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  • Essay / Development of Cotton Gin - 1517

    In the antebellum South, cotton was king. The idea of ​​a diversified agricultural South became a fallacy after Eli Whitney's development of the cotton gin. The ability to gin cotton creates a market for commercial cultivation and an increase in forced labor. It is therefore cotton that fuels the financial wealth of thousands of families in the South and replaces stable crops. The development of the most beneficial technology in the Old South, which we all know as the cotton gin, was developed by Yale graduate Eli Whitney in 1793. This occurred shortly after his moving from Massachusetts to Georgia when his former manager pointed out to him that harvesting cotton was time-consuming and did not benefit plantation owners. As a result, he was then asked to craft a resolution of support; this is how the cotton gin was born. This extraordinary machine had the capacity to separate cotton from its seeds using a manual crank. The acquisition of the cotton gin allowed cotton to become the most economically beneficial crop in the Old South. This became the main reason for using the slogan “King Cotton”. The success that Southerners achieved through cotton ginning was not enough due to their greed. Since the importation of slaves was illegal at the time, plantation owners relied on enslaved women to produce children (future slaves) in order to increase their cotton harvests. This led Whitney to believe that the purpose of her invention had taken a wrong turn. Eventually, the craving for more cotton slowly became a South-wide trend due to multiple purchases of land in order to produce more cotton for economic benefit. Another tragic part of the medium of paper that African Americans have today. Overall, agricultural diversity in the South primarily revolved around slaves who became valuable assets to slave owners due to the increased economic activity they produced during the need for labor. 'artwork. Cotton was the primary crop of the Old South due to the development of the cotton gin, which made production less difficult for plantation owners to expand their wealth. It would be quite safe to say that compared to other southern crops, cotton and the cotton gin would represent the mascots of the Southern region due to their extraordinary agricultural success. To answer the question of how important other crops were to the region, they simply did not do so because they were not necessary to generate economic activity due to the fact that this was already the case both for cotton and for cotton ginning..