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. It was then believed that the slave was no longer earning enough for the landowner to pay for the upkeep and the end to slavery may have been near until a little invention changed all that. The cotton gin was
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There was a need to separate the seed from the cotton boll, to make growing cotton in the South more cost-effective. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin changed the way cotton fiber was separated from the seed. It was no longer separated by hand, which was commonly done by slaves. The crop of cotton was easy to grow, but time-consuming to separate. It would take 10 hours to separate 3 pounds of cotton from the small seed inside the bolls. The invention of the cotton gin changed one day's work of seeding into one hour. This innovation meant that cotton could be separated easier and quicker. Eli Whitney’s idea of the cotton gin was that it could be hand cranked by a person, powered by horses or water. Whitney quoted in the article Teaching With Documents: Eli Whitney’s Patent for the Cotton Gin, in a letter to his father, “One man and a horse will do more than fifty …show more content…
A direct effect of the cotton gin was the need for more slaves to pick cotton since it was so easy to separate, they now could work in volume. Consequently, more cotton crops caused more demand for cheap labor and the role of slaves. Even though, the invention of the cotton gin decreased the amount of labor, that was needed to separate the cotton from the seed, the caused an increase in the cotton crops across the South. This provided a need for more slaves to pick those crops. After the Proclamation of 1763 had been nullified, the land west of the Appalachians began to be settled as well as the land from the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The new, rich land began to be worked for the new cash crop of cotton as well as the increased demand for slaves to cultivate the soil and pick the cotton. From 1790 to 1808 the South brought in 80,000 more slaves before the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves outlined in the Constitution came into effect January 1, 1808. One-third of the southern population, after the cotton boom, were slaves.Thomas Jefferson, then Secretary of State at that time, wrote in a letter to Eli Whitney, “As to the State of Virginia, of which I am, carries on household manufactures of cotton to a great extent, as I also do myself, and one of our great embarrassment is the cleaning the cotton of the seeds, I feel a considerable interest in the success of your invention
Before the invention of the cotton gin, Americans would remove cottonseed by hand. Slaves were hired to complete this procedure. This would take a very long time and something had to be done. Later on, a man named Eli Whitney invented a device called the cotton gin. The cotton gin is a machine for removing the seeds from cotton fiber. His invention could produce up to fifty pounds of cotton each
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.
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 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.
Great post. The invention of the cotton gin immensely changed the American economy. Southern cotton farmers planted larger crops, while Northern textile factories grew up to take advantage of the sudden cheapness of cotton. By 1860, the American South provided roughly two-thirds of the cotton sold worldwide, shipping it from its flourishing ports such as New Orleans and Charleston. However, in order to harvest and process those crops, Southerners needed more workers. The population of enslaved workers increased by 1850, and a higher ratio worked in the cotton fields than ever before. By the time of the Civil War, the invention of the cotton gin had led to an American South heavily dependent upon slavery for its
In the 1800’s, the cotton gin was invented and created an economic boom for the South, but that eventually tear the nation apart. One cotton gin used by one person can process 50 times the amount of cotton done by hand. The cotton gin made cotton processing easier and led to the use of more slave labor because the plantation owners in the South want to plant more cotton to earn more money. This event eventually causes the nation to separate based on their sectional or regional interests. The nation was divided between the North and the South. Their social and political differences contributed to the division of the nation and started the civil war, a war within a country.
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
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
One of the most important events caused by the cotton gin was the exile of the Cherokee Indians along the Trail of Tears. As the demand for cotton and slaves grew the South began to look for more land, and discovered it in the land owned by the Cherokee Indians. The land was taken from them beginning in 1828 when the Georgia government outlawed the Cherokee government and began to take the land. This continued until 1838 when, despite a Supreme Court order, federal troops drove the last of the Cherokee from the land, that covered Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina to Oklahoma where many of them died. This would not have occurred had it not been for the invention of the cotton gin. The cotton gin created a market for slavery. As the production of cotton rose so did the production of slavery. These enterprises needed land, which stimulated the wars against the Indians to take their land, which could then be used by cotton farmers, and plantation holders who bred slaves. Whitney’s cotton gin, and its ripple effect was having a major impact on the events in the American South.
When Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1794 there was not much of an impact at first, but once the 1800’s came around the cotton gin gained popularity. The cotton gin was used in the south by slaves to separate the cotton fiber from the seeds. It had teeth that pulled the fiber apart and let the seeds fall out. The north and south, both, were impacted by the cotton gin, but depending on who you ask; workers, slaves, slave/ plantation owners, mills owners; people would have different opinions.
The slaves would have had to hand pick the cotton fibers from their seeds, but the cotton gin machine separated the fibers for them. The farmers in the South tried growing cotton, but realized that having the slaves pick cotton took them a whole day to separate the fibers from the seeds so the farmers decided to stick to growing rice and tobacco. The cotton gin helped the slaves harvest fifty pounds of cotton in one day. The cotton gin increased slavery because the companies needed workers to operate the machines so the government banned slavery in the Northwest Territory. Also, there was a constitutional permanent ban on slave
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.
With its warm climate and fertile soil, the South became an agrarian society, where tobacco, rice, sugar, cotton, wheat, and hemp defined the economy (“Colonial Economy”). Because of a labor shortage, landowners bought African slaves to work their massive plantations. Even small-scale farmers often used slave labor as a means to help increase their production rate ("John C. Calhoun's Defense of Slavery"). After the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney, cotton could finally be mass produced (“Slavery”). However, in order to pick all the cotton, slave labor would be needed, thus the reason for hundreds of thousands of imported slaves during the 1700s. In the United States, a stronger case can be made that slavery played a critical role in economic development. Cotton, grown primarily with slave labor, provided over half of all US export earnings. By 1840, the South grew sixty percent of the world's cotton and provided about seventy percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry. (“Colonial Economy”). In addition, due to the South specializing in cotton production, the North developed a variety of businesses that provided services for the slave South, including textile factories, a meat processing industry, insurance companies, shippers, and cotton brokers (“Colonial Economy”). By the time the Civil War erupted, 4.9
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
Eli Whitney created one of the first causes of the Civil. In 1793 Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin greatly increased the amount of cotton produced. The cotton gin cleaned the cotton by extracting the cottonseeds efficiently. In the 1800’s, 36,000 bales of cotton were exported, but