“I never thought my cotton gin would change history,” were the words of Eli Whitney after his realization of the colossal impact that his invention had in the revolution of America. The cotton gin, a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers form their seeds played a huge part in the Unites States’ Industrial Revolution. Although some believe that the creation of the cotton gin enabled greater productivity and triumph for agricultures, there is also proof that it caused great tragedy to African American slaves in plantations.
Eli Whitney, born on December 8th, 1765 in Westboro, Massachusetts to Eli and Elizabeth Whitney was the inventor of the revolutionary cotton gin. From an early age, Whitney showed that he had mechanical abilities that he could get ahead with. When Whitney traveled to Savannah, Georgia – where he planned to study law and teach – he was hired on the to work on a plantation owned by Catherine Littlefield Greene, widow of the American revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene. While working on the Greene plantation, Whitney noticed that the biggest problem was how time consuming and difficult it was to separate the seeds from cotton; moreover, there were cotton gins that had been used for many years but they did not advance the issue. Whitney set out to fix the problem and studied cotton processing on the plantation from the slaves who picked and cleaned the cotton using a comb-like device – this was the basis for his invention.
Furthermore, after perfecting his invention, Whitney began to produce cotton gins while in business with Phineas Miller. The two wanted control of the complete process of cotton production and they planned to do this by growing the cotton themselves, processing it using Whitney’s cotton gin, and sell it on their own – hoping to monopolize the cotton market. While working on getting his design patented, Whitney went through countless obstacles to make sure that he was given full credit and rights to the invention of this revolutionary machine. However, what made his cotton gin so distinctive was its simple design and its ability to be made cheaply – a machine that could be copied easily. With this came many problems because the design was easily imitated and spread like wildfire throughout the country, flooding the markets. Even though Whitney took many of his imitators to court, he also lost most of the patent battles. It took him until 1807 to finally be recognized as the cotton gin’s inventor, but by them the market was full of competitors; which is where his famous phrase “an invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor,” came from. After years of patent litigation, he received only a tiny fraction of the wealth to which he was entitled.
The invention, which took over nearly every plantation in the South and even made its way up to the Northern states, was simple and cost effective. Whitney’s cotton gin had four parts: a hopper that fed the cotton to the gin, a revolving cylinder studded with hundreds of short wire hooks, a strainer that took out the cotton seeds while allowing the cotton fiber to flow through, and brushes that took the cotton off the hooks. Requiring only two workers, one turned the crank while the other fed the cotton to the machine. Before the invention of the revolutionized cotton gin, it took one worker ten hours to clean just three pounds of cotton; with the gin, a full day’s work of many workers could be finished within the hour. Whitney thought that his innovative invention would reduce the labor of separating seeds from cotton and make the process quicker, and he was right, but unfortunately he did not see the negative impact that his machine made on the African American slaved working in those plantations. While it was true that the cotton gin reduced the labor of removing seeds, it did not reduce the need for slaves to grow and pick the cotton; in fact, the opposite occurred. Since producing cotton was made so simple and profitable through this machine, plantation owners demanded more land and slave labor.
Consequently, this brings us to the negative effects that the cotton gin had during the Industrial Revolution and how it led to great tragedies. Certainly, the cotton gin’s uprising subjugated thousands of slaves that were used for labor in southern plantations for the use of growing and picking cotton. Because of the cotton gin, slaves now labored on ever-larger plantations where work was more regimented and relentless; nonetheless, as large plantations spread into the Southwest, the price of slaves and land inhibited the growth of cities and industries. Demand for land and slaved grew so much that the current number of slave states grew from six to fifteen from 1970 to 1860. In fact, slave population grew so much that by 1860, the year before the Civil War, approximately one in three residents of the Southern states was a slave. With slave ownership becoming a national concern, this eventually led to the Civil War.
Eli Whitney’s cotton gin may have led to the start of the Civil War, but his idea of mass-producing muskets so that parts were interchangeable, created a technology that helped the Northern states advance and eventually win the war. The expansion of slavery across the states left them with no choice but to attempt an escape, which eventually led to the Underground Railroad. Many questions are answered as to why slavery continued for so long, especially in the South were the production of cotton was the largest industry. Describing some of the effects that the cotton gin had in the South and what its role with slavery was and elaborating on how the cotton gin revolutionized the South and how it had a negative impact on slaves, especially those who picked cotton in the Southern states. In fact, the value of slaves in 1860 was roughly three times greater than the total amount invested in banks. Many historians, including Gene Dattel, author of Cotton and the Race in the making of America, conclude that cotton prolonged America’s most serious social tragedy, slavery, and salve-produced cotton caused the American Civil War. This supports that in fact, one of the ultimate causes of the Civil War was “King Cotton” grown by black slaves, one of the most significant determinants of United States history in the 1800s.
Many Americans read and learn about slavery and the impact that these revolutionary inventions had on slave ownership, but no one really gets a first-hand account of what was happening during this time from a person who was oppressed by these machines. Solomon Northup, a citizen of New York, was kidnapped and in Washington City and sold to slave owners who forced him to work at a cotton plantation near the Red River in Louisiana. Northup provides a first-hand account of his experiences while being captured and taken as a slave, even though he was born a free man and enjoyed all the blessings of freedom until he was kidnapped and sold. Since the creation of the cotton gin caused the production of cotton to be in high demand, cotton picking season was a harsh one for the slaves. An ordinary day’s work for a slave is two hundred pounds, one who was accustomed to picking would be punished if he or she would bring less quantity than that. When one who was not accustomed to the business was sent for the first time into the field, he is whipped up smartly and made for that day to pick as fast as he can possibly; furthermore, the amount of cotton picked is weighed at night so that the plantation owner know what that slave’s capability of picking cotton is. The slaves on the plantations had other jobs to tend to as well, like feeding mules, pigs, cutting wood, and practically any task on the plantation. With everything that they had to do, they has a weekly allowance of three and a half pounds of bacon, and corn enough to make a peck of a meal. Solomon was rescued and continued to live life as a free African American man in 1853; however, the experiences and cruelty he went through in those twelve years changed his life forever.
Although the creation of the cotton gin had some very negative impacts in society – especially African American slave society – believe it or not, it did have some very positive impacts on American economy and politics. As mentioned previously, the invention of the cotton gin greatly augmented the production of cotton harvesting by slaves. This caused the value of the slave population to increase immensely; the value of slaves was equal to about seven times the total value of all currency in circulation in the country. Cotton production became America’s leading export, taking over the market and leading great profit to Southern plantation owners. Cotton grown by American plantation owners would be shipped to Europe and made into clothes, which made clothing cheaper because of how much cotton was being produced in plantations. The production of cotton brought American immense trade with other nations. With the amount of money available to the nation being multiplies, this brought about significantly higher profits and benefits to farmers.
Additionally, the cotton gin made it so that cotton would be produced faster and more efficiently. Solomon Northup, the black man that was kidnapped and sold into slavery, explains that each slave in the plantation that he was staying at picked two hundred pounds of cotton each day. The process of passing the cotton plant through the gin made it so that 50 pounds could be produced each hour. Northup mentions that one of the slaves at the plantation with him picked with both hands and with such surprising rapidity, that five hundred pounds a day was not unusual for her.
In spite of cotton being so popular in America because of the cotton gin, and the huge impact it had on the economy, what Southerners failed to realize was that they were investing more money on slaves than one transportation. The slave population’s value was three times the value of the entire livestock population, twelve times the value of the entire U.S. cotton crop, and forty-eight times the total expenditure of the federal government that year in 1860. With all the money that the South was putting into their new “holy grail,” they fell behind in the innovation of transportation like railroads and factories. Larger plantations and the price of slaves and land was increasing so much that it stunned the growth of the South’s cities and industries; which is why the North was way more industrialized than the South during the nineteenth century.
Though some trust that the development of the cotton gin empowered more prominent efficiency and triumph for agribusinesses, there is additional evidence that it caused serious detriments to African American slaves and influenced the civil war; not forgetting the lack of industrialization in the South caused by the obsession of spending absurd amounts of money on slave ownership. Ultimately, demonstrating that although the invention of the cotton gin did have some positive impacts on America and the economy of the South, as well as America’s trade with other countries, it was a tragedy more than a triumph because it caused detrimental impacts to African Americans and American society during the nineteenth century, and the innovation of transportation and mechanization in the South; consequently, causing more harm than good.