Cotton Gin Research Paper

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Have you ever wondered why slavery had been so particularly endorsed in the South? The answer to this question is cotton. Slaves had slowly been becoming less of a need to people in the South and the North and South were beginning to find peace with one another. Cotton had only been a small percentage of the country’s exports. That was before Southern lifestyle changed dramatically. Cotton gained economic supremacy in the South, invigorated slavery, and fostered trade with Europe due to the invention of a machine called the Cotton Gin. The Cotton Gin’s invention affected the entire cotton industry. Before the Cotton Gin was invented, a slave had taken “ten hours” to separate the seed from the lint of one pound of cotton(Life On A Southern Plantation). The Cotton Gin was invented by a man named Eli Whitney in 1793. The Cotton Gin, a revolutionary machine, enabled a single slave to pick “fifty times” more cotton fiber with the Cotton Gin than by hand(Davidson, 270). After the Cotton Gin was invented, a single slave could produce up to “1,000”…show more content…
In 1760, there were “689,000” slaves in America(Davidson, 270). By 1850, there were over four million slaves in America. This is mostly due to large cotton plantations. After the Cotton Gin was invented, plantation owners began buying more slaves in order to increase their cotton harvest. As slave demand grew, the prices of slaves grew as well. The price of a single African-American slave increased by up to ten or twenty times the original price. Slaves became so popular in the South that slave values were twelve times the cotton values in the South. Plantation owners were able to increase their cotton growth tremendously. In 1790, plantations grew “one and a half million pounds” of cotton(Davidson, 271). By 1820, they had grown “ten times” that much(Davidson,

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