Slaves were considered property, thus they worked for much cheaper than any other hired help would. This There was an innumerable amount of slaves working for cheap.The effect of this was that they were able to produce much and sell it to other places. Cotton was a very important good at this time one reason being that The north depended on the south to produce the cotton for them to make the cloth. The demand of cotton was so high, that the effect of the sudden depletion of slaves would be very drastic on the textile industry. The economy would be at a state of corruption.
Eli Whitney was the first person to build the cotton gin machine in the 1700’s. This machine separated the cotton seed from the cotton fiber faster than the slaves could do. Whitney machine could clean up to fifty pounds daily making it very profitable for the South. A lot of men lost their jobs because of the cotton gin. But was needed more for clean up after the machine had come through the fields.
You dare not make war on cotton; no power on earth dares to make war upon it, Cotton is king.” (Boyer et al. 351). But cotton is very hard to harvest, before the invention of the cotton gin, it takes one slave a day to clean one pound of cotton. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin soon changed that, it allows slaves to be much more productive. The cotton gin did not only change the output of cotton in the south it also changed the whole entire country.
In my opinon without the cotton gin slavery might not have lasted as long as it did. It began with Eli Whitney when he was born in 1765, he noticed the slaves having a hard time picking the tough cotton from its sticky seed. So when he got older and smarter he invented the Cotton Gin so they wouldn’t have such a hard time with it. The Gin was a simple machine that had a big impact on the South.
“…the invention of the cotton gin fastened slavery upon the country; and that, but for its invention, slavery would have long since disappeared.” (David Christy, Esq. 1860) Do you like jeans? Do you like t-shirts? Well if you do, then you have no one else to thank but Samuel Slater. He made the process for making cotton much faster than what it used to be.
This had a much more positive effect because while the villagers lost land the enclosure resulted in efficient farming that produced more food. Before this happened there were people dying of hunger and very young so thy ay have lost land but gained food and a longer life span for themselves and their children. This agricultural revolution also came to revolutionize how we live and go about our lives. The second aspect of the Industrial Revolution came in the textile industry which was the most important part of this revolution. Cotton became the fabric of choice instead of wool, linen or silk.
When the cotton gin was invented in 1793, cotton came to be very lucrative. This machine had the ability to decrease the time taken to separate seeds from the cotton. However, with the number of the plantations willing to change from growing other crops to cotton increasing, there was a greater need for a large amount of cheap labor which was achieved through slavery. This resulted in the Southern economy developing a one crop economy, which depended on cotton and consequently on slavery. In contrast to the South, the Northern economy was centered more on manufacturing than farming.
Hemp was used as early as 4500 B.C. in Asia to make rope and fishing nets (Roulac 27). Hemp has been used through out history in Europe, Asia, South America, Canada, and even in the U.S. the invention of the cotton gin was a leading factor in the decline of hemp. Cotton then became one of the most popular crops in the world. Hemp produced almost 3x the amount of fiber per acre than cotton did, but the cotton gin greatly reduced the labor cost of cotton.
Slaves were the support system of their owners. Some believe the evolution of slavery in the US was divided into three stages: development, high profit, and decadent. In the developmental stage the slaves cleared the land for planting and built the roads and dams essential for plantations. In the second, high profit stage, slaves were driven to plant, cultivate and harvest for market. The plantations masters thought it was “cheaper to buy than to breed” meaning it was cheaper to buy a new slave and work him to death than it was to allow a slave to live long enough and bear children to increase numbers.
Smaller gins could be cranked by hand; larger ones could be powered by a horse and, later, by a steam engine. Whitney's hand-cranked machine could remove the seeds from 50 pounds of cotton in a single day. (Bellis.M) • Revolutionary Cotton Gin This machine boosted the cotton production to many folds by reducing the amount of labor needed to seperate cotton from seeds. (Bellis.M) • Annual production of cotton in south increased dramatically from 2 million pounds in 1795 to nearly a billion pounds in 1860. (Bellis.M) • It became a hit making many farmers and other industrialists millionaire.