The Cotton Gin: Causes And Effects

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The Causes and Effects of the Cotton Gin “I have now taken a serious task upon myself and I fear a greater one that is in the power of any man to perform in the given time-but it is too late to go back,”- Eli Whitney. The cotton gin was invented by Eli Whitney in 1793 and created because of the decline in the tobacco and indigo industries. Tobacco and indigo plants were not suitable for farming because they caused soil exhaustion and took many nutrients out of the soil, due to this farmers had no profitable crops. However, cotton was a very easy plant to grow, but the seeds took hours to remove by hand. A hardworking and fast paced slave could only clean about a pound of cotton after twelve hours of work. The invention of the cotton gin was …show more content…
However, in the North they were independent, they had a diverse and industrial economy. The North paid immigrants and freed black men and women to work it their many industries. Also according to the article Dig Deeper: Why did the invention of the cotton gin increase the number of slaves? it was also stated “In 1790, there were 657,000 slaves in southern states. In 1810, there were almost 1.3 million.” This increase in slavery was shocking due to the fact that Whitney built his machine to lessen the work that slaves had to do and decrease the general population of slaves. If the cotton gin was never invented slavery would have probably died out like it had throughout the rest of the world. Prior to the invention of the cotton gin slavery was naturally dying out in the United States, but when the gin was created history took a different course. The cotton gin did not just affect a number of slaves, but also created a need for the Fugitive Slave Act. As a result of the increased need for slaves, the Fugitive Slave Law was enabled. The Fugitive Slave Law required that runaway slaves had to be returned whether they were in free or slave state and that all citizens and officials had to cooperate with the law. If the cotton gin was never invented then there would not have been an increase in slavery, and there would not have been a need for the act. According to the article Growth and Entrenchment of …show more content…
A few of the outcomes of the cotton gin were an increase in slavery, the Fugitive Slave Act, Missouri Compromise of 1850, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Eli Whitney never had the intention to change history for the better or worse, unknowingly he led America down the path to the civil war. As stated before, many believed that if the cotton gin would have never been created that slavery would have died out naturally. A solution to the effects of the cotton gin would have been to create an industrialized market and agricultural businesses, so they could have a reliable source of income without the use of slaves. They could also have just created a market that was not revolved around a single product if the Souths economy was more stable they probably would not have found the need to fight in the Civil War. If this was the case the outhouse could have had a chance of winning the Civil War, since the south had no factories and used all farms to plant cotton. Then if slavery would have been outlawed naturally southern states would have still had a reliable economy. There are many different courses history could have taken with the cotton gin, but what if the cotton gin was never
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