Question

1. How is the invention of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in the 1790s related to the expansion of enslaved labor in the decades prior to outbreak of war in 1861?

Answer 1

In 1794, Eli Whitney invented a machine (called the cotton gin) that combed the cotton bolls free of their seeds in very short order. Prior to its introduction, one worker could be expected to pick the seeds out of 10 pounds of cotton on a daily basis. The cotton gin could process more than a 100 pounds in the same time period. One would assume that an increase in efficiency would decrease the need for slave labor which was primarily used for cotton processing in plantations. But this technological shift caused a price drop which led to a boom in demand from the cotton mills of New England and Great Britain. The Cotton Revolution of the South gave birth to the capitalist America that we know today.

Another factor which coincided with the development of the cotton gin was the boost to international shipping because of the rise in the size of cargo ships. Piracy threats fell as navies protected merchant shipping on the high seas. The steam engines which powered these new ships along with the looms and weaving machines in the cotton mills contributed towards an increase in consumer demand as the production cost of cotton and related products fell. The American South with its cotton driven economy looked to capitalize on the ever-increasing demand with an expansion in the both the number and size of plantations. Cotton apart from tobacco was one of the only crops grown in the South that had international demand which spiked in the early 19^th century. Between 1801 and 1835, the U.S. cotton exports grew from 100,000 bales per year to more than a million bales per year.

Slavery in the form of free labor inputs made the cotton industry extremely profitable. Increased productivity was needed to keep the growth sustainable and it came in the form of increased mistreatment of enslaved workers. Since the rest of the factor costs didn’t change, the working hours of the enslaved people did. By the mid-1850s, the expected production of an individual enslaved person in Mississippi’s Cotton Belt had increased from between four and five bales per day to between eight and ten bales per day. Cotton production per slave increased by 600 percent in Mississippi between 1820 and 1860. Each slave, then, was working longer, harder hours to keep up with his or her enslavers expected yield which kept on growing thanks to the increasing debt that plantation owners took by using their slaves as collateral.

Bankers in London and New York drove the rise of slavery by recognizing enslaved people as a legal form of property and hence could be used as collateral to borrow against and to settle outstanding debts. Hence most of the credit offered by bankers in the country usually dealt with some aspect of the cotton market. A significant proportion of plantation value was dependent on enslaved workers. Since slaves were legally considered property, the state treated them as such and taxed plantations based on their ownership and transactions involving enslaved people. Although slavery arrived in the Americas long before cotton became a profitable commodity, the use and purchase of enslaved laborers and the racial and economic reasoning for the continuation of slavery caused a boom in the slave trade which was only possible because of the invention of the cotton gin. The South became known as the Cotton South for a reason – The fortunes of cotton plantations and that of its enslaved workers were so heavily intertwined that slavery became a key part of the cultural and economic identity of the South.