The Historic Significance of the Cotton Gin and Its Impact on Slavery

On March 14, 1794, Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin machine revolutionizing the cotton industry in the southern United States. From the article:

"The Historic Significance of the Cotton Gin and Its Impact on Slavery

The cotton gin, patented by American-born born inventor Eli Whitney in 1794, revolutionized the cotton industry by greatly speeding up the tedious process of removing seeds and husks from cotton fiber. Similar to today’s massive machines, Whitney’s cotton gin used hooks to draw unprocessed cotton through a small-mesh screen that separated the fiber from seeds and husks. As one of the many inventions created during the American Industrial Revolution, the cotton gin had an enormous impact on the cotton industry, and the American economy, especially in the South.

Unfortunately, it also changed the face of the slave trade — for the worse.

How Eli Whitney Learned About Cotton
Born on December 8, 1765, in Westborough, Massachusetts, Eli Whitney was raised by a farming father, a talented mechanic, and inventor himself. After graduating from Yale College in 1792, Eli moved to Georgia, after accepting an invitation to live on the plantation of Catherine Greene, the widow of an American Revolutionary War general. On her plantation named Mulberry Grove, near Savannah, Whitney learned of the difficulties cotton growers faced trying to make a living.

While easier to grow and store than food crops, cotton’s seeds were hard to separate from the soft fiber. Forced to do the job by hand, each worker could pick the seeds from no more than about one pound of cotton per day.

Shortly after learning about the process and the problem, Whitney had built his first working cotton gin. Early versions of his gin, although small and hand-cranked, were easily reproduced and could remove the seeds from 50 pounds of cotton in a single day.

Historical Significance of the Cotton Gin
The cotton gin made the cotton industry of the south explode. Before its invention, separating cotton fibers from its seeds was a labor-intensive and unprofitable venture. After Eli Whitney unveiled his cotton gin, processing cotton became much easier, resulting in greater availability and cheaper cloth. However, the invention also had the by-product of increasing the number of slaves needed to pick the cotton and thereby strengthening the arguments for continuing slavery. Cotton as a cash crop became so important that it was known as King Cotton and affected politics up until the Civil War.

A Booming Industry
Eli Whitney's cotton gin revolutionized an essential step of cotton processing. The resulting increase in cotton production dovetailed with other Industrial Revolution inventions, namely the steamboat, which greatly increased the shipping rate of cotton, as well as machinery that spun and wove cotton much more efficiently than it had been done in the past. These and other advancements, not to mention the increased profits generated by the higher production rates, sent the cotton industry on an astronomical trajectory. By the middle of the 1800s, the United States produced over 75 percent of the world's cotton, and 60 percent of the nation's total exports came from the South. Most of those exports were cotton. Much of the South’s suddenly-increased quantity of ready-to-weave cotton was exported to the North, much of it destined to feed the New England textile mills.

The Cotton Gin and Slavery
When he died in 1825, Whitney had never realized that the invention for which he is best known today had actually contributed to the growth of slavery and, to a degree, the Civil War.

While his cotton gin had reduced the number of workers needed to remove the seeds from the fiber, it actually increased the number of slaves the plantation owners needed to plant, cultivate, and harvest the cotton. Thanks largely to the cotton gin, growing cotton became so profitable that plantation owners constantly needed more land and slave labor to meet the increasing demand for the fiber.

From 1790 to 1860, the number of U.S. states where slavery was practiced grew from six to 15. From 1790, until Congress banned the importation of slaves from Africa in 1808, the slave states imported over 80,000 Africans. By 1860, the year before the outbreak of the Civil War, approximately one in three residents of the Southern states was a slave.

Whitney's Other Invention: Mass-Production
Though patent law disputes kept Whitney from significantly profiting from his cotton gin, he was awarded a U.S. government in 1789 to produce 10,000 muskets in two years, a number of rifles never before built in such a short period of time. At the time, guns were built one-at-a-time by skilled craftsmen, thus resulting in weapons each made of unique parts and difficult, if not impossible to repair. Whitney, however, developed a manufacturing process using standardized identical and interchangeable parts that both sped production and simplified repair.

While it took Whitney some 10 years, rather than two to fulfill his contract, his methods of using standardized parts that could be assembled and repaired by relatively unskilled workers resulted in his being credited with pioneering the development of America’s industrial system of mass-production."