ipl-logo

Cotton Gin Research Paper

576 Words3 Pages

The Cotton Gin

In 1793, Eli Whitney invented a simple machine called a cotton gin. The cotton gin became very popular in the South. This machine made the South able to produce very large amounts of cotton, which made them lots of money. The only issue was that the cotton still needed to be picked by hand, so slavery soon became popular in the South.

Eli Whitney was born in Westboro, Massachusetts on December 8, 1765 and died on January 8, 1825. When he was young he used to love taking things apart in his fathers workshop, like clocks, and putting them back together again. Then, when he was in his twenties, he worked at a plantation tutoring children. He noticed how the slaves were having much trouble picking the seeds out of raw cotton. So, when he had …show more content…

You put cotton in the top and then crank the lever. The cotton gets pulled through wire teeth, which acted like a comb, and pushed the seeds out of the cotton. Then, the cotton gets pulled out of those wire teeth by brushes on the other side of the teeth, and then pulled off of the brushes by hand.

This cotton gin allowed farmers to plant larger amounts of cotton. Before the cotton gin, cotton was not a cash crop but was used for clothing and other things like blankets or pillows. Tobacco and indigo were the leading cash crops in the South at that time. Tobacco messed up the land and after it's planted the land needs 7 years of rest before anything can be planted again. Cotton could be planted anywhere, even in soil that was drained of its nutrients.

Now that cotton is easier to clean, and it grows fast, cotton soon became the leading cash crop in the South. There were a few problems with this, though. The farmers needed more land to grow cotton, so they took it from the Indians. They also needed workers to harvest the cotton, so they used slaves for this

Show More
Related
1535 Words | 7 Pages

Eli Whitney was visiting a plantation when he first heard of this crisis that the farmers were facing. He consulted with agriculturalists, and after a few months he finalized the idea of what he called a cotton gin. The “gin” in cotton gin is short for engine, so essentially this was a machine that sped up the process of producing cotton. The cotton gin consisted of a long box with a revolving cylinder. It also had saws that separated lint from seed.

Read More
358 Words | 2 Pages

The cotton gin help the slaves separated the cotton from the seeds. They had factories in the North and plantations in the south. The factories allowed for trading with forgeign countries. . A telegraph is how they communicated back then..

Read More
439 Words | 2 Pages

Carpenters and masons built cotton warehouses. Merchants and manufacturers sold their goods to townspeople and to the plantations. Cotton brokers...provided planters with access to the textile mills of the North and Europe. " The cotton gin cause more cotton to be created so jobs like textile workers, the workers at river docks and train depots,carpenters,masons,merchants,manufacturers, and cotton brokers were created, or the workers increased in numbers to help cotton go around, or to turn it into

Read More
1523 Words | 7 Pages

It revolutionized the cotton industry by making it more profitable. A machine was now used to remove seeds from cotton rather than having to remove them by hand. This allowed more cotton to be processed quicker which made production of cotton more efficient for farmers. Prior to the invention of the cotton gin, slavery was actually dying out in the southern United States due to how labor intensive the removal of seeds from cotton had become.

Read More
689 Words | 3 Pages

It enabled productivity to increase significantly, more specifically the cotton gin would generate up to fifty pounds of cleaned cotton daily from one pound daily. An important contribution to produce the cotton gin consisted of the closely time-related period of the removal of the native peoples of the southern lands (Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Northern Louisiana.) When this act occurred, the land that was previously occupied by the Native Indians presented availability for white men with money and dreams such as developing or producing more cotton gins. Other acts and features (negatives and positives) of the cotton gin are; it revolutionized cotton production, was profitable for the non-wealthy to become wealthy, it fostered associated expansion of racial slavery throughout the region, shaped the nation’s economy, social and political development, lower status people were forced into slaving these companies or moving to cities to be employed in other, typically dangerous jobs

Read More
1297 Words | 6 Pages

The growth of the textile industry, in particular, generated an increased need for cotton, which in turn perpetuated the south's reliance on slavery. With the creation of Eli Whitney's cotton gin, cotton could be produced much more efficiently and effectively through slave labor, and was also more accessible to small farms as well. The social gap between the rich and the poor in the South did not widen as much as in the North, because white people, regardless of whether they were independent landed farmers, landless farmers and farm workers, or plantation owners, had a "bond" of racial solidarity that was strongly emphasized in southern society, which solidified and aided in the retention of slavery as an institution. Although most southerners did not own slaves, and those who did rarely owned more than 10, every white southerner benefitted from slavery because it meant they could never be at the bottom of the social or economic hierarchy, and also, slaveholders often rented out slave labor to other farmers during harvest season. Even though slavery was becoming more of a divisive issue, the border states (Virginia, Kentucky, and Maryland) that could have ousted the slave-cotton system based on public opinion chose to remain slave states.

Read More
482 Words | 2 Pages

As the antebellum Americans made several advancements in technological innovations, this helped the North overcome the South agriculturally. With the new inventions such as the cotton gin, the reaper, the steel tipped plow, and new ways to revive unfertile soil, the North had many advantages to aid them while they were gone to war. As these new inventions were created each had an impact on how and why the differences between the North and South came to be. Although the creation of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney improved the South’s economy it also made the South more dependent on slaves.

Read More
1430 Words | 6 Pages

That is why the invention of the “cotton gin” was very important for the South, as it helped them get out seeds faster than a slave could. Ten years after the invention of the “cotton gin”, cotton became the South’s most important

Read More
1344 Words | 6 Pages

By 1811 cotton had spread across many states including South Carolina, Georgia and Virginia. During the territorial expansion there was a huge increase in the number of African American Slaves This occurred in the region spanning from the Atlantic coast to Texas. 75 percent of the south’s slave population consisted of agricultural laborers. Tobacco was an important crop in the 1800’sespecially in states like Virginia, Maryland and Kentucky.

Read More
889 Words | 4 Pages

However, since the cotton gin worked so fast the people in the fields were getting behind on their work so they farmers needed to hire slaves to pick the cotton. Factories in the Nouth grew from this and started to gain lots of money. Because of all the big shipments going through they created railroads so they would be sent faster. However, after a while people stopped buying cotton so the prices went down and people were no longer making as much money. P6

Read More
822 Words | 4 Pages

One person taking seeds out of cotton would produce about a pound of cotton a day and that would not be efficient. Eli Whitney an inventor and engineer in the 1790’s invented the cotton gin that expanded in the south. The cotton gin was a machine that removed the seeds from the cotton. The cotton engine produced fifty pounds of cotton a day versus muscle labor by hand with one individual producing one pound a day. The cotton gin was major increase efficiency in cotton

Read More
993 Words | 4 Pages

Firstly, the owners of land ownership in the southern colonies rapidly pooled their land, forming a large-scale farms, which, respectively, required much more labor. Second, the price of tobacco, the main crop of the South, in the 1660s fell and remained at a low level, forcing all the planters to sell cheaper. Third, as population growth in England and at the same time reduced to improve living conditions, the number of people who wanted to go to America as indentured workers, reduced - thus the number Servent also declined. Fourth, the laws of Virginia and other colonies were aimed at the worsening situation of black workers and ultimately led to legitimize the system of slave labor. Although theoretically black workers were free men, in fact, they had to put up with infringement of their civil, legal and property rights.

Read More
901 Words | 4 Pages

By the early 1800’s, the vastly growing cotton industry soared as cotton became the nation’s most important and valuable export. The development of the cotton gin only further propelled the cotton industry into economic success. The cotton gin took care of the hard tedious work that slaves used to have to undertake and increased the pace and the quantities in which cotton bales were produced. Working among the cotton fields, slaves adopted the gang system. The gang system was most commonly used in the cotton industry; to speed up production but also formally used among tobacco and sugar production.

Read More
766 Words | 4 Pages

No matter your stance at the time, one thing became clear: socially, politically and economically, slavery was the fabric of American success and gave birth to the Old South as we know it today. At the center of the entire institution of slavery, and central to its defense, was the economic domination it provided a young country in international markets. In the early 19th century, cotton was a popular commodity and overtook sugar as the main crop produced by slave labor. The production of cotton became the nation’s top priority; America supplied ¾ of the cotton supply to the entire world.

Read More
704 Words | 3 Pages

Have you ever wondered how life was for the slaves in the South? Slaves in the South suffered through many consequences. For example, they suffered through many whippings with cow skin if they didn't obey their master, they also got separated from their family mostly the fathers, so, they can be sold to a very mean slave owner. Even if they were living a miserable life on the farms, they had their own culture and they managed to even get married in the farmland or where they worked. Not only did the slaves live on the farm.

Read More

More about Cotton Gin Research Paper

Related Topics

Open Document