Eli Whitney and the Effects of the Cotton Gin

...

for $50,000 but did not pay it right away(National Archives). The partners also arranged to sell the patent rights to North Carolina and Tennessee. By this time even the Georgia courts realized what was wrong with what had happened to Whitney and Miller, only one year of his patent remained. In 1808 and again in 1812 he requested for congress to consider renewing his patent. Though the cottin gin never gave Eli whitney the profit he had hoped for, it gave him the fame.

The American economy was vastly impacted in a good way by the production of cotton using Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin. Cotton replaced tobacco as the main cash crop of the United States. The cotton gin made the U.S the leading cotton producer in the world by a landslide (“Dig Deeper”). By 1860 the southern states such as Georgia and South Carolina were supplying two thirds of the world’s supply of cotton.(“Cotton in the south”). The cotton gin made cotton easier to produce; therefore, allowing more to be exported and sold. for example one slave could produce over ten times as much cotton now with the cotton gin, than before the cotton gin when they had to do everything manually. Not to mention how much physical labor that it takes to produce it. But the cotton gin also bolstered industrial production all throughout Europe and especially Great Britain as well (Cannon 1963). The gin also made the southern economy immune to financial crisis. They always had cotton to fall back on because they were dominating production of it thanks to Eli Whitney. The invention was one of the best things to happen to the economy in U.S history to that point in time. But the demand for slaves to keep up with all of the cotton plantations was maybe just too much.

With a good side there is often a bad side. Many believe that the cotton gin invention was a strong point in why the country went into a civil war in 1861. The more cotton production there was and the more demand for the product led to a high demand in slaves to work on the plantations. The slave population increased from seven hundred thousand before whitney’s patent all the way to more than three million in 1850 (Hammer 2010). This showed how the southern economy was changing. It also showed the south’s dependence on the slave system to keep their strong economy running. There was a huge demand for slaves during this time frame. Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin can be seen to cause many problems between the north and the south at the time. The south saw the rise in the cotton industry and was starting to spread their cotton plantations farther and farther and they kept expanding their plantations and farms. Meanwhile the North didn’t like this. They didn’t like the use of all of the slaves and thought the morals of it were wrong. They The south had a huge number of slaves and this raised an issue with the north. The south saw Abraham Lincoln’s stance on Slavery . They thought with Lincoln as the president of the country that all of this success with the cotton plantations wouldn’t last much longer. It wouldn’t last longer because the largest reason these plantations were working so well were because the use of slaves, without the slaves the plantations wouldn’t be as nearly successful. The north saw their success in the cotton industry coming to an end soon. This because they relied greatly on slaves and absolutely needed them for their cotton plantations to work functionally. This led to the south deciding to secede and the start of the civil war.

It’s amazing to think about how one simple invention like the cotton gin changed the course of the southern economy. And how America became the worldwide leader in selling cotton as an export when they started to use the cotton gin. The invention of the cotton gin was revolutionizing. It helped America more than it hurt America. Even with the fact that it caused an uptick in the amount of slaves and that ultimately led to one of the reasons for the start of the civil war. The cotton gin changed America and opened the door to any new ideas and new inventions that could end up changing the world.