms. By adding tobacco to the southern plantations, the work became more intense

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.

When the cotton gin was invented in 1793 it solidified the “need” for slaves in the south. Cotton was by far the leading cash crop. By 1830 slavery was primarily located in the South. In the lower South the majority of slaves lived and worked on cotton plantations. Slaves of the South fueled an economic engine based on cotton. Seventy-five percent of Southern whites did not own slaves.

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

From 1775-1830, America saw its slavery institution expand. One major factor that contributed to the growth of enslaved African Americans was the increase in agriculture in the South. Cotton, a long standing staple crop of the southern states, was a very labor intensive crop to harvest. Because of this need for labor, many plantation owners and farmers continued to purchase slaves. In addition to the fact that cotton was very laborious to pick, plantation owners wanted more and more land to plant the crop on because it was such a success. As more land was obtained, more slaves were needed to work the land. In 1793, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. This invention sparked an increase in the number of enslaved African Americans in the South

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

Since African slavery began in North America in 1619 at Jamestown, numerous slaves had been shipped in slave trade between Britain’s American colonies and Africa. With years by years’ transition, when it comes to 1793, a young Yankee schoolteacher named Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin which significantly boosts the demand of the slaves. Especially in the south, the cotton gin meant a switch that reinforced the region’s dependence on slave labor and the slave population in the United States increased nearly five-fold in the first half of the 19th Century. But it didn’t seem that all of people like the existing slavery system. Not only the slaves want to be freed but also a lot of abolitionist showed up and advocated for liberating the slaves.

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.