Eli Whitney And The Cotton Gin

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Zhang 1 Eli Whitney and the Cotton Gin In The late eighteenth century Tobacco, South’s primary cash crop has died out. Many southerners turned to other cash crops and one of them is cotton. Cotton has boomed during the early nineteenth century. In the South Cotton is king, a senator form South Carolina proclaimed in 1858 “No! 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. It expanded slavery, created sectional conflict, fueled the American Industrial Revolution, and it also led to the America’s bloodiest war: The American Civil War. By Early 19th century cotton became King in United States, and slave labor was in critical demand. By 1790 slavery was a declining institution, in 1790 there are only about seven hundred thousands of slaves in United States, but in 1860 right before the out break of the American Civil War there are approximate four million slaves in United States. (Boyer et al. 348). Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793 to help the farms in the south; he also hoped that he would become rich and famous by inventing such a device. In a letter to his father he said “Could be invented which would clean the cotton with expedition, it would be a great thing both for the country and to the inventor.” (Grace 428). In the early nineteenth century the English textile industry has soared, the demand for cotton has drastically increased. So many planters turned to cotton. In 1790 four Zhang 2 thousand baled of cotton were produced, and by 1860
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