A while back, our high school celebrated Black History Month by putting up posters highlighting people and events that were important in the history of African-Americans. I was struck by a poster that commemorated the invention of the cotton gin. I assume the poster was meant to praise a labor-saving device that made the lives of slaves better. I just had to shake my head because the cotton gin was not something to be thankful for. It was a disaster for future African imports and present American slaves.
Eli Whitney was born in Massachusetts to a farm family. He did not go into the family business and instead graduated from Yale in 1792. He headed South to find employment as a tutor. Whitney stayed for a while at the plantation of Catherine Greene. Catherine was the wife of the famous Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene. (He had passed away by this time.) One day Catherine complained about the amount of time and effort it took to remove seeds from cotton. It took a slave ten hours to remove seeds from one pound of cotton. Whitney, who had a mechanical bent, decided to see what he could do.
He came up with a simple machine that had a drum with a series of hooks on it. The cotton would be fed into the machine where the hooks would pull the cotton apart. The cotton fiber would then be fed through a mesh that had such small holes the seeds could not go through. They would be deposited at the bottom of the machine. The original hand cranked model could produce 50 pounds of cotton per day. (Later, horses were used to power the machine and then steam power was used.) On March 14, 1794, Whitney was awarded a patent for an invention he was sure would make him wealthy. He planned to manufacture the cotton gin (the “gin” was short for “engine”) and sell them to cotton growers for a percentage of the crop. Not surprisingly, Southerners simply built their own gins and since patent infringement was poorly policed, Whitney made very little off his invention.
Why was the machine a disaster? Before Whitney came along, slavery was not very profitable. Cotton was not a major crop because of the difficulty in producing the cotton fiber. Now that it could be produced efficiently, more would be produced. New England textile mills provided the demand. And not just American factories, there was also a demand for cotton for British mills. By the mid-19th Century, cotton was the leading American export. Now that supply could meet that demand, Southern farmers turned to cotton as the most profitable use of their land. More land was converted to cotton production and the plantation system expanded rather than declined. In 1830, 750,000 bales of cotton were produced. By 1850, the number was 2.85 million. Bigger farms needed more workers, so slave importation greatly increased. The number of slaves went from 700,000 to 3.2 million in 1850. One has to wonder how American History would have been different if Eli Whitney had not made cotton, and thus slavery, profitable.
P.S. Before you feel sad for Whitney being cheated out of a fortune for producing the machine he invented, he became wealthy from another invention that revolutionized the American economy. He developed the idea of interchangeable parts. This means individual parts of a product were made by machines so each part was identical. This led to mass production. The product he used the concept with was the manufacturing of muskets. Before he came along, guns had to be made by hand.
https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/cotton-gin-and-eli-whitney
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin
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