Cotton Gin+Slavery= Tidy Profits for Planters

Today in 1793, inventor Eli Whitney filed a patent for the cotton gin.

By the late 18^th 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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Who Was John Brown?

Today in 1800, John Brown was born. This seemingly unimportant birth led to the life of one of the most violent abolitionists in the United States. Frederick Douglass described Brown as “a white man who is in sympathy with the black man and is deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul as been pierced with the iron of slavery.”
Brown grew up to be a deeply religious Christian. Like many religious men, he placed importance on family. He was the father to twenty children. Brown tried to support this rather large family through a variety of ways: as a farmer, wool merchant, tanner, and land speculator. However, he was never able to find financial success, filing bankruptcy in his forties.
He believed, unlike the Southern planters, that God opposed slavery. Brown’s father had raised him in an Ohio district known for its antislavery views. Brown did not allow his financial woes to impact his antislavery cause. He and his wife raised an African American youth as one of their own children. He participated in the Underground Railroad. In 1851, he helped to found the League of Gileadites, an organization whose goal was to protect runaway slaves.
By the time Brown had reached his fifties, he began having visions of slave uprisings, imagining that racists would have to pay for their sins. He began to believe he was commissioned by God to make these visions a reality.
In August 1855, he joined his sons in Kansas. Due to the Compromise of 1850, Kansas’ population was able to choose if it would a free state or a slave state. The state held several elections, each compromised by many outsiders who filled the ballots. The Brown sons had gone there in an effort to keep Kansas from being a slave state. However, they suffered greatly in Kansas and requested their father to come to help them. The following year, pro-slavery activists burned and pillaged the free state community of Lawrence. Brown, ready for revenge, organized a militia. They visited the homes of pro-slavery men, dragged inhabitants into the night, and hacked five men to death with long-edged swords. Helping give the state the nickname, “Bleeding Kansas.”
After the murders, Brown fought in Kansas and Missouri for the remainder of the year. In 1857, he returned to the East and began to plot for a war against slavery in Virginia. On October 16, 1859, along with twenty-one other men, Brown raided a federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. He was captured, tried, and convicted of treason. Before receiving his sentence, Brown addressed the Court, “…Now if it be deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit: so let it be done.”
John Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859. Despite his horrible acts, Northerners spoke favorably of him. Thoreau said of him, “No man in America has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature.”