American History Assignment # 6 What were some of the key characteristics of the Antebellum South? Why were these significant? The colonies along the east side of United States during the “plantation era” became known as the New England, the middle and the southern colonies.
According to Eric Foner is his book, Give Me Liberty!, even though the market revolution and westward expansion occurred simultaneously in the North and the South, their combined effects heightened the nation’s sectional divisions. In some way, the most dynamic feature of the American economy wins the first thirty years of the nineteenth century was the rise of the Cotton Kingdom. It all started during the industrial revolution, which centered on factories producing cotton textiles with water-powered spinning and weaving machinery. All of these factories produced a massive demand for cotton.
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.
And you can’t just pull up a plantation from nowhere, you have to build many buildings, and pay for labor too. Many people didn 't want to labor at sugar plantations. Because of the hot temperature and the other dangerous things you would have to be around. And plantation owners didn’t want to pay a lot of money for laborers. The solution, slaves.
Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin in 1794.The cotton gin was a machine that revolutionized the production of cotton by speeding up the process of removing seeds from cotton fiber so you didn't have to do it by hand. Picking cotton by hand before the cotton gin was invented took an entire day to get one pound of cotton but once people had the help of the cotton gin, sometimes they were able to remove seeds from about fifty pounds of cotton. However, to make a profit off of his invention, Whitney started renting it off to people to use and charging them extra to have him pick the cotton himself. Because the taxes were so high, and he could make the machines, instead of being paid in money, he got to keep three fifths of the cotton that he picked.
For example, the South relied on cotton because it was essential for trading with countries in Europe like Britain. Without slaves, the South could have ever made such a development in their cotton production. As a result, slaves were crucial to the prosperity of the
The Production of Cotton from 1800-1860 The production of cotton during 1800-1860 in America started because of many factors that influenced America to start their own industries. According to The American Nation Beginnings to 1877, before the Industrial Revolution most of the Americans manufactured goods were imported from Britain, however due to the war of 1812, Britain blocked the United States from getting goods. The many factors that influenced the increased production of cotton from 1800-1860 were the resources that Americans had, the demand for cotton, and the technology that helped the production of cotton.
A machine had to be invented first that would make the cotton profitable by easily separating the seeds from the fibers. This machine, the cotton gin, was patented in 1794 by Eli Whitney a man who lived on a cotton farm in Savannah Georgia (history.com staff). Before the invention was made popular throughout the South not many people grew cotton as in some states like Mississippi cotton was not widely grown until the 1830’s (Dattel). However, after the machine revolutionized the refining process of the cotton crop the supply of cotton rose to meet the growing demand, which only increased after the supply met it, and with the rising demand of cotton rose the demand for inexpensive labor. This demand for labor was increasingly supplied by slaves.
Slavery was also increasing because you never had to pay the slaves that you owned and the plantations required a lot of labor, so slaves were a lot cheaper than the indentured servants. The profits from tobacco and rice led planters to import enslaved Africans, which made the economy depend on slavery. Although slavery was a morally
The American Revolution, was an inspiration to black people and they’d hoped the words and rules of the Patriots go for them as well. But that wasn’t the case. When all of the Armies had gone away from the land, we were a country of farmers founded by notions of freedom. We had over 700,000 slaves working in the US at its birth.
Cotton was not a commodity as it later became due to its difficulty as well as high cost in refining it. Typically in the South, crops, such as indigo, tobacco, and rice, were cultivated largely by hand by small groups of slaves. Slavery had already been quite popular among planters in the South due to its historical tendency for agriculture, but slavery had been on the decrease mostly due to the rising cost of maintaining slaves. Slavery had originally been on the decline and was planned to be abolished by many Southern legislative leaders ("Pre-Cotton Gin America." Web). Though little did they know, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin would answer their questions in regards to the struggle of cotton harvesting.
Without slavery, Americans searching for jobs might not find any because African Americans would be searching and competing for jobs too. They also argued that having slaves brought economic prosperity because there were always plenty of resources with slaves working so hard to harvest crops and make essential
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.
The most important were the increasing mechanization of farms, which rendered the labor of sharecroppers more unnecessary, and the growing demand for labor outside the South, which caused some sharecroppers to migrate to northern and western
Between 1800 and 1860 two major things changed within the country. The cash crops changed from tobacco and rice to the new money maker cotton. Along with the crops changing the slave trade grew to replace the economic short fall in the Chesapeake area. These changed occurred due to the supply and demand of commonly bought goods. Another contributing factor for the crops changing was the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 and the use of cotton in textile facilities.
