Before the Cotton Gin was invented, the United States produced almost 750,000 bales of cotton in 1830. By 1850 this number had increased to 2.85 million bales. (Civil War History). The most used invention would have been the cotton gin, which was invented in 1794 by Eli Whitney. Whitney knew that the south needed a machine that could help the southern planters make cotton more profitable. That’s when he decided that the cotton gin would be the thing for the South. The cotton gin is a machine that removes cotton from its seeds. The cotton gin made the production of cotton much faster. This also helped the prices of cotton drop drastically. Cotton became a big part of the south, which increased slaves, and blue collar work. (FIND EVIDENCE). The …show more content…
First, one of the positive effects of the Cotton Gin would be that it helped the Economic System of the South. Another positive effect would be that the Cotton Gin could do almost 20 times the work one slave could have done in one day. This was big for the south because it could have taken weeks or months to get the cotton away from the fibers at some points. However, one of the biggest problems with the Cotton Gin would have been that more slaves were needed during this process. Even though the machine would help the slaves work, they were needed to grow and pick the cotton now that the cotton was such a huge producer. Slaves were a main part of the South, and now that the Cotton Gin was in effect more slaves could not be freed. In fact, plantation owners began to move to larger plantations where they would need even more slaves. Southern farmers did not want to have to go out in the field and do the work that they could buy slaves to do for them. However, the Cotton Gin was a success in the South because it increased the population, and helped the production of Cotton become stronger. The US Economy became better in both the North and the South with this
The economy changed in the southern region once Eli Whitney invented the idea of cotton gin. The technological aspect of the cotton gin allowed cotton to transform into a cash crop. In Document 8.1, Whitney states “The means furnished by this discovery of cleaning
In the south, the economy relied on the production of cotton so they could make and sell clothes. With the invention of the Cotton Gin, people in the south had brought in more slaves in order to produce more cotton. The North also produced cotton, they produced it in the Northwest. They had built mills to produce the cotton. The owners
The cotton gin help the slaves separated the cotton from the seeds. They had factories in the North and plantations in the south. The factories allowed for trading with forgeign countries. . A telegraph is how they communicated back then..
Cotton was the most important crop in south. The cotton gin is important to the south because it saved a lot of time. Furthermore, He Invented interchangeable parts and the concept of mass production in 1798. Eli signed a contract to the Government to make 10,000 guns in two years. Previously guns took a long time to make.
The booming production of cotton in the south during the 19th century was a vast money maker and supplied for the Southern economy, however, it also caused many set backs. Cotton fueled the economy of the Southern states and arguably the economy of the Northern states as well, and also played a major role in the global economy of that time. Cotton indeed brought great wealth to the Southern states, but only the plantation owners benefitted from this wealth. The rest of the population was left poor, uneducated, and illiterate. Despite the wealth and power that cotton brought to the south, it also brought slavery and thus the Civil War which ultimately left the South weak and powerless.
If the cotton gin had been invented at an earlier time the slavery wouldn’t happen because they wouldn’t need anyone to do the work, they needed to be done. People or more like slaves were being exploited due to the work they were doing. If the machines, they needed would have been invented at this time there would have not been a problem in looking for people to do any work and overworking them. There’s always different opinions whether positive or negative. The negative opinions were affecting certain people, such as the ones that were put under pressure by doing all the work.
With Ely Whitney's invention of the cotton gin, cotton farming drove several changes. Cotton farmers could grow more cotton, considering processing cotton became more efficient with the cotton gin (Schultz, 2013). This change drove increases in land use, the establishment of additional farms, and a sharp increase in the use of enslaved people. These additional farms increased the wealth of southern farmers but caused several environmental problems considering the additional land clearing required to open fields and the soil damage caused by overuse. Social life for enslaved people dropped to inhumane levels, given that enslavers believed social interaction among enslaved people could lead to rebellion and insurrection due to several slave
By the early 1800’s, the vastly growing cotton industry soared as cotton became the nation’s most important and valuable export. The development of the cotton gin only further propelled the cotton industry into economic success. The cotton gin took care of the hard tedious work that slaves used to have to undertake and increased the pace and the quantities in which cotton bales were produced. Working among the cotton fields, slaves adopted the gang system. The gang system was most commonly used in the cotton industry; to speed up production but also formally used among tobacco and sugar production.
No matter your stance at the time, one thing became clear: socially, politically and economically, slavery was the fabric of American success and gave birth to the Old South as we know it today. At the center of the entire institution of slavery, and central to its defense, was the economic domination it provided a young country in international markets. In the early 19th century, cotton was a popular commodity and overtook sugar as the main crop produced by slave labor. The production of cotton became the nation’s top priority; America supplied ¾ of the cotton supply to the entire world.
The South was able to produce 7/8 of the worlds cotton supply. The South became more dependent on the planted field system and it’s full of force part, slavery. Notably, at that moment, the North was flourishing industrially. The North depended on factories and others
It turned the rag to riches. It was perfect for people that wanted to change their past and to have a new start. South tobacco farm owners became the most wealthy and self sufficient from the government. The south had popular trading ports that
It revolutionized the cotton industry by making it more profitable. A machine was now used to remove seeds from cotton rather than having to remove them by hand. This allowed more cotton to be processed quicker which made production of cotton more efficient for farmers. Prior to the invention of the cotton gin, slavery was actually dying out in the southern United States due to how labor intensive the removal of seeds from cotton had become.
Imagine if the cotton businesses had no slaves the Southerners would have to create their own factories, for example, if they did have to create their own industry, they would have to sell all their slaves and that’s one of the last things that they wanted to do. If the South had no slaves, they would have to do everything all by themselves. According to page 242 it says " planters would have had to sell slaves to raise the money to build factories, most wealthy southerners had their wealth invested in land and slaves. Planters would have had to sell slaves to raise the money to build factories. Most wealthy southerners were unwilling to do this.
The cotton gin was one such invention. In the 1780’s, there was some cotton production. But harvesting the actual cotton from the seeds was so time-consuming, it wasn’t very profitable. By the time the cotton gin was invented in 1793, slavery was decreasing. With one simple invention, everything changed.
The demonstrations of division in America coexisted many: utopian societies, clashes over public space, backlash alongside immigrants, urban rebellions, black demonstration, and Indian oppositions. America was a separated land in need of change with the South in the biggest demand. The South trusted heavily on agriculture, equally opposed to the North, which was vastly populated and an industrialized union. The South produced cotton, which remained its main cash crop and countless Southerners knew that hefty reliance on slave labor would damage the South ultimately, but their forewarnings were not regarded. The South was constructed on a totalitarian system.