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Why The Cotton Gin Is Not Just A Revolution

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“The cotton gin is not just a machine; it's a revolution in the way we live and work.” The Cotton Gin as we know it today had a great impact on how we produced cotton. The creator of the cotton gin, Eli Whitney, was born on December 8, 1765, in Eastborough, Massachusetts. As he moved towards the South, he discovered the difficulty of taking out the seeds from the cotton and decided to create a machine that eventually removed the seeds from all the cotton plants. He patented the cotton gin on March 14, 1794. The smaller cotton gins could be operated by hand, while the bigger ones could be powered by a horse and later by a steam engine. The Cotton Gin impacted the lives of the working class by increasing the demand for labor and land, reducing …show more content…

Southern slave owners benefited from this because they were wealthy. Another reason is that “Americans were driving into the frontier to the north in search of farmland for cotton and opportunity.” This explains how the success of cotton production led to looking for more land to start more plantations. They went westward during the westward expansion and bought land to build these plantations or they would kick out Native American tribes as well so that they could build more plantations. By the reduction of the amount of labor of removing seeds, the slaves were still doing hard labor. “While it was true that the cotton gin reduced the labor of removing seeds, it did not reduce the need for enslaved labor to grow and pick the cotton.” This explains how the cotton gin helped the reduction of labor of removing seeds but did not reduce the amount of labor that was being used in these plantations, they still had to work long hours and endure discipline from their owners every day. It was not easy for them that they had to come up with different ways to stop that, whether it was poisoning little by little their master, breaking tools, or telling each

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Invented by Eli WHitney in 1793, because of the cotton gin it reduced the amount of time and cost of separating the cotton seeds from white fiber. Due to the cotton gin, cotton farming became much more profitable in the South. Because of the cotton gin, the demand of the cotton grew and increased slavery. There was economic consequences due to the cotton gin and the increase of the cotton

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The cotton gin could remove fifty pounds worth of seeds in one day. Whitney patented the cotton gin in 1794, but after only three years Eli and Phineas went out of business because many people were reluctant to pay for the cotton gins services, so it fell victim to piracy by many plantation owners and was improved for their own use. The patent laws had many loopholes and did not result in Whitneys favor. As of 1802 Whitney and Miller got about half of the money (about fifty thousand dollars that they had asked for their patent rights). During the mid nineteenth century America's leading export was cotton but, it ultimately resulted in more slaves as it was cheaper and faster to get cotton; most farmers started growing bigger crops which meant there was a need for more

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The use of the cotton gin had a major impact on slavery by expanding the use and population of slaves. “This machine revolutionized the process of separating cotton from its seed, making it dramatically faster and less expensive to turn picked cotton into usable cotton for textiles” the author said. Harvesting the cotton fields was intense work and the more cotton that was being produced lead to more fields causing more slaves to be needed to work those fields. All the large cotton plantations that the south maintained, by 1850 the slave population increased tremendously. “Southern wealth had become reliant on this one crop and thus was completely dependent on slave-labor.”

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Source D is a diagram of cotton production in Georgia starting in the year 1800 and ending in 1860. This diagram shows the noticeable difference in cotton and the number of slaves increasing throughout the years. This means that the more cotton produced, cleaned, and sold, increased the number of slaves to do the harder labor like planting. Consequently, the cotton gin ended up doing the exact opposite of what its intended purpose was. Which was to decrease the number of slaves working in the cotton fields but instead doubled the number of

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The Cotton Gin shaped Georgia's Economy by Introducing Railroads, Increasing The Slave Population and Jobs. The Cotton Gin Caused the Slave Population to increase. In Document C it shows that as the amount of cotton increased did the slaves as well. In the note it says "At this time, it took one person a full day of work to separate the seed from a pound of cotton fiber. The cotton gin, however, enabled a person to "clean"

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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.

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The cotton gin reduced the need for slaves to pick the seeds out of the cotton by hand. However, it did not decrease the need for slaves to grow and pick the cotton. The gin made growing cotton extremely profitable in the South.

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The invention of the Cotton Gin by Eli Whitney changed the South for the better. It made the South a major world trader as well as a wealthy region. It did this by increasing cotton production and slave trade in the lower U.S. Almost as soon as the Cotton Gin was developed it produced major success. It allowed Planters and Yeomen’s alike, to produce cotton as a faster rate.

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The cotton gin was a machine that was able to take off seeds much faster than hands. (Davidson 388). It was able to speed up the process of cleaning cotton, so planters were able to produce more than before. Secondly, the telegraph. Invented by Samuel Morse, it allowed communication over long distances (Davidson 378).

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Whitney was born on December the 8th 1765, in Westborough, Massachusetts, to a family of farmers. Whitney was never much interested in the labour work of the farm and took up more of an interest in mechanics, and in 1792 he graduated from Yale College, now known as Yale University. Shortly after graduating, Whitney travelled to Savannah, Georgia, on the promise of a Tudor job, which he never received, but instead began to live on a plantation called Mulberry Groove, owned by a lady named Cathrine Greene, the widow of Civil War hero Nathanel Greene. During his stay at Mulberry Groove, Whitney learned of the tedious job of separating seeds from short-staple or upland cotton and made it his mission to solve this problem and create a gin to make the job more manageable, which he did successfully. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin made it so that cotton was much more easily picked, which allowed it to become the main cash crop of the Southern United States.

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A single worker using a cotton gin could do the work of 50 people cleaning cotton by hand. Because of the gin, planters

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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

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The Upcountry also benefited because they started growing larger crops of cotton. Now, unlike before, the upcountry and lowcountry both supported the idea of slavery, as they owned plantations full

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The Cotton Gin is a machine that cotton is inserted into the machine. As a person turned the handwheel the cotton was pulled through a grate. The great separated the seed from the cotton. This invention made an increase in how fast cotton clothes could be made because no one had to sit and pick the seeds out of the cotton. In 1846 Elias Howe created the Sewing Machine.

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The Cotton Gin invented by Eli Whitney was a machine that was able to quickly separate cotton fibers from the seeds, this made work faster and more productive. Although this invention affected the South in many helpful ways the biggest effect of the Cotton Gin was the civil war. The Cotton Gin was a big demand in the South because cotton and agriculture were what the economy relied on. The invention needed people to work the cotton gin therefore, the South needed an abundance of slaves. The population of enslaved people was far larger in the South than in the North as seen in this map showing the distribution of the population of enslaved people in the United States, in 1861 shown on the map below (Map of Enslaved 1861).

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