AMERICA 250
My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.
Eli Whitney’s cotton gin was viewed by a lot of abolitionists as a godsend that would swiftly make slavery disappear.
After all, most Southern slaves worked at picking the seeds out of cotton bolls with their fingers, endless, tedious labor in the hot sun. Whitney’s device, patented in 1794, did that task mechanically. Huzzah! No more slaves!
It took human beings a long time to get every stinking seed out of the mass of cotton fiber in each boll. The cotton gin, relatively, did it in the snap of a finger.
Perhaps the new United States could rid itself of its Original Sin — America hadn’t yet fully embarked on its genocide of Indigenous Peoples here, so slavery will suffice as the forbidden fruit in our nascent Garden of Eden — or so went the most pollyannish thinking of the time. Things didn’t quite work out that way.
The Cotton Gin.
What actually happened was Whitney’s gadget turned the South into a humming economic powerhouse. His invention enabled cotton plantations to produce huge amounts of the fiber, quickly and cheaply. Growers immediately expanded their acreage and began supplying the world with the comfortable, breathable, washable fabric. The South went from a sleepy region of slow-moving drawlers into one of the centers of the nascent Industrial Revolution.
So much cotton was planted and grown that more slaves than ever before were needed! Hordes of slaves were imported to trudge through the fields, picking cotton. The cotton gin worked so well it made a certain strain of the plant, short-staple cotton, economically viable. This type of plant grew faster and more abundantly than long-fiber cotton but had been far more difficult to de-seed. Whitney’s gin made it a profitable strain. Short-staple cotton, too, could be grown in areas previously inhospitable to the crop, greatly expanding the range of plantations — and slavery.
Seemingly before anybody knew what was happening, the South had become the new nation’s money tree.
In terms of making the United States a world economic power, the cotton gin was a fabulous highlight. In terms of its effect on human physical and emotional suffering, it was a horrendous lowlight. As such, it might be the most American invention ever.
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