Today in 1793, inventor Eli Whitney filed a patent for the cotton gin.
By the late 18th century, slavery was already ingrained in American culture. However, it was the rise of the Cotton Kingdom that made slavery become invaluable to Southern planters and it was Whitney’s invention that opened the door to this kingdom. Before the cotton gin, planters had discovered that short fiber cotton would grow in the lower South. This cotton, while was perfect for the cotton textile factories in the North, was extremely difficult to be harvested. The cotton contained sticky green seeds that were difficult to remove and had to be done by hand, making it a very long and expensive process.
Enter Whitney. He had graduated from Yale and was working in Georgia as a private tutor. He saw first hand the difficulties with picking the cotton. He invented a simple device that quickly separated the seed from the cotton (see illustration). The cotton gin, as it was called, made the buying and selling of cotton on a large scale possible. Whitney’s original plan for his invention was to charge the farmers for the cleaning of their cotton and charge them 2/5 of their profits. However, planters saw the simplicity in the machine and began copying his ideas. The invention revolutionizes the slavery system. The cotton gin allowed a laborer, or more likely a slave, to clean fifty pounds of cotton a day (before the gin only a pound a day could be cleaned). This meant that slaves could quickly pick and clean large amounts of cotton, which the planter could sell to the northern factories for a tidy profit. And of course, the more slaves a planter owned, the more cotton he could produce and sell. With that extra profit, this planter could buy more slaves and the cycle continued!
In the South, cotton production soared. It quickly accounted for 60% of the world’s supply of cotton and two-thirds of all American exports. Northern factories were able to make a profit from cotton by turning into cloth. From there, the Northern merchants shipped the textiles to Europe and back to the South.
In 1793, the year the cotton gin was invented, the United States produced five million pounds of cotton. By 1820, 170 million pounds of the crop had been produced! It would remain the staple of the South’s economy until the Civil War.
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