Explain Eli Whitney’s cotton gin and its effects. Including, on the emergence of the cotton culture in the South, and the revival of slavery after 1800.

Introduction:

By the early 1800s the “Age of Homespun” was fading in America. Manufactured goods produced in distant factories increasingly started to replace home-made goods. There was a cluster of changes revealing a new vigor to the American economy such as the revival of the Southern economy based on slavery and cotton production. Since Eli Whiney’s popular cotton gin invention, the rising trend of slave prices and growing slave population shown the continuity profitability and viability of slavery up to 1860 in New Orleans; but both the Southerners and Northerners were able to profit since the cotton was produced in the South and sent to factories in Northern America.

Thesis:

Although the Eli Whitney’s cotton gin invention facilitated the production of cotton, it discouraged white owners to free their slaves and  led to the commencement of an organized business known as the slave trade. The cotton boom of the early 19th century acted as a brake on the colonization movement, while cotton production expanded the need for labor in the South and North in different ways.

Cotton Revolutionizes the South:

• Most important indirect effect of the industrialization occurred in the South, which soon began to produce cotton to supply the new textile factories of Great Britain and New England

• Beginning of 1786, the “sea island” cotton was growing successfully in the mild, humid lowlands and offshore islands along the coasts of Georgia and South Carolinao High quality cotton, similar to the

Egyptian one o Susceptibility to frost severely limited the

area of its cultivation• Elsewhere in the South, “green-seed,” or

upland, cotton flourished, but this plant had little commercial value because the seeds could not be easily separated from the lint.

Cotton Revolutionizes the South:

• Upland cotton would grow whenever there were 200 consecutive days without frost and 24 inches of rain

• The crop engulfed Georgia and South Carolina and spread north into parts of Virginia

• The rich “Black Belt” area of central Alabama and northern Mississippi and the delta region along the lower Mississippi River were rapidly taken over the fluffy white staple

Alabama alone raised 40,000 bales.

Central Tennessee also became important cotton industry

Cotton Revolutionizes the South:

• Most of it was exported, the sale paying for much-needed European products.

• The transportation, insurance, and final disposition of the crop fell largely into the hands of Northern merchants, who profited accordingly.

• And the surplus corn and hogs of western farmers helped feed the slaves of the new cotton plantations

• Cotton was the major force in the economy for a generation, beginning about 1815

Cotton stimulated the economy and the rest of the nation as well.

Revival of Slavery:

• Slavery was revitalized • Libertarian beliefs • Aspirations of blacks • Slave uprising in Saint Domingue • Black Republic of Haiti 1804 • Slave Gabriel • Number of free blacks rose• 1780’s colonization movement • American Colonization Society 1817

Revival of Slavery:

• Cotton boom of the nineteenth century

• Price of slaves between 1795 and 1804

• Smuggling of slaves • Slave trade around1820 • North Versus South • Right of blacks

Video:

• In 1791 Hamilton admitted in his Report of Manufacturers that the “extensive cultivation of cotton can, perhaps hardly be expected.”

• Eli Whitney invented a machine that instantly revolutionized the production of cotton

• New Methods Vs. Old Method

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eT4bNxkv-c

Conclusion:

Although the cotton gin engine was a major success in the prosperity of the Southern states to the Northern states, it increasingly affected the return of the slave trade. Once the cotton boom triggered, the slave trade became an organized business which led to unethical behavior towards the slaves. While the whites saw their country turn into an economic system, the black slaves were seeing their world fall apart as they had fewer job opportunities, prohibition in most public places and fewer rights in courtroom. Eli Whitney's invention may have been one of America’s most successful inventions, but it brought back one of America’s biggest issues.

Activity:

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